Jennifer's Body (dir. Diablo Cody, 2009) — Review

Read the Jennifer’s Body screenplay PDF here — for personal, private and educational use only.

How do I love thee, Megan Fox? Let me count the ways. Car-sponging, barely legal pinup; dutiful housewife to a staggeringly mediocre husband; and lately, bisexual, Facetuned Taurus Insta baddie. In sum: poster child of the timeless, shapeshifting powers of woman in a timelessly gross world. 'I'm not killing people,' goes her character's most celebrated line in Diablo Kody's sleeper cult hit. 'I'm killing boys.’ Hell yeah you are.

The cultural life cycle of Jennifer’s Body, and the creative and societal forces behind it, offer a spectacular fusion of life and art. On one level, it’s a sexploitative B-movie slasher about an angry, sexy teen who wreaks vengeance on the lads of her middle-American high school, in the time-honored fashion of any number of women possessed by either the forces of darkness or that time of the month. Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried would go on to cement their already burgeoning status as icons of 21st-century womanhood. Fox was the staggeringly sensuous ‘bad girl’, her status as a high schooler overshadowed by the ‘adult appeal’ to professional and personal collaborators who shaped her celebrity image. Michael Bay notoriously got her to "dance underneath a waterfall" in a bikini when she was 15; her husband of nearly 14 years met her when she was 18, he 32. After Bay’s Transformers, she dropped off the public radar to pop out some sprogs and stay out of trouble. Amanda Seyfried, meanwhile, would cement her hold on the ‘earnest ingenue’ niche — established with 2008’s Mamma Mia! — with roles like Fantine in Les Mis, paving the way to more ‘reputable’, serious fare.

Diablo Cody has attributed the trashing which the film received on its release to inaccurate marketing. At the time, Fox had little studio clout beyond her looks, and a slavering male audience. Despite Cody’s insistence that this was a movie for women — the tale of two high school girls, subjected to horrors that are not only supernatural but all too mundane — the marketing framed the movie as a sexy, bloody romp for the fellers. Cody stated that she once received an email from an unnamed marketing executive stating the value of the move in three words: ‘Megan Fox hot.’

The essence of feminine power, in almost every culture, is the ability to shapeshift, maddening men with desire. According to the indubitably male authors of the stories that have survived the only recourse for these women is transformation. They can become inanimate, harmless objects like Daphne of Greek myth, granted the great mercy of turning into a laurel tree to avoid violation by Apollo. They can become sickening, subhuman creatures, like the Harpies. Or they can become monsters — female monsters. Beautiful, intelligent, human in those aspects; but inhuman in their unwillingness to conform to the hero’s vision of events.

Jennifer’s Body is a lush, almost religious feast of Western iconography, presented in a meticulous, shrugging romp that sweeps together ‘50s Americana, Victorian Gothic, ‘80s slasher, and the cold, calculating eye of the porn industry. The girls — best friends Jennifer (Fox) and Needy (Seyfried) — bounce between visual settings as swiftly, and jarringly, as they find themselves thrown between apparently stable binaries: youth and womanhood, good and evil, victimhood and empowerment.

Misinterpreted by its 2009 male audience as an unsatisfying battle between two stock-character girls for ‘supremacy’ — the conventional trophies of homecoming queen, or the affections of the guy — Jennifer’s Body has come into its own as not a catfight but a laugh-through-tears meditation on the forces that plague every girl, whether she tries to follow the rules of either the ‘bad’ or ‘frigid’ stereotype. At its heart, it is a paean to female love: Jennifer and Needy, best friends despite all the socially imposed distinctions they face as a ‘slut’ and a ‘nerd’. And, bitter though it may be, the ends to which they will both go in recognition of that bond only serve to affirm it.