The Flesh is Weak. Empathy and Becoming Human in Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin"

Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film "Under the Skin" offers an unsettling meditation on humanness through the eyes of an alien predator. This essay reflects on Glazer’s film by drawing it into conversation with the later phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with Heidegger, Martin Buber, and with a number of earlier Greek thinkers who together point us towards a more complex and shared definition of ‘contemplation’ or theory. The paper asks: do films watch us as much as we watch films?