Misunderstood Monsters: Keep Your Hands Off JENNIFER’S BODY
By Matt Konopka
Welcome fellow monster kids to Misunderstood Monsters. This is where I, Matt Konopka, sink my fangs into all sorts of beasts, ghouls, and creatures from above while I search for the humanity behind their frightening exteriors. From monster favorites such as The Wolf Man to obscure monsters like the whistling Shadmock, there is more to these fiends than bad hair days and gooey tentacles. Within them all is a piece of ourselves.
I’m angry right now. Furious, in fact. I’m talking Carrie burning down the prom and everyone in it mad. America just dumped pig’s blood on those of us with any shred of decency left. We’ve been here before. Many of us hoped we never would be again. Instead, we woke up on November 6th with a rotten-pumpkin-looking-wannabe-Hitler being given the most important job in the country…again. Despite his racist rhetoric against immigrants, despite his disgusting smearing of the Trans Community, despite his promise for bloodshed against “enemies within,” i.e., anyone who disagrees with him, and despite his party’s willingness to strip women of their basic rights, they expect us to take it lying down. To roll over and accept the horror.
Fuck that. In the words of Jennifer’s Body’s very own Jennifer Check (Megan Fox): “We have all the power.”
Directed by The Invitation’s Karyn Kusama and penned by Diablo Cody (hot off Juno at the time), Jennifer’s Body tells the story of a murdered teenage girl named Jennifer who returns as a boy-eating demon, much to the dismay of her best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried). Sadly, it did not do well at the box office. Between the U.S. and Canada, it just barely made back its estimated budget of sixteen million. It was largely a critical disaster and still maintains a forty-six percent Tomatometer and thirty-five percent Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes (though let’s be clear, RT is trash when measuring a film’s quality). Since then, the film has gained a massive cult following, much to the delight of yours truly, but that doesn’t make the reasons behind its box office failure any less frustrating. Back then, there was a Michael Bay fanboy backlash towards Fox following her comments on the director being “a nightmare to work with” and that the Hollywood industry is misogynistic. We have ten-plus decades of proof to back her up.
Then it’s so fitting that Fox followed up her role in Bay’s Transformers films as the title character of Jennifer’s Body. There’s a whole hell of a lot going on in Cody’s bubblegum-and-demons script, from exploration of repressed queerness to the commodification of tragedy, but at the gooey black heart of it all is a razor-tooth sharp commentary on a patriarchal society’s view of women. With Jennifer, the filmmakers paint her in stereotypical broad strokes. She’s the popular girl. The pretty girl. The seemingly kind-of-dumb girl. A top to bottom manifestation of the male fantasy. Except there’s a deception to Jennifer. She isn’t as airheaded as the people around her or certain audience members may think. She’s cunning. As implied by the title, she knows that men only see her body, so she uses it to her advantage. As she explains to Needy, boys are “morsels.” Clueless. Women have all the power when it comes to sex.
That power is what makes Jennifer so frightening to the other characters. “The terror of Jennifer is that she’s sexually confident,” explains Kusama during the film’s audio commentary. They would be too cowardly to admit it, but the reason the misogynists of the world try so hard to control the bodies of women is because they’re afraid of women. They fear being weaker. Less dominant. Less in control. They know the power women have over them and it terrifies their toxic-masculinity-infected brains. Jennifer embodies all those fears. We see that power in action over and over again. She doesn’t need to be possessed by a demon to lure men to their doom. Men will follow a woman into the most definitely-going-to-be-murdered of places for the mere possibility of a blow-y. It would be sad if it wasn’t so pathetic.
What is upsetting is the film’s honest interpretation of the very real horrors women face. Jennifer is murdered by the boy band Low Shoulder in a scene that acts as a metaphor for rape, four men laughing around the poor, tied-up girl as they stab her with the phallic symbol of a blade. Jennifer’s hunting of men merely turns the tables on what is typically a danger for women. The sexual violence she commits delivers back the violence women face every day with demonic fury. To hammer this point home, Cody’s script brilliantly establishes Jennifer’s victims as harmless innocents outside of Low Shoulder. These are boys who have done nothing wrong, who are charming in their own clueless way. It allows us to feel empathy for these teens and encourages a male audience to see themselves in the shoes of victims of sexual violence for once. For some men, watching Jennifer’s Body may have been the first time they had ever imagined themselves in that situation.
Ready for a boiling over hot take straight out of Devil’s Kettle? Jennifer is far from perfect, but if you ask me, it’s the conservative town around her that’s evil: the men who see her for her body and her body alone; the boy-run media that has infested her mind with insecurity; the repressed best friend who fears Jennifer for the queerness she awakens. She’s their Frankenstein’s Monster and they’re coming after her with pitchforks and torches. Jennifer lives in a post-9/11 town full of white Christians who would’ve voted for Trump all three times. They fear her for her sexual confidence. And, like any other woman, she is punished for it. The bi-sexual relationship between Jennifer and Needy isn’t subtle, and we don’t have to dig too deep for an interpretation of Needy killing her possessed friend in bed with yet another phallic symbol. After all, it isn’t until Needy is bitten by Jennifer that she absorbs her power and finally sees the world for the oppressive, woman-hating place it is. “I think they’re trying to wear us out…keep us sluggish so there won’t be an uprising,” she reflects in her opening narration regarding the women’s institution she’s being held at before taking us back to the past.
Difficult to disagree when yet another old white man determined to control women’s bodies has been put back in charge.
I’m mad as hell. Mad for Jennifer. Mad for women. Mad that we’re going backwards in time instead of forward. But the fight isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Because the people who want to strip away reproductive freedoms have awakened something in the rest of us. We were tossed into a lake of sorrow this past election, but we’re emerging like Jennifer accompanied by that power ballad. She’s an inspiration with a message meant for anyone attempting to push women down: keep your goddamn hands off women’s bodies. 🩸
About
Matt is a writer and wannabe werewolf who began his love of horror at the ripe old age of 3 with John Carpenter’s Christine. He has previously been published on Dread Central, Certified Forgotten, Daily Grindhouse and others. He has also contributed essays for releases from labels such as Arrow Video. He lives in Los Angeles, CA, with his wonderful wife and their fur baby, Storm.
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