Episode 40: On Jonathan Glazer's 'Under the Skin'
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In Jonathan Glazer\'s loose screen adaptation of Michel Faber\'s novel Under the Skin, a creature of mysterious origin drives around Scotland in a white van, collecting lonely men and spiriting them away to an otherworld where they are turned into food.... or something. Drawing on a deep well of literary, visual, and musical tradition, Glazer (with help from his score composer Mica Levi) create a vivid work of tragedy and horror, masterfully executed for maximal weirdness and unwaveringly true to the auteur\'s intent to reveal our world from an "alien perspective." In this episode, Phil and JF discuss some themes and ideas they\'ve pried from this exquisite tangle of image and sound. Along the way, they discuss the role that serendipity, coincidence, and fate play in both art-making and scholarship.
\\n\\nREFERENCES
\\n\\nUnder the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
\\nOther films by Glazer: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
\\nIannis Xenakis, Greek composer
\\nTwin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, 2017)
\\nLigeti, Atmosph\\xe8res
\\nStranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016)
\\nScreen shot of "Space Invader" Easter egg in Under the Skin
\\nWeird Studies Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis
\\nJohn August, American screenwriter
\\nPhil Ford, "The Devil\'s On Your Side: A Meditation on the Perennially Disreputable Business of Hermeneutics" (unpublished)
\\nRoom 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2013)
\\nWilliam Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
\\nInterview with Mica Levi, who composed the score for Under the Skin
\\nAtar Arad, American violist
\\nDavid Caspar Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
