Your ‘Jennifer’s Body’ hot-takes are missing the point
Perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of justice of our time, the film Jennifer’s Body has spent the last few years undergoing a critical re-evaluation, transforming the film’s once undeserved reputation as a panned flop on its release into that of a misunderstood feminist masterpiece and cult classic today.
Written, directed, and starring women, the 2009 horror movie was created with a female audience in mind, however those on the studio’s marketing team were decidedly disinterested in appealing to female viewers. “The test screens were horrible,” screenwriter Diablo Cody said in a 10th-year anniversary interview with the film’s titular Jennifer, Megan fox. “And I believe that’s because of the audiences that were recruited for the screenings. The studio had a very strong unshakable belief that this movie needed to be marketed to young men.” Karyn Kusama, the film’s director, told Buzzfeed News she once received a suggestion during the ad campaign for Fox to host an amateur porn site ahead of the movie’s release.
If you bought a ticket to see a movie with the hopes of getting a quick look at Megan Fox’s boobs, you might rightfully be upset when 40 minutes in, there’s not a tit in sight and Fox’s character is complaining about PMS being a myth “invented by the boy-run media to make [women] look crazy.”
Just a year before the 10th anniversary, critical consensus was beginning to change. Mid-2018, retroactive acclaim for Jennifer’s Body sprang up across the Internet, winning the approval of writers from Vice, Refinery 29, The New York Times, Vox, and more. The new perspectives didn’t come out of nowhere. The film’s dialogue–with lines like “I go both ways,” “You give me such a wetty,” and “...my tit”–fits perfectly within certain corners of the Internet’s ironic sense of humor, and on its own, the gif of Megan Fox burning her tongue with a lighter could make the film into a cult classic.
It’s also observably true that Megan Fox herself is undergoing a sort of redemption arc, once maligned as the overly-objectified actress from those panned Michael Bay movies, now re-evaluated as a true talent pigeonholed by a misogynistic film industry.
Undoubtedly, however, the #MeToo movement is the biggest instigator in Jennifer’s Body’s newfound acclaim. Much of the re-evaluation centers around one scene: toward the beginning of the film, Fox’s Jennifer follows an indie-rock band into what protagonist Needy (played by Amanda Seyfried) refers to as “one of those white molester vans with no windows.” It’s revealed later that the band performed a Satanic sacrifice using Jennifer’s body (get it?!) under the impression that she was a virgin. The band succeeds in their mission, gaining fame and fortune in the months following the sacrifice, but since Jennifer was “not even a back-door virgin,” the demon that entered her body leaves her permanently possessed rather than dead. To retain her strength and invulnerability, Jennifer begins cannibalizing her classmates, thereby transforming her into the story’s main antagonist.
There is no explicit sexual assault in the film but the scene of Jennifer’s sacrifice acts as a metaphorical rape. Jennifer’s body is violated then discarded by a group of men happy to use her pain as a weapon in their own quest for power. They jokingly offer her consolation before her murder, saying they’ll write a song in her honor, then joyously laugh whilst singing Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny (867-5309)” and stab her to death. After that, Jennifer is not just a changed person, she’s a literal demon. For a one-to-one rape analogy, that’s a bit problematic, but within the horror context of the film, there’s a message about how trauma permanently alters the soul. Constance Grady writes for Vox,
“Watching that moment in 2018 brings up unavoidable echoes of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged assault on her when she was a teenager, of the phrase ‘Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.’ Jennifer’s pain is funny to these men. For them, it’s a lark. But for her, it’s a moment of trauma that is going to change her forever.”
Jennifer’s reshaping from victim into demonic killer has prompted Grady and other commenters to deem Jennifer’s Body “revenge fantasy.”
The “rape-revenge film” is a subgenre, typically of exploitation and B-movie genre films, in which a protagonist (usually female) is raped toward the beginning of the story, then exacts revenge upon their rapist and/or other abusers throughout or leading up to the end of the movie.
The problem with upholding Jennifer’s Body as rape-revenge fantasy is that Jennifer never seeks revenge on her metaphorical rapists. It is true that all of Jennifer’s victims are male–as Needy points out that she’s “killing people,” Jennifer counters with the statement, “I’m killing boys,” an iconic line associated with the film that’s only actually in the trailer and a deleted scene–but Jennifer never once expresses interest in finding or killing her assailants. When Needy laments the murderous band’s success, Jennifer doesn’t appear bothered by their demonic rise to glory, instead complaining that their hit song is just “really poorly produced.” Even after the night of her attack, Jennifer is unwilling to acknowledge that something traumatic ever happened to her, and while that’s a noted coping mechanism for many survivors of abuse, it doesn’t make for a great rape-revenge leading lady.
