Scarlett Johansson: Into the Flesh and Out of the Flesh

Abstract

This chapter aims to establish connections among three films which pose interesting questions about the female body and the gendered subject in a post-feminist universe where, allegedly, emancipation is taken for granted and yet women are still objectified as “enfleshed” and materialized subjects or as disembodied, artificially intelligent, sex-fantasies created by technology. The films Under the skin and Her (both 2013) explore the idea of embodiment/disembodiment, dramatizing melancholy insofar as the physical materiality of the body becomes a fantasy, eliciting desire (as in Her) or a site where self-awareness gives way to vulnerability (as in Under the skin). The three films analyzed star Scarlett Johansson, whose role in Lost in Translation resonates with the difficulties of intimacy and with the predatory quality of heterosexual relations that Under the skin (2013) and Her (2013), in very different but disturbing ways, also explore. Lucy (2014) proposes the reversal of the former’s melancholy, by making its female protagonist a sort of machine-like goddess to become a Deleuzian rhizomatic, nomadic being, un-moored by gender. Yet, the body remains a memory, a reminder of humanity, which shores up the promise of tactile engagement with other bodies. Thus, these films explore in different ways the constitution of female subjectivity in a world where intimacy and heterosexuality are always already imperiled.