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The horror comedy “The Body of Jennifer,” starring Fox as a demon who eats children, showed me the personality of squeaky teenage queens when I needed them most.
By Lena Wilson
A freshman biology lab, I clustered with an acceptable boy and the only woman in my class. We were meant to dissect worms.
That day, the player opposed the boy.
“I bet you need to see “Jennifer’s body, ” she says suggestively to the girl. We had all noticed the ads for the film, which showed Megan Fox dressed.
In 2009, Megan Fox was not only a sex symbol, it was the sex symbol, a universal heat barometer. And recently he had been bisexual in Esquire.
At this point in my life, I face my own hidden lesbianism pretending that homosexuality did not exist. I’m not looking for the horror of adolescence driven through sapical sexpots. I looked at the virus on my computer and set out to cut it in half.
It turns out that the most productive time to get into horror videos is after being cut in part as a lab worm.
When I was 16, I spent most of the summer of 2011 on the couch, recovering from spinal fusion surgery. One day, I came here through a cable television exhibition of “Jennifer’s Body” halfway through the make-up scene among the film’s women. I was intrigued and well on my own while my mother was working from her room. I hit the total movie later in the day.
“Jennifer’s Body” was Diablo Cody’s next script after winning the Oscar for “Juno” in 2008. The film, directed through Karyn Kusama, follows more productive friends Jennifer (Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) through the breakdown of her poisonous bond. Jennifer is a demon who has to eat the children to remain beautiful. Needed, she didn’t do that. There’s a massacre.
Even “Jennifer’s Body” had brought me closer to the horror movies with a cautious interest in the best case. But this movie was different. With his references to emo music and past pop culture, he seemed like a time capsule of a comedian of my own life, so his protagonists, charming in Hollywood, seemed genuine to me. “Jennifer’s Body” has put the wonderful assets of horror – social transgression, complex female characters and bloodthirsty revenge – at the hands of two new teenagers. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with monstrous women like Jennifer.
At the end of the film, Needy and Jennifer are the shell of their being the best for the yearbook. But their path to oblivion is strangely liberating, as the two women give up stereotypical female docility to take on the roles of hero (Needy) and villain (Jennifer). After an indefinite organization killed Jennifer in the wrong virgin sacrifice, she is reborn as a male blood-flavored monster. Needy’s sweet manners will have to save his helpless boyfriend Jennifer, and in the end, Needy stalks and kills the organization that triggered everything. Such subversive female disturbance is especially imaginable in horror films, where harassed and bloodied women burn their schools and passive mothers sacrifice their children. That’s why it’s my favorite genre, and on which I come back and go back for new representations of women.
“Jennifer’s Body” is a satire of gender tropes. It’s one of the few horror videos in which a teenage girl’s promiscuity saves her from ending prematurely: if Jennifer had been a virgin, there would be no film. The film also plays the “devergond” Jennifer and the “virginal” Needy opposite each other in extravagant extremes. Jennifer and Needy are sexually active in the film, despite Needy’s mouse.
Although it was written in mind in a female audience, sexist expectations have marginalized the film. After seeing “Jennifer’s Body” at 16, I searched the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, hoping to see my joy reflected in me. The film called rotten.
In 2009, Kusama and Fox suffered damage due to critical acrimony and a sexist marketing crusade connected with excited male viewers. (That’s why I hadn’t noticed the movie in the movies, I didn’t think of it “for” me.) His detractors, many of whom were men, seemed to be waiting for an objectified refrigerator. Instead, they watched a deliberately subversive, cheesy film and called it a failure. The delight led Kusama to leave the study formula altogether. Fox, already debatable about her open complaint from Michael Bay, who had directed her in the films “Transformers”, was dismissed as a star.
In recent years, female enthusiasts have claimed “Jennifer’s Body” and it’s a pre-MeToo classic. For my 21st birthday at Smith College, my friends and I took a classroom and screened the film. The scene of the virgin’s sacrifice, which had been recorded slightly in my teenage brain, was now stealing all the air from the room. It was 2015 and it seemed that the whole country was waking up to the culture of rape in college. I helped send a bed to campus in solidarity with Emma Sulkowicz last year.
When rockers sacrifice Jennifer to Satan, the scene is absurd and full of Cody’s iconic jokes, but it’s also incredibly dark. The band’s lead, Nikolai (Adam Brody), stabs Jennifer several times as she happily makes a song. Jennifer is betrayed through the same artist she adores. And she victimizes her in particular because she’s a woman.
Violence is highly sexualized: Jennifer is worried aloud in the group van that members can simply be rapists, and there is long-standing symbolic dating between stabbings and sexual penetration. Jennifer is a pain that many women understand. It’s shocking to learn that the musician (or comedian, director or actor) you once admired sees you as an undeniable way to come to an end.
While Jennifer is sacrificed by her body, society despises Needy, the only character who knows Jennifer’s fact, by her mind. He first shows up at a psychiatric hospital, where he kicks a doctor and spits in his face. As a teenager, before surgery, I had a panic attack so strong that I won what seemed to be enough Ativan to drop a hippopotamus. Watching “Jennifer’s Body” with an incision of a healing foot in my back, I was attracted to both Needy’s depressing anti-medical mania and Jennifer’s emo cult.
As the violence intensifies, Needy drops his first F-bomb and ends up eating his “totally lesbian-gay” friendship with Jennifer in this makeup scene, which encouraged lesbian and bisexuals to claim the film as well.
It was there, I learned at 16, where the true appeal of the kind of horror resides. Horrified, women and women do not want to be pretty, educated, chaste or even heterosexual; in fact, those characters are so scary because they intentionally avoid gender assumptions. Teenage women, whose feelings were also noticed as hormonal hysteria, would possibly, in spite of everything, lose their temper. Jennifer and Needy have joined personalities such as Regan MacNeil (“The Exorcist”), Carrie White (“Carrie”) and Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald (“Ginger Snaps”), and continue to live in younger and more recent women like Dani Ardor. (“Midsommar”) and Justine (“Raw”).
The summer of my operation, incorrigibly unhappy and in too much agony to eat, sleep or shower independently, let alone dress, make up or smile. Now, as an adult, I still don’t wear women’s clothes or makeup. I learned that this is how I feel more comfortable as a woman and a lesbian.
A lot of things brought me here, but “Jennifer’s Body” first showed me the messy, messy kidnapping that awaits me if I learned to be a woman on my own terms.
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