A short video essay exploring Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film.
Friction is the force generated when different materials come into contact. Without friction there is no walking, driving, or writing. It is caused by microscopic imperfections and irregularities on the surface of objects that get entangled as they move.
The human began to be consumed in 1982. We were seduced by the digital. The alien began to move amongst us, unnoticed.
The fetishization of the smooth is the dream of frictionlessness and the disappearance of the messiness of contact. It is highly valued. It seeks to be universalised, to become the universe.
Yet, a stickiness persists. A stickiness of encounters. There is yearning, dream states, desire. And death.
Thinking can create friction, act as a resistance between flows even as we are submerged. Cinema is a flow. Yet thinking in cinema is as rare as elsewhere.
John Lynch 2025
Cited in the film
Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer, Film4, 2013.
Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, Continuum, 2008 (1985)
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative, Zero Books, 2009
Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, Polity, 2018
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton University Press, 2005