Plastic Surgery: Under the Skin, Suture, Destructive Plasticity and Post-Cinematic Ontologies

Abstract

Analysing Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), this article provides an overview of the importation of suture theory from psychoanalysis into film theory and Žižek’s revisiting of this theory, then bringing about a rapprochement between the concepts of suture and Malabou’s destructive plasticity, as expounded in her work The New Wounded. The forms of wounded subjectivity we find there are unable to stitch themselves into the illusory narratives needed to enable them to access a fixed sense of individual or shared identity and enclose them in a subjectivity separated off from all else around. Here, on the contrary, alterity, the alien, is situated within. It is such a form of subjectivity, I argue, that we find in Glazer’s Under the Skin where this narrative plays out not only diegetically, as we witness the alien that has sutured itself inside a human envelope attempt and fail to articulate itself to an external narrative that remains inaccessible to it, but infratextually also. Indeed, ultimately this article suggests that Under the Skin can be read as a commentary on the viewing subject required by (and forms of subjectivity produced by) post-cinematic media forms that at first seem to operate according to a different logic to the cinematic syntax of classical cinema, but which may in fact require us to reconsider some of our assumptions with regard to all forms of cinematic subjectivity produced in the relations between spectator and screen.

Keywords

• Suture theory
• post-cinema
• Catherine Malabou
• destructive plasticity
• Under the Skin
• Slavoj Žižek