There is a connection between the difficulties of representation belonging to psychoanalysis and those belonging to cinema, which the dynamic of Lacan’s notion of das Ding (1960/2008) can help unlock. In this presentation, I provide a reading of the desire staged in the 2013 British science fiction film Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2013). The film stars Scarlett Johansson as an alluring, alien instantiation of Creed’s (1986) ‘monstrous feminine’. Johansson’s character, like other representations of the monstrous, illuminates the (ostensibly) contradictory movements of desire and disgust. Monstrum, the etymological origin of ‘monster’, refers to a type of warning, a divine/evil omen indicating misfortune, or a portent. The closely linked monstare means ‘to show’. What, then, does Johansson’s anxiety-inducing monster show, reveal, or warn us about? The answer can be found in Glazer’s representation of the alien’s lair which, I argue, holds the key to the film.

This lair can be read as having structural and aesthetic parallels with das Ding. If this is so, the acts that unfold in relation to the alien’s body and lair are interpretable as functioning as analogues for the Thing’s operations. There is always something incognizable in the alien and her lair towards which desire moves, and when we get too close to the impossible jouissance that an encounter with das Ding promises, everything begins to unravel. At the same time, the film warns us about the devastating consequences pertaining to the collision between phallic logic and ‘consent culture’. How, the film asks us, can women simultaneously articulate their desire, while contending with the patriarchist presumption that men hold the answer to women’s lack, to their Che Vuoi?

In the film, the alien’s body demarcates what is outside of acceptable behaviour or being, and how jouissance can be accessed through transgression, but only manifests vis-à-vis a paradoxical lack of satisfaction (Chiesa, 2024). Inhabiting this space, it is impossible to meet a real subject: like the idealized Lady of courtly love, the alien is nothing, always remaining veiled and out of reach, elevated to avoid the horrific encounter with das Ding. The alien’s body as limit, therefore, reveals how the Law, prohibition and desire operate and how the ‘pornographic trope’ of female sexuality indicates little more than the deficiency of fantasy.

Olly Cutler is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh Napier University, working under Professors Calum Neill and Louise Milne. As a researcher, he has examined critical literacy and inclusive educational practice, and he has taught literature and media studies in schools across Scotland. His current research applies Freudo-Lacanian concepts to a study of film to examine the paradoxical spectatorial effects resulting from the representation of monstrous feminine characters.