As memes go, Scarlett Johansson Falling Down is a slam-dunk. It's got a) a well-known celebrity doing b) something embarrassing, and the image of said Embarrassing Celebrity Moment is c) easily Photoshoppable into pretty much any scenario. After it caught fire last September, it took mere days before BuzzFeed declared it "the best new meme in years."
But what went largely unknown to the redditors, Know Your Meme-rs, and other net-dwellers is that they weren't actually in on the joke.
Johansson didn't just face-plant on a Scotland street and get caught by a paparazzo—she was acting. The fall, in fact, was pivotal to the movie she was making, and was filmed by three hidden cameras to get genuine reactions from people on the street. And now, a year and a half after its original occurrence, the spill appears in director Jonathan Glazer's ethereal alien seductress film Under the Skin, out Friday.
>"It's very interesting isn't it, what a different take that was to what it was actually shot for?"
director Jonathan Glazer
Glazer heard of the meme his filming caused, but was largely unfazed by it. "We knew there was a paparazzi following us around and photographing that," Glazer says. "I wondered whether people thought that was really Scarlett falling on the street." When told that—at least at the time— some people (though not all) seemed to think it was an actual accident, he chuckles. "It's very interesting," he says, "what a different take that was to what it was actually shot for."
In the scene, Johansson—who plays an alien luring various men to her in order to extract their lifeforce (it's complicated)—is still finding her way around Earth. But to really nail the feeling of a stranger in a strange land, Glazer filmed the scene incognito; the people who help pick Johansson's character Laura up off the ground didn't know they were being filmed (they were later tracked down by production assistants who had to get their permission to be in the film).
Around two-thirds of the movie was shot using what Glazer calls "covert filming"—a move that makes the film feel as disconnected and disoriented as its protagonist. It just happened to have that same effect on those who saw the shoot (and captured it for posterity). The camera had to serve as the "eye of this predator," as Glazer puts it.
As it turned out, though, the available cameras small enough to pass unnoticed for the documentary-style filming weren't up to snuff for a major motion picture—"the cameras that were small enough to hide just weren't good enough quality to project," Glazer says, "and the cameras that were good enough to project weren't small enough to hide." So London studio One of Us developed the "one-cam," to suit Glazer's need. (It's essentially a GoPro for filmmakers.)
It's strange that a dark, indie head-trip like Under the Skin would inspire an LOL-worthy meme. It's also, even more strangely, fitting.
Johansson may play an alien in the movie, but in some ways she's an alien herself. We watch stars from afar, and congregate online to make jokes (or memes) when they do something even remotely human. When a megastar trips on the street, it's a "stars—they're just like us!" moment. (It's no coincidence that Jennifer Lawrence comes off as one of the most down-to-Earth people in Hollywood and has spawned scores of GIFs and image macros.)
With her fall, Johansson's character in Under the Skin gets her real taste of genuine interaction with the race she's come to study. That's the whole point. "It's a way of showing a ghost in the machine, really—the fallibility that's there," Glazer says of the movie's falling-down scene. "It's an extremely human thing. She's picked up by a simple act of human kindness—that's what that scene was there to show her."
Though the fact that a great meme came out of it is a nice bonus.
