“My mermaids do not wear seashell bras but rather chew on human hearts.”
—Agnieszka Smoczyńska, Director of The Lure
“But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid
In Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure, a young man with shaggy blonde hair and a rumpled jacket is playing a guitar and singing to the sea while an older man smokes and a woman laughs and dances behind him. From the sea, a girl’s head emerges and watches the blonde man with hunger and alien fascination. Another girl joins her, and together they begin to sing back to the men, taunting them, humming. The girls sing their song, asking to be pulled to shore and promising not to eat them. They sing, and the men draw near. They sing, and the men reach out their hands. The woman finally sees what the men are walking towards and screams in terror behind them. She recognizes the singing sirens for what they are:
Predators.
~
The Little Mermaid was originally created by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen in 1837 and opens with an enchanting description of the wonders of the sea, the merfolk that reside there, and its celebrated King. Anderson crafts a fairytale full of imagined underwater marvels – and horrors – that symbolize a smattering of themes (Christianity, LGBTQ+, unconditional love, etc) ripe for varied analyses. Yet, though they share a namesake, his version of the titular character and her story is vastly different than the one many of us grew up with.
The tale starts similarly enough: the little mermaid is the youngest of six sisters who’s just as obsessed with humans as Disney’s fork-brushing redhead. When she finally gets the chance to visit the surface, she does so, and sees beautiful fireworks and ships, and even a handsome prince. Things then go awry and the prince’s ship wrecks, but the mermaid saves him by dragging him to shore.
Naturally, she falls in love with him, wants to be where the people are, yadda yadda, and decides to forsake her voice and tail (thanks to an actually Very Wise sea witch) in order to try to win him over and thus gain an immortal soul by proxy (in Andersen’s version of the story, mermaids live a really long time but have no souls; only humans do. Back then, this was Bad). This goal of hers comes with a steep price, though: if the prince marries someone else, the mermaid will die and turn into seafoam by sunrise. And if that’s not terrible enough, every time she walks on her new human legs, she’ll feel knives cut into her at every step. The Art of Seduction according to Jigsaw, apparently.
The little mermaid, brandishing no voice and no means of real communication, thus begins her (incredibly painful) journey of trying to win a marriage proposal. Of course, this isn’t a Disney fairy tale, so what comes next is pretty brutal. The prince basically friend-zones this poor little mermaid, dresses her up as a pageboy, then marries someone else. She’s left alone, the truth that she saved him never revealed, and eventually turns… into seafoam.
Fortunately for her, she’s been written into a Christian redemption story, so when she “dies”,” she’s actually given another chance to earn an immortal soul, as long as she’s willing to wait it out with other spirit mermaids for three hundred years. And that’s how it ends.
~
The Lure is a sexy, stylishly demented, hyperreal musical that follows the original thematic arc of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid a little more faithfully than the popular animated one. Set against a dazzling neon-lit trashy nightclub in 1980s Warsaw, the film features not one but two little mermaids who are “recruited” to dance, strip and sing for the cabaret club. Here, the mermaids are man-eating predators, along for the ride.
Their curiosity about humans and the above-ground city they live in make their aforementioned recruitment seamless, despite the shady methods the club owner uses to go about it. As is typical with humanity, any kind of other will either be considered monstrous and alien, because we fear the unknown; conversely, what we find interesting and exciting becomes something to be exploited. The shady club owner falls into the latter half, and views the mermaids as something to capitalize on; thereby already assigning a human woman-like quality to the outsiders. Their first taste of human womanhood is that of exploitation.
~
“We’re not human. We’re just on vacation here.” -Triton, The Lure
Peacocking herself in a leopard fur coat and bright red lipstick, Scarlett Johansson’s Female in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin drives around in an old van while prowling for unsuspecting human men to consume in her black, gooey, unending alien abyss. The goo is her energy harvest, and is only powered by the human males she seduces and captures.
The Female drives and drives along the streets of Scotland, slowing down when she spots a man. She plays friendly, and always asks for directions. Smiles like a stranger giving out candy, offering the men a ride along the way. She’s the Stranger In a Van.
The Female charms her victims, and uses a surface-level knowledge of conversation to endear them to her. She likes to test out the effectiveness of her “skin” by repeatedly asking her male victims if they think she’s pretty.
The Female likes to go out at night, alone. Safe as a predator.
~
“I’m new to the city, I wanted to put my best foot forward. Change what I can change and get their attention.” -Przyszłam do miasta (I Came To The City, The Lure)
A shopping mall. In The Lure, two mermaid sisters, enthralled and overwhelmed with the hundreds of fashion options and the crowds, sing about how exciting and different it is. How the city will show them what they might lack. They shop in wonder, looking for shoes and clothes so they can fit into this temporary new life.
