“They were enraged”: the movie Scarlett Johansson called her ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
The worst crime a film can commit is being forgettable.
There is nothing worse than a song on an album that is clearly filler, a photo that should’ve been left on the cutting room floor, or a movie that simply leaves you bored.
Art should make a mark on you, even if you walk away feeling a strong sense of disgust. You should feel polarised, uncomfortable, and uncertain at times; art can’t simply tell you what you want to hear or reflect back at you the things you already know and believe in. This is something Scarlett Johansson learned after watching Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, a stunningly dark tale of infidelity and corruption.
Set against the backdrop of New York at Christmas time, Kubrick immerses us in a world of erotic confusion, betrayal, and fear, complete with masked orgies and murdered prostitutes. When the movie was released (just a few months after Kubrick’s death), audiences were divided: to some, this was his best work yet, a damning exposé of elite culture wrapped up in a bleak layer of cynicism, while others thought it was a mess.
Johansson wasn’t sure what she thought of the film, but she soon came to realise that this uncertainty was important, as she told Beauty and the Dirt, “That’s what it’s all about. Personally, as an audience member, I want to have an experience when I see a film and love it, hate it, whatever, I want to still be thinking about it three days later and have the visuals stuck in my mind. I remember going to see Eyes Wide Shut, and I don’t even know if I liked it, I can’t even tell you, but all I know is that it bothered me forever afterwards, and it’s rare to be able to have that experience from cinema.”
Carrying this into her own work, Johansson kept this in mind when she signed on for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, a film that saw her play an alluring alien woman who seduces men before destroying them in an oily black abyss. Although it’s hardly a super accessible piece of cinema, with a haunting score from Mica Levi, the film quickly received acclaim for being an uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and brutal, but ultimately beautiful meditation on the human condition from the perspective of an outsider.
As much as it was acclaimed, even earning multiple Bafta nominations, many audiences were still horrified by the film. You’re never going to win everyone over, and with a story as intense as Under the Skin, it’s only to be expected that some people are going to find it simply too much to stomach.
The actor continued, “I think Under The Skin is the same. When we had the screening in Venice, people were cheering and people were booing, people were speechless, people were vocal, and it was mad. But they were engaged, and that’s really the point, and I know Jonathan has been very excited about that.”
Mixed reception is usually a good sign that you’ve done something right, for if everyone likes something, it raises the question of how special can that really be; hence, Under the Skin is arguably the boldest decision Johansson has ever made in her career, jumping headfirst into controversial and potentially polarising territory that proved to be a success for creativity.
