Hell is a teenage girl
2018-10-01 23:58Rabbit, rabbit! It's October and at least half the country is dreaming of eating men alive. Let's talk about Jennifer's Body (2009).
Written by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama, and incredibly underappreciated by critics, Jennifer's Body spins a very funny, stealthily poignant horror movie out of a premise with the genius of a one-liner—when a virgin sacrifice to the powers of darkness turns out to be not so much of a virgin, a succubus is born and only her plain-jane friend can stop her—and a plot that commits to flipping the superficial misogyny of hottie vs. nottie to explore the demons of female rage and loyalty underneath. Megan Fox stars as the eponymous Jennifer Check, the reigning hot cheerleader of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, so named for its local geographical mystery of a seemingly bottomless waterfall. Kids and scientists throw stuff down it all the time and none of it ever appears to come out. That concludes the most fun you can have in this town while staying legal. Big fish, small pond territory, all right? But what a fish. Slender and pneumatic in low-slung jeans and nipple-hugging crop-tops, Jennifer has wolf-blue eyes and twining dark hair and a cultivated trick of saying outrageous things in a tiny, pouty, little-girl voice; her bee-stung mouth drops open to reveal white, white teeth in a way that suggests absolute receptivity and then comes out swinging with opening lines like "It smells like Thai food in here. Have you guys been fucking?" Her sickest burns are reserved for her would-be admirers, the mean-girl swagger that passes for sophistication in high school: "He thinks he's cute enough for me and that's why he's in retard math." "He's into maggot rock. He wears nail polish. My dick is bigger than his." The heart-shaped pendant nestling just above her jailbait cleavage reads "BFF." Its twin swings around the throat of our milk-blonde, bespectacled, nerdy-cute narrator Anita Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), whose Jennifer-bestowed nickname "Needy" illuminates the tensions of their long relationship just as much as the starry eyes with which she watches Jennifer twirling the high school flag. Whatever it was like when they were grade-schoolers playing with dolls in a sandbox, with the deforming pressures of adolescence they have fallen into one of those id-and-superego spirals that can lock girls together, especially girls with different insecurities, "tits were her trademark" Jennifer always pulling "dork like me" Needy along on some irresponsibly adult adventure, glamorous and irresistible and nowhere near the grown-up she looks or sounds like. "Boo," she mourns when it takes more than a casually issued order to get Needy to disregard her own boundaries yet again, this time into blowing off a night with her genuinely nice boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) to accompany Jennifer to the town's dive bar in pursuit of an indie singer she's been stalking on MySpace. Finger-marking the air with affected disappointment: "Cross out Needy." It works like a charm, albeit a malign and slightly sad one. It works on the audience, too. By the time Needy's having to decide, amid the Grand Guignol of the third act, whether she's willing to let Jennifer keep getting away with murder now that it's more than a figure of speech, we understand that the stakes have escalated only in degree, not kind.
In many ways, I think Jennifer's Body was for me the experience I had been promised with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and never actually got—the daily horrors of high school expressed in supernatural terms and a slangingly snarky argot that never undercuts itself so much that the beats of real emotion have no room to land. The deaths in this movie have weight. In a small town that really feels rural, Midwestern, recession-hit, we see parents grieving, teachers lost for words, students drifting numbly through the hallways as the blunt-force trauma of a devastating fire gives way to the deeper panic of an unsolved series of gruesome murders. ("Did you hear what Colin Gray looked like when they found him?"–"Lasagna with teeth?"–"You heard!") For every dry jab of humor at the sight of Jennifer sashaying a radiant catwalk through a crowd of weeping, shocked classmates, there's a swirl of unease at the depth of her indifference, as if the studied carelessness of her introductory scenes has become effortlessly, affectlessly real. One minute she's casting a territorial eye toward Chip, the next falling into bed with Needy herself, at least until Needy kicks her out of it with a justified yell of "What the fuck is happening?" It's a nightmare not just because Jennifer's now-supernal levels of babe-hood have begun to wax and wane with the bloody disappearances of local boys, but because Needy can't tell whether to be more frightened of her friend or more frightened of losing her. The love in this movie has weight, too. Romantic, familial, whatever complicated and codependent thing twines between Jennifer and Needy, it's worth noting that while there are fright-flick moments aplenty in this story—spiky black vomit chased with a predatory whisper of are you scared, hallucinations of blood and of Jennifer crouching feral as Lilith at the foot of the bed in which Chip and Needy are sweetly, awkwardly, seriously getting it on for the very first time—they are always underlaid by the ordinary, awful fears of adolescence, when the night terrors of children bleed into the existential awakening of adults. That your friends will turn on you, that your parents won't save you, that the people you love won't heed you, not really, not when it's important. That you were always alone, even when you thought you had allies. That you were always too late to save anyone, even yourself. The nature of demonic possession in this script is sketched broadly enough to allow for the interpretation that what we might otherwise term "Jennifer" is for most of the runtime really more like "the demon where Jennifer used to be," but that doesn't change the fact that whether it's Jennifer's body or Jennifer herself in the climactic showdown with Needy, what they're fighting over is not really the serial man-eating that has terrorized Devil's Kettle for months but just how bad a friend Jennifer has honestly been for years. It's heavy stuff. It just comes out in lines like "She's just hovering. It's not that impressive" and "Do you buy all your murder weapons at Home Depot? God, you're butch." I was not necessarily as charmed by similar dialogue in the more realistic Juno (2007), for which Cody won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. What can I say? Add a succubus, it works for me.