A shopping mall. In Under The Skin, the Female walks amongst bustling shoppers and lets her fingers graze against a leopard fur coat and other catchy, seductive articles of clothing and makeup. She’s looking for lustful adornment; a disguise that will stand up to the scrutiny of her male victims. Images of women enjoying their mall experience sandwich the Female’s quick and detached shopping spree, the contrast further enhancing the other-like quality to Johansson’s character.
~
The two little mermaids, Golden and Silver (in fantastic performances by Michalina Olszańska and Marta Mazurek, respectively) , sit at neighboring vanities in sparkly red costumes. They’re to be performing that night with the band in the cabaret club. They eye the makeup and perfumes on the counter questioningly as the young blonde guitarist walks by them, sharing a look with Silver. Golden mermaid-communicates with her sister, suggesting they stay there a while before heading to America. Silver nonchalantly agrees.
“What if you fall in love?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Would you eat him?”
After becoming regular performers at the nightclub, Silver gets caught up in a tragic romance with the guitarist in their cabaret band, Mietek, and ultimately sacrifices her mermaid tail for human legs – what makes her other – in order to be with him. Despite warnings from her sister, Golden, about what happens to seafolk who don’t marry the human they fall in love with, Silver falls headfirst for the guitarist and hangs all her hopes on his returned affection.
However, this fairytale is also a tragedy, and ends similarly to Andersen’s original one: Silver loses her “prince” to another human woman, watches him marry her, then turns into seafoam.
~
Under The Skin is based on a novel of the same name, but is wildly different in both theme and purpose. Glazer jettisons the weird and wacky sci-fi plot points of the novel and marries them with more universal, elemental beats shared and explored in Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Thus, this tale also ends in tragedy, mirroring both mermaids’ fates in The Lure and the original fairytale. The predator’s willingness to make herself vulnerable leaves her vulnerable to another kind of monster separate from herself: humans.
Through a series of events – witnessing the surfer’s act of self-sacrifice, the loneliness of the disfigured man, and the kindness of the man she crashes with, the Female in Under The Skin is jarred with the gift of empathy, and chooses to explore it. To have empathy is to be human, and here the Female grapples with wanting to become it. Like the mermaid, she chooses to give herself to a man, but due to her intrinsic nature (like the mermaid), it doesn’t work. While fleeing to the forest to reckon with this and mourn the pandora’s box of loneliness that she opened, the Female ends up being taken advantage of by a human man, and perishes.
~
“You were the beat of my heart.” -Byłaś serca biciem (You Were The Beat of My Heart, The Lure)
Despite ending in tragedy, both films show how the women experience the positivity of humanity and all the little wonders it offers. The Female trips and people help her up. The guitarist brings the mermaid a rose. It allows them to fall for humanity easily, and thus lose their protection from it. To be human on Earth is to be part of something, a community. Once the outsiders fall for the species, a loneliness appears that is singular to their experience. They can ache for humanity but never be a part of it.
By the end, the ferocious monster is no longer hiding; it lies dormant. Yet the humanity wish-fulfillment is only skin-deep, for both the Mermaid and The Female. They believe acts like attempting to eat human food or physically removing what makes them Other, will be enough to transform them wholly. Because it is only skin-deep (one quite literally), their struggle to assimilate becomes their downfall. And yet, while their superficial attempts to be “human” are only skin-deep, it is their capacity for empathy and self-sacrifice that makes them human – even more human than the human men who cause their deaths.
~
“To me, you’ll always be an animal, a fish.” -Mietek, The Lure
Both the mermaid and the Female risk annihilation through their vulnerability and mutual sacrifices to become like a human woman. Yet to become a human woman is to risk vulnerability. Typically, a man’s worst risk on a date is rejection, whereas a woman’s is, well, rape and murder. The vulnerability of women in the act of seeking love or sex or companionship is to literally risk annihilation. These characters are monsters who become human, but the price they pay for their monstrousness is that they only get a taste of humanity before it’s taken from them by human monsters. Both films end with men treating the protagonists as inhuman monsters, regardless of their newfound empathy: the guitarist can’t unsee Silver as an animal, and the Female is assaulted and discarded like one.
~
The theme of the original Andersen fairytale is rooted in a wish fulfillment for a human soul, for innocence. For redemption. There’s a duality in both films, in the form of a duo. Two sisters, two aliens. One half of the duo risks participating in humanity and destruction at the hands of it. The other remains evil and inhumane and ends up alone in each. The redemption is never reached, and the loneliness that belies both members of the duos persists. Yet, there’s a nobility in the sacrifice of both of these women, these “monsters,” in that they wish to become vulnerable, to become more “human.” The bitter irony being that it is humans who destroy them.
~
The mermaids and the Female stand as a striking contrast to the Final Girl trope, their journeys transforming them into the very thing they once regarded as food. The films become tragedies in the same way that the women become victims. We’re invited to empathize with the “villains,” the “others,” which makes their downfall tragic. The women empathized too much with the humans, imparted too much trust, and thus lost their lives in tragedy. They gained a conscience, and a longing to belong. The roles were reversed, and the villain became the victim.
The predator became the prey.
