Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body

Is Jennifer’s Body, the girl-centric horror film written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karen Kusama, a feminist movie? The issue has been tossed around on a variety of different feminist blogs: some say yes, some say no, with some good arguments from both sides. The film centers around two friends, Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Siegfried). Jennifer is as sexy and confident as Needy is nerdy and dull, but once Jennifer becomes a demon who devours men, their friendship is sent into a tailspin.

Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried)

I had a friend in middle school who was very much like Jennifer, but instead of oozing confidence through sexuality, she displayed it through her physicality. She was a troublemaker and a fighter, always ready to start a hallway brawl. I played the part of Needy, the smart, awkward girl standing in the alpha’s shadow. She was everything that I was not: tough, assertive, never taking any abuse from anyone. She was not “role model material” to say the least, but this was around the time when I was obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I adored her hardness and her ability to kick ass like Buffy could.

The relationship also held a sense of menace: she was a bully, but if I remained her friend, I could be spared the abuse she doled out to the girls who were even more socially inept than myself. It was an insurance policy as much as it was a friendship. That’s not to say that we didn’t like each other or even love each other at the time; it was just complicated.

It is through the lens of this friendship that I viewed Jennifer’s Body, and I appreciate that it brings a complicated female relationship to the horror genre. As a horror movie, there are some ways in which it succeeds and some ways in which it fails. There are the obvious criticisms: it’s a slow burn horror movie, not for people who like constant action and gore. However, the problem with slow burn horror is that the payout at the end has to be big for such a long crescendo. Unfortunately, Jennifer’s Body gets weaker and weaker as it continues before achieving a bittersweet climax. My least favorite moment is a pivotal fight scene that devolves into a name-calling match full of ham-handed characterization. There is also the gratuitous, guy-baiting lesbian kiss that comes out of nowhere, and a cheesy scene where woodland animals (I’ve nicknamed them the Christmas Critters ala South Park) show up to watch Jennifer murder a boy.

Jennifer's alternative to prom

One of the surprisingly negative features of the film is the dullness of the dialogue. There are some witty and adorably silly lines (“you’re jello, lime jello” to refer to cowardice) but mostly the deadpan humor lacks spark  and fun, either because of Ms. Cody’s writing or Ms. Fox’s performance or both. Instead the script invokes a sense of catatonia, making Jennifer a hipster zombie spouting Willow Rosenburg’s “Bored Now” ethos even before she is demonized. It’s not enthralling characterization to make one character a wallflower and the other a member of the living dead.

The problem with the negatives I’ve listed is that they can all be argued the opposite way: that the movie was meant to crescendo into Mean Girls and that the kiss was meant to shed light on Jennifer’s desire to eat Needy and become her. The woodland creatures really were supposed to be funny and “Bored Now” really is the quote by which Jennifer operates. It’s what I like about this movie, but it’s also why a lot of people are going to be turned away by it. Everything can be read as following both a feminist and antifeminist line of thinking, so it polarizes its potential audience.

However, I prefer Jennifer’s Body to the comparable Teeth, a film that featured a girl with a (literally) killer vagina who uses it as a weapon against men. The film achieved female empowerment by portraying all male characters as disgusting, horrible rapists, thereby allowing the main character to murder them without regret. Jennifer’s Body doesn’t have this issue, since the male victims and Needy’s boyfriend are mostly sympathetic and well meaning, so the responsibility for Jennifer’s actions lie solely on her own shoulders. I also much prefer this movie to the recently released Sorority Girls, a rehash of old horror themes with one-dimensional female characters, even though it allows women to “wax poetic about the virtues of feminine solidarity.” If the message and not the women involved are the most important aspect of a film, then it’s just superior propaganda, nothing deeper than that.

Jennifer and Needy

The highlight of Jennifer’s Body lies not in its message but in the tangled web of love and jealousy that characterizes the girls’ relationship and continues even after death. The relationships of girls and women are messy, complicated, but beautiful, an untapped gold mine of inspiration for all genres. My real life relationship with my middle school friend ended much less dramatically: we went to different high schools and have only run into one another once in recent years. But I will always remember when we were sitting alone at the top of the bleachers in the fading evening light. All of her other friends had gone, but when I started to descend, she asked me to stay with her. She had a sad vulnerability about her that I had never seen before. Gone was the toughness, the girl who could handle anything. I wondered why she was upset, what she was afraid of. But I didn’t ask, and neither of us spoke as I sat with her. The relationships between girls and women refuse to be characterized in such simple terms as feminist or empowering, simply because they are both and neither all at once.

(All images are from Jennifer’s Body, distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation)

Tags: gender, jennifer's body, movies, reviews

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 2:05 am and is filed under Geek Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.