I saw this movie with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks as part of the Boston Women's Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre; it was introduced by Strictly Brohibited and cheered by an audience split audibly between people who could quote it from memory and people whose high expectations were being fulfilled, which is a delightful thing to hear for a triple-threat female cult favorite whose critical reception was mixed in the extreme. I think it helps that while it's happy to reverse the conventions of its genre, e.g., boys in this story serve as the doomed, disposable equivalents of women in slasher flicks, it also insists on digging past the obvious. ( Tonight's going to be their last show. )
Beyond the title and the killer play-out of "Violet," I could detect no overt allusions to Hole in this movie, which doesn't stop it from feeling as though it's in dialogue with nearly every song ever growled, sneered, or screamed into a microphone by Courtney Love. I was especially reminded of "Miss World," "Celebrity Skin," "Reasons to Be Beautiful," and above all the Orphic fury of "Use Once & Destroy." It does not give an inch to the male gaze, but it's not interested in telling a pretty story for women, which does not mean there's not a lot of strength wrapped up in that mess. It deserves critical reappraisal, but I'm not sure it's so much lesser that the audiences for whom it was made scream for it as loudly as they do. I don't see a lot of movies that could double-feature as readily with Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) as with Pretty Poison (1968) and I especially don't see them featuring a cameo by Lance Henriksen, which after everything Jennifer's Body had already done for me frankly felt like a gift. With teeth. This friendship brought to you by my forever backers at Patreon.
Written by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama, and incredibly underappreciated by critics, Jennifer's Body spins a very funny, stealthily poignant horror movie out of a premise with the genius of a one-liner—when a virgin sacrifice to the powers of darkness turns out to be not so much of a virgin, a succubus is born and only her plain-jane friend can stop her—and a plot that commits to flipping the superficial misogyny of hottie vs. nottie to explore the demons of female rage and loyalty underneath. Megan Fox stars as the eponymous Jennifer Check, the reigning hot cheerleader of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, so named for its local geographical mystery of a seemingly bottomless waterfall. Kids and scientists throw stuff down it all the time and none of it ever appears to come out. That concludes the most fun you can have in this town while staying legal. Big fish, small pond territory, all right? But what a fish. Slender and pneumatic in low-slung jeans and nipple-hugging crop-tops, Jennifer has wolf-blue eyes and twining dark hair and a cultivated trick of saying outrageous things in a tiny, pouty, little-girl voice; her bee-stung mouth drops open to reveal white, white teeth in a way that suggests absolute receptivity and then comes out swinging with opening lines like "It smells like Thai food in here. Have you guys been fucking?" Her sickest burns are reserved for her would-be admirers, the mean-girl swagger that passes for sophistication in high school: "He thinks he's cute enough for me and that's why he's in retard math." "He's into maggot rock. He wears nail polish. My dick is bigger than his." The heart-shaped pendant nestling just above her jailbait cleavage reads "BFF." Its twin swings around the throat of our milk-blonde, bespectacled, nerdy-cute narrator Anita Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), whose Jennifer-bestowed nickname "Needy" illuminates the tensions of their long relationship just as much as the starry eyes with which she watches Jennifer twirling the high school flag. Whatever it was like when they were grade-schoolers playing with dolls in a sandbox, with the deforming pressures of adolescence they have fallen into one of those id-and-superego spirals that can lock girls together, especially girls with different insecurities, "tits were her trademark" Jennifer always pulling "dork like me" Needy along on some irresponsibly adult adventure, glamorous and irresistible and nowhere near the grown-up she looks or sounds like. "Boo," she mourns when it takes more than a casually issued order to get Needy to disregard her own boundaries yet again, this time into blowing off a night with her genuinely nice boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) to accompany Jennifer to the town's dive bar in pursuit of an indie singer she's been stalking on MySpace. Finger-marking the air with affected disappointment: "Cross out Needy." It works like a charm, albeit a malign and slightly sad one. It works on the audience, too. By the time Needy's having to decide, amid the Grand Guignol of the third act, whether she's willing to let Jennifer keep getting away with murder now that it's more than a figure of speech, we understand that the stakes have escalated only in degree, not kind.
