Why Jennifer’s Body Just Made Me Feel Uncomfortable (with spoilers)

I finally got around to seeing Jennifer’s Body this evening—even after all the negative hype, I was a little excited to see a film that featured the lines, “You’re killing people!”/ “No, I’m killing boys.”  Wow! I thought.  Now that’s different…

Of course, this conversation wasn’t actually in the movie.  Maybe they cut it to make room for the unscripted make-out scene between Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, which was clearly necessary to advance the “plot”. 

Writer Diablo Cody was going for some sort of feminist homage to the mean-girl teen movie plus the horror flicks she loves, and in my opinion failed miserably.  The relationship between Jennifer and Needy is not completely unbelievable, but is totally underdeveloped. Over at Jezebel, Dodai writes, “What if your best friend — who already thinks she can get any guy she wants — became an actual man-eater? While Jennifer was slightly under-developed as a character, it seemed like that was the point: She was a vain, slightly mean airhead before she turned into an evil creature, and, thanks to her indestructibility, became even more vain, cruel and drunk with power afterward.” 

Sure, every girl has that friend, to be sure, but even that friend is more than just the evil girl who keeps you around to destroy your life.  There are no poignant moments between these supposed best friends.  There is no palpable anguish in the destruction of this life-long friendship, perhaps a double-victim of the horror genre—where girls are just gore fodder, and the teen movie genre, where girls are just backstabbing bitches.  There is no real exploration of the fact that Jennifer was the victim of a really disturbing violent crime.  Her murder is treated lightly and dismissively, just as a way to explain how she becomes murderous she-devil boyfriend-eater, rather than as the Horror from which all the rest of the horror in the film radiates.  Jennifer ostensibly has no control over the fact that she wants to kill and eat people—this is something that was done to her.  Is Jennifer “vain, cruel, and drunk with power,” or confused and traumatized, not to mention a teenager having to deal with being inhabited by a demon?  Again, the film doesn’t really get into it.
I briefly thought that Jennifer’s Body could find a place in the genre of new rape revenge flicks, alongside the amazing 2007 film Teeth.  Megan Fox’s character Jennifer is not raped, but is murdered because of her presumed sexuality.  After magically not dying and gaining the ability to move creepily fast, among other sweet skills, Jennifer does not go after her killers and their awesome haircuts. Instead, she just starts killing random, fairly nice-seeming boys.  She also does this by seducing them.  The film even throws the word “succubus” out at you at one point.  As Alexandra Gutierrez writes, “Jennifer glibly treats the experience as little more than a footnote, focusing instead on the awesome powers she’s attained. Now, I’m sure Cody was trying to represent trauma subtly and communicate Jennifer’s anger by having her act out revenge fantasies on her male victims.”  But it doesn’t work.  Straight up, it just doesn’t.  The casting choices of J.K. Simmons and Amy Sedaris, an absurdly awful pink prom dress, and a vast and relentless barrage of made-up teenage slang had everyone in the theater laughing throughout the film.  Which is cool, right, I’m down with laughter.  But I didn’t feel good about laughing at Jennifer’s Body.  It felt exploitative.  I just felt shitty the whole movie. Like Cody sacrificed the character of Jennifer’s humanity, after sacrificing her life, to the pursuit of inserting more Juno-esque slang into the lexicon. None of the deaths in the film seemed very funny at all—I almost cried a couple of times.  You’re not supposed to want to cry when people die in a slasher, and certainly not in a spoof. Fail.
There may have been a redemptive moment in the vengeful slayings of Jennifer’s indie-rock murderers by Needy at the very end of the movie, but it is premised by some sort of gleeful statement by Needy like “haha! I got bit by a demon and now I have special powers!” Not like, “These killers took my best friend away from me and turned her into something unrecognizable.”  I guess you could argue that it was implied, but it was all just a little too gleeful for me.  Diablo Cody’s sophomore effort was another hip, ironic, vague attempt at female empowerment that fell short.
Jenna Bee. 
sassyfrasscircus.com