A decade ago this autumn, Diablo Cody
followed up her Oscar-winning screenplay for Juno with Jennifer’s Body. Aside from the high school setting, few critics—or filmgoers—saw
any real similarities between her prior optimistic take on a pregnant teen and
this horror flick about a monstrous teen.
This major change of pace was too jarring for many. For
most of the past decade, it was left for dead, the way that the title character
walked away from her victims, and its poor reception altered the career
trajectories of Cody and the movie’s star, Megan Fox.
The last couple of Halloweens, though, viewers
catching the movie on TV or DVD could have asked whether all the stinging criticism
was so justified. To a degree that was unappreciated at the time, Jennifer’s
Body seemingly adhered to its genre while subtly undercutting its
conventions.
Two years after the birth of the #MeToo movement,
it’s easy to see that critics were carping about matters unrelated to what was
onscreen. Rather than the gore and sleaze they thought they saw, they ignored
the film’s more pointed dissection of trauma counseling, female relationships,
and especially the enduring trauma of male violation of women.
In recent years, Cody and director Karyn Kusama have
noted in interviews that, even before the film’s release, they sensed that it
might underperform at the box office, for various reasons:
*The desire to take Cody down a peg. The
screenwriter was riding high, not only for her quick success with Juno but with
Candy Girl, her memoir about working as a stripper. A critical reaction
was bound to set in against a young writer deemed to be flying too high.
*Outrage over Fox’s negative comments about
another director. Fox seemed to be biting the hand that fed her when she
criticized her director on Transformers, Michael Bay. Likening him to Hitler
appeared way over the top at that point, but a 2018 article from The Daily Beast documented not only how the director filmed her in several
sexually demeaning scenes but used crew members to trash her for her criticism,
ensuring that she would have a reputation for being difficult—anathema in
Hollywood.
*Marketing to the wrong audience. Teenage
guys were not likely to embrace a movie with a blunt first line like, “Hell is
a teenage girl.” Yet that was exactly the demographic that Boom! Studio
targeted. It was as if it never read the screenplay, which revolved around how
the affectionate but complicated relationship between popular cheerleader
Jennifer Check (Fox) and her smarter, nerdy friend Needy Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) comes unglued after Jennifer becomes the victim of a vicious attack
following an indie band’s concert. The marketing staff also never thought that
teen boys would be far more likely to want to see Fox having sex with men than
devouring them. The marketing department didn’t help their cause (or the
film’s) by suggesting to Kusama that Fox do live chats with amateur porn web
sites.
Perhaps the male-dominated marketing staff couldn’t
get around the central inversion of the movie: Jennifer might be the monster of
this horror flick, but the villain is male. After a show at Melody Lane, the
town hot spot, Nikolai Wolf, lead singer of indie rock band Low Shoulder, has more
than the usual groupie business in mind:
“Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie
band these days?” Nikolia wails to Jennifer, after she disregards Needy’s
warning not to seek safety in the band’s van after a fire breaks out at their
show. “There are so many of us, and we're all so cute and it's like if you
don't get on Letterman or some retarded soundtrack, you're screwed, okay? Satan
is our only hope. We're working with the beast now. And we've got to make a
really big impression on him. And to do that, we're going to have to butcher
you. And bleed you.”
The sacrifice does not work as planned because,
contrary to the band’s belief and “the beast’s” wish, Jennifer is not a virgin
(as she had assured them, in the mistaken belief that it would save her from
harm). Instead, she is turned into a succubus—possessed by a demon, and
dependent for the continuation of her sex appeal on devouring male victims.
It would seem obvious that the sacrifice that Low
Shoulder has in mind is sexual assault, that Jennifer’s trauma is the lasting
damage inflicted on such victims, and, as Cody put it later, Jennifer’s killing
spree is “about the feeling of wanting to turn the tables.”
Much of the tension
derives not so much from where and how Jennifer might strike next, but from the
undercurrents of codependency and resentment in the Jennifer-Needy relationship
(Jennifer’s jealousy of Needy’s close relationship with her mother and
boyfriend, Needy’s unconscious infatuation with Jennifer) that affect the
unfolding tragedy.
Little if any of this, however, seemed to register
at the time. “Because of the way the film was marketed, people wanted to see
the movie as a cheap, trashy, exploitative vehicle for the hot girl from Transformers,” Cody noted, in an interview with Louis Peitzman of Buzz Feed News last December. “That’s how
people insisted on seeing the film, even though I think when you watch it, it’s
pretty obvious that there’s something else going on.”
Teenage girls have to negotiate the minefield of
male norms of sexuality. The complication in this film is that Jennifer is not
a total innocent—not only not a virgin, but also ready to use her sexuality to
cadge drinks at the Melody Lane though she is underage.
But the fateful encounter with Low Shoulder represents
a barrier even she can’t handle. Her urge to feed on males after the
attack—based on biology, according to horror cinema conventions—really feels
more like revenge, as seen in her reply to Needy’s cry that she’s been killing
human beings: “They weren’t human beings—they were boys!”
Jennifer’s
Body
is filled with much of the same tart teen humor so applauded in Juno. (Example: Needy corrects her
friend: No, Jesus did not “invent the
calendar.”) But like Get Out and The Stepford Wives, it uses its genre
for satirical social commentary.
Far earlier than the national discussion that has
been taking place in the last two years, it depicted how adapting to the male
gaze can lead unwary females into dangerous places, and how male violence can
go viral—damaging not just its immediate female victim but also families,
friends and entire communities.
And this everlasting horror can be perpetrated
not only by an overweight, bullying Hollywood producer but also by a handsome musician
you’d kill to see—without ever grasping he’s about to do that to you, literally.
“Just as humans are created from elaborate matrices
of ancestral traits, fictional characters, too, resemble the people who create
them. Even stock romantic-comedy heroines (who are written and rewritten in
Hollywood boardrooms for maximum ‘likability’) carry traces of DNA from the
hands that craft them. Even at our most inventive, we are what we
write.”—Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno), “The Narcissist Decade,” Newsweek, Dec. 5, 2011