In many ways, I think Jennifer's Body was for me the experience I had been promised with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and never actually got—the daily horrors of high school expressed in supernatural terms and a slangingly snarky argot that never undercuts itself so much that the beats of real emotion have no room to land. The deaths in this movie have weight. In a small town that really feels rural, Midwestern, recession-hit, we see parents grieving, teachers lost for words, students drifting numbly through the hallways as the blunt-force trauma of a devastating fire gives way to the deeper panic of an unsolved series of gruesome murders. ("Did you hear what Colin Gray looked like when they found him?"–"Lasagna with teeth?"–"You heard!") For every dry jab of humor at the sight of Jennifer sashaying a radiant catwalk through a crowd of weeping, shocked classmates, there's a swirl of unease at the depth of her indifference, as if the studied carelessness of her introductory scenes has become effortlessly, affectlessly real. One minute she's casting a territorial eye toward Chip, the next falling into bed with Needy herself, at least until Needy kicks her out of it with a justified yell of "What the fuck is happening?" It's a nightmare not just because Jennifer's now-supernal levels of babe-hood have begun to wax and wane with the bloody disappearances of local boys, but because Needy can't tell whether to be more frightened of her friend or more frightened of losing her. The love in this movie has weight, too. Romantic, familial, whatever complicated and codependent thing twines between Jennifer and Needy, it's worth noting that while there are fright-flick moments aplenty in this story—spiky black vomit chased with a predatory whisper of are you scared, hallucinations of blood and of Jennifer crouching feral as Lilith at the foot of the bed in which Chip and Needy are sweetly, awkwardly, seriously getting it on for the very first time—they are always underlaid by the ordinary, awful fears of adolescence, when the night terrors of children bleed into the existential awakening of adults. That your friends will turn on you, that your parents won't save you, that the people you love won't heed you, not really, not when it's important. That you were always alone, even when you thought you had allies. That you were always too late to save anyone, even yourself. The nature of demonic possession in this script is sketched broadly enough to allow for the interpretation that what we might otherwise term "Jennifer" is for most of the runtime really more like "the demon where Jennifer used to be," but that doesn't change the fact that whether it's Jennifer's body or Jennifer herself in the climactic showdown with Needy, what they're fighting over is not really the serial man-eating that has terrorized Devil's Kettle for months but just how bad a friend Jennifer has honestly been for years. It's heavy stuff. It just comes out in lines like "She's just hovering. It's not that impressive" and "Do you buy all your murder weapons at Home Depot? God, you're butch." I was not necessarily as charmed by similar dialogue in the more realistic Juno (2007), for which Cody won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. What can I say? Add a succubus, it works for me.
I saw this movie with
rushthatspeaks as part of the Boston Women's Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre; it was introduced by Strictly Brohibited and cheered by an audience split audibly between people who could quote it from memory and people whose high expectations were being fulfilled, which is a delightful thing to hear for a triple-threat female cult favorite whose critical reception was mixed in the extreme. I think it helps that while it's happy to reverse the conventions of its genre, e.g., boys in this story serve as the doomed, disposable equivalents of women in slasher flicks, it also insists on digging past the obvious. ( Tonight's going to be their last show. )Beyond the title and the killer play-out of "Violet," I could detect no overt allusions to Hole in this movie, which doesn't stop it from feeling as though it's in dialogue with nearly every song ever growled, sneered, or screamed into a microphone by Courtney Love. I was especially reminded of "Miss World," "Celebrity Skin," "Reasons to Be Beautiful," and above all the Orphic fury of "Use Once & Destroy." It does not give an inch to the male gaze, but it's not interested in telling a pretty story for women, which does not mean there's not a lot of strength wrapped up in that mess. It deserves critical reappraisal, but I'm not sure it's so much lesser that the audiences for whom it was made scream for it as loudly as they do. I don't see a lot of movies that could double-feature as readily with Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) as with Pretty Poison (1968) and I especially don't see them featuring a cameo by Lance Henriksen, which after everything Jennifer's Body had already done for me frankly felt like a gift. With teeth. This friendship brought to you by my forever backers at Patreon.