To be fair, Needy, the movie’s actual protagonist, does eventually follow the band on tour and it’s implied in a closing montage that she kills them. That montage, however, takes place as the closing credits for the film begin. It’s an afterword, not a climax to the central conflict because Needy’s arc hinges on her killing Jennifer, not rapists.
So is Jennifer’s Body a rape-revenge film? Maybe, but only one in which the protagonist is never raped and spends a majority of her screen-time not seeking revenge for rape.
Why, then, has the film gained a reputation as a story about sexual assault? It’s for good reason. Though the #MeToo elements are not a focal point of the film, they are present in the narrative just as gendered sexual violence and harassment are covertly present in the lives of most women. The constant threat of violence is an almost defining aspect of the female experience. That so many critics overlooked Jennifer’s Body’s metaphorical rape scene becomes representative of how women’s stories have historically evaded adequate assessment when primarily viewed by male audiences.
Jennifer’s trauma is an essential part of the film’s story–it’s literally the inciting incident that turns her into the antagonist–so it’s somewhat absurd that this analogous detail was left so unexamined by an audience of critics upon release. Even famed critic Roger Ebert, in one of the more positive reviews of the film’s release, seemed to completely miss or was just disinterested in how Jennifer became a demon, writing:
“Jennifer is your classic teen queen who rules the school. Boys lust after her, she's the head cheerleader, and maybe it does her ego good to have needy Needy trailing along. But then she's transformed into, not a vampire exactly, although she does go for after throats with bared teeth. She's some kind of demon or monster, sort of undefined, whose mission in life becomes attacking teenage boys.”
Critics today are right to correct that wrong, but that doesn’t mean the movie as a whole was meant to be a #MeToo story. Obviously, the film was written and produced long before “Me Too” was a widespread movement (though the phrase in reference to sexual assault did exist prior and was first notably used by Tarana Burke in 2006 on MySpace), so those words would have never been a part of the film’s marketing campaign even with proper consideration to the audience. But the nasty thing about gendered sexual violence in our culture is that it’s insidious; it exists within the context of most women’s lives, so the odds of two women writing and directing a horror film starring two women and aimed at a female audience using sexual violence as an aspect of the on-screen scares are pretty high.
It makes sense that this aspect of the story has become a central part of the film’s discourse, both for what it says about the female experience as well as what it says about how female stories are consumed; but how this aspect has dominated Jennifer’s Body discourse occasionally minimizes the larger themes the film attempts to explore. In Grady’s Vox piece, entitled, “How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today,” the article mentions briefly (in one paragraph) that the central relationship between Jennifer and Needy is at the core of the film’s “emotional truth.” The article mostly discusses, however, Jennifer’s Body’s resonance in a post-#MeToo world.
Grady, at least, seems to have watched and understood the film, but the more Jennifer’s Body’s status as a “feminist cult classic” becomes reliant on its loose connection to sexual assault, the more I see critics completely missing the more nuanced feminism the film blatantly presents. On July 27th of this year, the YouTube channel, The Take, posted a video entitled, “Jennifer’s Body and the Horrific Female Gaze.” In it, they claim, “After Jennifer's attack, her sole focus becomes the destruction of anyone who reminds her of her assailants or is a symptom of a culture of violence against women–namely boys.”
I won’t mince words: this is a bad take. There is no textual evidence that Jennifer’s “sole focus” is ever “the destruction of anyone who reminds her of her assailants,” nor does she display any recognition of the “culture of violence against women.” The Take tries to support their claim by playing a clip of Jennifer saying “I’m killing boys” to imply that Jennifer’s real target was “The Patriarchy” or something (again, that line is not even in the final cut of the film), but that ignores the context of most of Jennifer’s demonic attacks. When classmate, Collin, asks Jennifer on a date to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jennifer is initially disinterested until Needy says she thinks Collin is “really cool.” Jennifer changes demeanor on the spot and invites him to watch Aquamarine (another movie I think deserves some re-evaluation), then directs him to an abandoned subdivision where she rips him apart with her teeth. Intercut with that scene is Needy’s loss of virginity to her boyfriend, Chip–Jennifer’s next and final victim.
