Posted in: Movies | Tagged: Alan Moore, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Casablanca, dc, doc savage, entertainment, film, lucy, marvel entertainment, Michael Faber, Philip Jose Farmer, scarlet johansson, Sunset Bourlevard, The Black Widow, three days of the condor, under the skin

The Accidental Black Widow Double Feature – Look! It Moves! By Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes:

I'm sure many of you went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier this weekend.  Some of you might have gone to see Under the Skin.

How many of you went to see both?

You'd think the two movies couldn't be more different. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a big, wham-bam Hollywood blockbuster and Marvel's latest entry in their movie franchises as a single ongoing story that never ends. It makes the effort of being more than just another action-CGI-fest with references to themes of mass surveillance, drone warfare, fascism and conspiracies in the age of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. It harks back to 70s paranoid conspiracy thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and even Captain America comics from that decade when the character faced the dark conspiracy-laden vibe of the Nixon era.

Under the Skin is an arthouse Science Fiction movie adapted from the novel by Michel Faber and stands on the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum. It's almost avant-garde filmmaking, the type that divides critics into either declaring it a masterpiece or incomprehensible wank. Ostensibly about an alien who takes on the guise of a woman to walk amongst humans to harvest men, it explains almost nothing at all, depends almost entirely on images to tell its story and wants you to feel more than understand. The main character's cold detachment from the rest of humanity becomes a prism through which we start to examine our own humanity.  It's an audio-visual experiment designed to unsettle and disturb. It was filmed around Scotland with hidden cameras and interacted with non-actors so their reactions were unscripted and real. It's delves into themes about empathy and what makes us human and puts you in a different headspace from watching it.

The only thing Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Under The Skin have in common is Scarlet Johansson. She had a really good week with two very different movies opening at the same time in the US as well the release of the trailer for her next movie, Lucy.

Here's something you might want to try for a laugh: see Under The Skin and Captain America: The Winter Soldier close together and imagine Scarlet Johansson's character in both movies was the same person: The Black Widow. Both movies start to take on an additional layer of meaning neither of their filmmakers intended.

In The Winter Soldier, The Black Widow mentions that her past as a spy was full of deeds she regretted and continues to feel remorse for, which prompted her defection over to the US. You could easily regard Under The Skin as part of that past and the things she did in it as what she feels bad about, since those are very, very bad things that the main character does in that movie. What's especially amusing is that The Black Widow has been described as a consummate spy who can seduce as well as fight, but we've only ever really seen her fight and shoot people in the Marvel movies whereas the alien in Under The Skin is all about seducing men in order to lure them into traps. Suddenly, the existential dilemma of both characters played by Scarlet Johansson merge into a single person since it's the same actress, and this sense of horror and alienation casts a shadow over both movies once you've seen them both. It's very interesting and amusing. You could read the characters as part of the continuity of a single actor's professional life as she goes from one different persona to another from movie to movie, perhaps informed by her own real-life emotional and creative impulses that create this separate entity only seen on screen.

The mind is a funny thing, especially an overactive mind exposed to several pieces of pop culture at once. We can't help but free-associate and draw connections that aren't there. It renders the fictions we consume fluid and malleable, becoming something we play with for our own ends and needs.  This is probably the same mentality that made Science Fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer think up the Wold Newton Universe, which posited that the famous pulp heroes pop culture like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage were all members of the same family that stretches throughout all of pulp history.  The film critic and writer David Thomson also wrote a version of this in Suspects, which links famous movie characters from Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond to Chinatown's villain Noah Cross to Casablanca's Rick Blaine and dozens, if not hundreds, of other movie characters to form a tapestry of connections that throw new light on their psychologies and histories.

This was a precursor to Alan Moore linking every single fictional character from both classic Literature and pulp fiction together in a single universe in an alternate history. You could also argue that the Marvel and DC universes became single continuums due to the writers and editors deciding to link everything together after writing them for a while. That may be a commercial impulse designed to sell more comics, but creatively, it had to have come from the same creative impulse that wants to connect otherwise disparate and separate characters together to create new meanings and ways to tell stories. I think it's the same impulse behind the writing of fan fiction.

You might wonder this happens, why some people would make mental connections like these. I think it comes down to the basic human need to find connections and find new meanings beneath the ones we're already presented with in the stories we're exposed to. In the end, it's really about how we form and create our identities and sense of Self, and we use fiction and characters to explore their nooks and crannies in a safe space. That's the value of fiction after all. That's why we seem to need it.

Making all the nutty connections at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about. 

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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