Jennifer's Body

Abstract

Since the ritual required a virgin, and the victim is played by Megan Fox, Jennifer was not killed but became a sort of demon who must eat people in order to stay vibrant. [...]in many ways, Jennifer's Body is paradigmatic of that apathetic, ideologically passive/complicit brand of postmodern fiction.

Jennifer 's Body

(Dir. Karyn Kusama) USA, 2009

20th Century Fox / Dune Entertainment

Despite its horror inflection, the second film written by Diablo Cody, is actually not much of a departure from her Oscar-winning Juno (2007), with a similar focus on high-school life and the female body. Jennifer 's Body is told in flashback from a mental hospital to which Needy (Amanda Seyfried), a young woman with seriously violent tendencies, is confined. We leam that she was once the mousy best friend of the glamorous Jennifer (Megan Fox), the most popular girl in school (though she does seem only to hang around with Needy). We begin when Jennifer drags her friend to a concert by indie band Low Shoulder, who are performing in a bar on the outskirts of their small town. To the chagrin of her friend, Jennifer is fixated on hooking up with the band's lead singer (The O.C. 's Adam Brody) and, after the bar bums to the ground, abandons Needy and drives away in a van with the band. Later that night, in a scene with a wonderfully suspenseful build-up, a bloodied Jennifer arrives at Needy's house, eats some of her Mom's chicken and vomits torrents of black goo. Next day at school, she is seemingly her brassy self again. And then she starts seducing, killing and eating her male classmates. It is later revealed that Low Shoulder performed a satanic rite in a bid for fame and success which involved sacrificing Jennifer to the Devil. Since the ritual required a virgin, and the victim is played by Megan Fox, Jennifer was not killed but became a sort of demon who must eat people in order to stay vibrant.

Visually, the film's unyielding focus is Jennifer's body, while thematically it charts Needy's complicated, dependant relationship with her friend, and the tension that develops as the bodies mount. There is a solid emotional core to the friendship which is charmingly established by flashbacks to their childhood. The extent of their unequal dynamic is nicely suggested by a psychic connection Needy has with Jennifer (at certain points, Needy can "sense" what Jennifer is up to and where she is) but which does not appear to be reciprocal. At one point, Needy is distracted during lovemaking with her boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons), psychically sensing that Jennifer is killing another boy, a far more suggestive scene than one in which Jennifer and Needy kiss. The film flaunts a self-conscious knowingness about the voyeuristic nature of horror movies. In one sequence, a freshly sated Jennifer swims languidly the full length of a lake towards the camera and emerges like an amphibious predator from the water, fully naked. If, as has been pointed out by some theorists, voyeurism in its strict definition is disabled by such awareness, scopophilia certainly isn't - this scene and the film's other meta-cinematic strategies hardly disturb or interrogate with any conviction those impulses that lie at the heart of cinema, horror films and female representation. In fact, in many ways, Jennifer's Body is paradigmatic of that apathetic, ideologically passive/complicit brand of postmodern fiction.

Pop culture references (of which the title, taken from a song by Hole, is a slightly more obscure example) rigorously enforce a facetious tone throughout. One of the few genuinely distressing moments, in which a bound and gagged Jennifer whimpers as the band of Satanists advance on her, is rendered toothless by a reference to the American rock band Maroon 5. Not that relentless referencing isn't an accurate reflection of how people behave these days (I'm wearing my Iron Maiden T-shirt as I write this). But it's the uncomfortably Tarantino-esque nature of this tonal venting that gets to me. At least the audience is spared from watching Jennifer being raped, though in a more general way Cody's girls do seem to be informed by Tarantino's own weird fixation on dubiously empowered women. Nevertheless, Jennifer's Body handles the Tarantino influence quite well overall, and manages to contribute quite a bit of its own aesthetic, which can't be said for the innumerable dreadful fdms that try their hand at mixing humour and violence; nor does Jennifer 's Body display the sense of moral depravity that so often accompanies the mix. Also, the depiction of Low Shoulder's greed and popularity suggests that Cody is sensitive to cultural vacuity, or some of its manifestations.

Pop culture references are also put to thematic use, quite cleverly. The last sequence of the film, in which an empowered Needy seeks out the rock band that facilitated her friend's outrages, plays to a cover of Blondie's "In the Flesh". As well as playing on the various connotations of the word flesh, the song is covered by a male vocalist, which complicates the gender dynamics. Considering the film's unremittingly scopophilic agenda, the lyrics resonate perfectly: "Darling, I can't wait to see you. Your picture ain't enough; I can't wait to touch you in the flesh". The subject matter of indie bands ties in nicely here; a male dominated musical and cinematic terrain is subverted efficiently and satisfyingly.

I don't mean to invest this particular song too heavily with meaning, to the neglect of diegetic elements of Jennifer's Body. It's a risk Cody courts in a film this intertextual, with a setting as iconographically replete as the American high school. The film is wonderfully shot throughout; in one scene the camera is poised above a shadowy street, offering an extensive view of a young man tentatively searching for Jennifer - the sequence is tense, amusing and aesthetically pleasing all at once. Also, Megan Fox is excellent as Jennifer - perfectly coy, brash and flippant. A number of motifs are entertainingly developed; true to teenage life (and life in general), there are times when Jennifer and other characters look far less glamorous than usual. This is usually attributed to the long time Jennifer has spent between eating boys, yet this can also be easily incorporated into the film's metaphorical framework. There are echoes throughout of plot elements from various earlier high school fictions, most c\cax\xHeathers (Dir. Michael Lehmann, 1989) and Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000). Indeed, murder and cannibalism aside, the film is another rehearsal of the story of erstwhile best friends Lindsay and Millie from Freaks and Geeks, told from Millie's perspective (albeit with a little less warmth and less acute characterisation than that found in the underappreciated Freaks and Geeks). And of course, the high school setting also resonates with Cody's earlier Juno, which garnered far more positive responses than Jennifer 's Body has received so far. Her latest film's gaudy and confrontational aesthetic, as well as the weighty implications of its subject matter and technique, explains why it has been less well received than Juno. To my mind, in terms of humour and characterisation, it's no better or worse.

Eoin Rafferty