The toxic relationship between Jennifer and Needy is a core part of the film’s narrative before Jennifer’s metaphorical rapists makes their appearance on-screen. In an opening scene, Needy cancels plans with her boyfriend because Jennifer chastizes her for missing a concert with her. When Jennifer tells Needy to “wear something cute,” Needy’s voice-over explains, “‘Wear something cute’ means something very specific in Jennifer-speak. It meant I couldn’t look like a total zero but I couldn’t upstage her either. I could expose my stomach, but never my cleavage. Tits were her trademark.”
Jennifer’s victims (at least her last two) weren’t chosen because they “reminded her of her assailants” or acted as some representation for rape culture. They were chosen because Jennifer’s friend Needy voiced interest in them. Jennifer’s Body is far less of a #MeToo-adjacent revenge fantasy and more of a psychological horror in which two young girls manipulate and destroy one another.
The interpersonal conflict between the main characters is partially what convinced Kusama to take on Cody’s screenplay, telling Buzzfeed,
“From the outset, I always felt like this is a horror movie about toxic friendships between girls. And on a larger scale, it’s about how these alliances between girls get distorted and corrupted by the patriarchy. We were just completely aligned by those kinds of ideas.”
One of the most hotly debated moments of the film is the kissing scene between Jennifer and Needy, taking place toward the end of the second act. The fact that a clip of the scene was used in the trailer amidst a marketing campaign aimed at horny boys was a bad look, making the “girl-on-girl” action appear like exploitation of lesbianism for the male gaze, but Jennifer’s Body is almost textually queer. In the first moment of actual dialogue (aside from the opening scenes of Needy in a psychiatric facility), Needy gets accused of being “totally lesbigay” whilst staring at Jennifer and calling her a “babe” in her voice-over monologue. When Needy loses her virginity to Chip, all she thinks about is Jennifer, who happens to be eating a boy she knew Needy thought was cool. Even Needy’s name is a reference to her co-dependent relationship to her best friend: “Needy” is a nickname, her actual name is Anita Lesnicki. Get it? Lesnicki?
Cody said of the kissing scene,
“There is a sexual energy between the girls which is kind of authentic, because I know when I was a teenage girl, the friendships that I had with other girls were almost romantic, they were so intense. I wanted to sleep at my friend’s house every night, I wanted to wear her clothes, we would talk on the phone until our ears ached. I wanted to capture that heightened feeling you get as an adolescent that you don’t really feel as a grownup. You like your friends when you’re a grownup but you don’t need to sleep in the same bed with them and talk to them on the phone until 5 a.m. every night.”
Jennifer and Needy’s relationship mirrors that of a lot of adolescent girls. For a time when I was a teenager, I genuinely considered my best friends to be my actual soul mates even though none of us were allowed to have the same favorite color as anyone else in our group, much like Needy can’t wear low-cut shirts because tits are “Jennifer’s thing.” Considering how many of the 20th and 21st century’s biggest “chick flicks” revolve around or heavily feature interpersonal conflict between and among female friends–Mean Girls, Heathers, Bring it On, The Craft, Bridesmaids, etc.–I’m clearly not alone in my experience.
Why Jennifer manipulates her best friend isn’t explored at length, but the instability of her identity and the focus she keeps on her place as the biggest babe in her high school is always present on-screen. Eating boys doesn’t just make her physically stronger, it makes her hotter. After failing to consume another “morsel,” a quiet scene is used in transition to Jennifer’s next attack in which her hair starts falling out and she mournfully slathers her face in foundation while fighting back tears. It’s a subtle moment, but an effective one. “I always thought that was such a sad image,” Cody’s said. “She's so vulnerable. I don't know any woman who hasn't had a moment sitting in front of the mirror and thinking, 'Help me, I want to be somebody else.'”
Unfortunately, the nuances of Jennifer’s character, Needy’s subservience to her best friend, and the psychosexual manipulation between the two female leads are far too often overshadowed in discussions on Jennifer’s Body’s feminist cred. Answering questions on how and why the film became a cult classic among female horror fans and focusing primarily on the #MeToo undertones reduces a complex female story about friendship and identity into a narrative about how women are so often victimized by abusive men.
I won’t underplay the importance sexual violence has on the film’s story–it is imperative to the plot and the fact that it went without textual analysis for so long is indicative of a historical problem in film criticism–but we don’t need to cling to the narrative that Jennifer’s Body was actually rape-revenge fantasy all along in order to justify its worth as a masterful piece of feminist horror. The Patriarchy isn’t represented in the story merely through the characters’ relationships to men, but also in their relationships to other women and to themselves.
With or without its new resonance in a post-#MeToo era, Jennifer’s Body was always feminist.