Day 26 of The Kasturi/Files here at Speculative Chic! The final countdown to Halloween has begun. Join us for the last few days of film discussion, book recs, and of course, cocktails. As demanded (suggested!) by Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files! Boyfriend-eating spoilers ahead!
Sandra: Today we tackle the controversial at the time (and perhaps still now?) Jennifer’s Body (2009), directed by Karyn Kusama, from a script by Diablo Cody. Kusama shot to fame for the film Girlfight, which was a critical success, but was considered a box-office bomb as it “only” made $1.6 million or so, on a $1-million budget. But the acclaim led her to her next film, the $62-million-budget Aeon Flux, which was ushered through by then-Paramount studio chief, the famous Sherry Lansing. But once Lansing left, the film got recut, was a critical flop, and didn’t make its money back. Kusama vowed not to work on any more movies where she didn’t have the final cut of the film.
Incidentally, Kusama talks about her top ten (really twenty) influential movies here, which are fascinating. It thrills me no end that she recommends Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, a film I’ve always loved, which has Ray Liotta at his absolute scariest and most brilliant.
In 2009 Kusama made Jennifer’s Body on a $16-mil budget, grossing about $31 million at the box office. Despite that success, the movie was largely panned by critics, but went on to become a cult classic. Frankly, I’ll watch anything Kusama does, because whatever it is, it’s bound to be interesting (including working on great shows like Halt and Catch Fire and The Man in the High Castle). But in 2015 she made The Invitation, which is a brilliant and disturbing psychological drama, and if you haven’t seen it, you really should. The final moment in that movie is absolutely chilling. But we’re not talking about that today! We’re talking about Jennifer’s Body.
Gemma: Jennifer’s Body is set in Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, so named for their local landmark, a supposedly bottomless waterfall. We first meet titular Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) while she’s spinning a flag in her high school’s auditorium, out front like usual, her strong, beautiful, athletic body on everybody’s mind — probably including that of her BFF-since-the-sandbox Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), whose bulging eyes rarely roam far away from where the other half of the broken heart necklace they share rests, just above Jennifer’s jailbait cleavage. “Sandbox love is forever,” she tells us, in voice-over; Jennifer accepted her worship long ago and has thrived on it ever since, becoming Devil’s Kettle’s resident demigoddess of snark, sex, and salt. When we look at Needy and Jennifer, we can see the shadow of their adult selves already falling over them: Needy will become the local weird girl made good, a librarian by day and author by night, maybe, and no one will ever understand the relationship she shares with Jennifer, who’ll eat every dude in town (figuratively instead of literally) before finally becoming a salty old broad with amazingly bad taste in clothes, maybe coaching the next generation of mean girl cheerleaders to glory. But as we already know from seeing Needy in juvie during the film’s prologue, none of that is actually going to happen.
Sandra: You know, Megan Fox gets a bad rap, as astonishingly beautiful women so often do. They can’t act, they’re bitches, they’re high-maintenance, whatever. Obviously, I don’t know what she’s like as a person, but she’s a much better actress than anyone gives her credit for. In Jennifer’s Body, Fox is lovely and charming, but with a mean streak right from the start, and once she Goes Wrong, she’s delightfully, gleefully unhinged. (The scene where she sets her tongue on fire while calmly chatting on the phone!) Her almost inhuman looks serve her well as a high-schooler who’s demonically possessed, and her soft voice is a great counterpoint to statements like “I’m going to eat your soul and shit it out” and “I’m killing boys.” All the movie’s meanest and funniest lines are given to Fox, so, really, it was a genius bit of casting. Especially given the controversy around Fox’s supposed feud with Michael Bay, and her continued flaunting of a false persona specifically created for the media, capitalizing on her appearance, while mocking it (and the media itself) for glorifying it. I mean, I kind of love her.
Gemma: So many great lines in this movie! One of my faves is when she dismisses Needy’s hapless Goth friend with this wonderful diagnosis: “He’s into maggot rock. He wears nail polish. My dick’s bigger than his.”
Sandra: Oh, I love that line! Jennifer, or rather, Diablo Cody the screenwriter, has the knack at getting at the (often vicious) heart of teenage matters, while the rest of us are faffing passive-aggressively about. Cody, who famously won an Oscar for her script for critical darling Juno, got some flak for choosing to follow that up with Jennifer’s Body, but frankly, it seems to me like a much more honest, and funnier — if far crueler — film. I’m amazed it only gets 5.1 on IMDB. Some of the trouble relates of course to how women are portrayed, and violence against women, as well as toxic (and dangerous) male behavior. But in fact, the movie is satirizing and playing on all of those things, and the men in the film are ancillary characters — even when murderous they seem sort of ineffectual. The real relationship is between Jennifer and Anita, amusingly nicknamed “Needy,” as portrayed by Amanda Seyfried. Even here the casting choice is funny, as Needy is supposed to be the unattractive friend of smoke-show Jennifer, but of course Seyfried is gorgeous, no matter how many ugly outfits she’s put in, or how dowdy her hair looks. But the film even plays on that trope — the idea that the “ugly” girl takes off her glasses and is suddenly beautiful. Needy knows deep down that her relationship with Jennifer is problematic, and knows she shouldn’t dress up to show off her own looks, because Jennifer needs to be the most attractive one in the room (even before demonic possession). But Needy, despite her nickname, is anything but — she knows who she is, and lets Jennifer take the reins in their friendship mostly because she doesn’t seem to need Jennifer under her thumb, or doesn’t need to one-up her. Of course, once things go wrong and Jennifer isn’t, well, Jennifer any more, Needy is not putting up with that shit AT ALL. There’s a scene where Needy, in her horrible dress is racing to save her boyfriend, fleeing through the darkened park and trees, hair flying, running away from the ball like some demented latter-day Cinderella. But she’s running toward Jennifer as well, to save or kill her, whatever needs to happen. A post-prom smackdown, with shades of Carrie. But despite that, Needy loves (loved) the real Jennifer, quite truly. Even during sex, it’s Jennifer whom Needy’s thinking about, not the boy she’s with.
Gemma: The love between Jennifer and Needy is genuine but complex, slightly toxic but not totally, and definitely rooted in a sexual component that real-Jennifer understands but wouldn’t trade on, whereas not-Jennifer — the demon who eventually wears Jennifer’s creamy flesh like a pornographic camouflage suit — goes straight there and punches that button over and over, as if she’s deliberately trying to destroy every softer feeling Needy ever had for Jennifer. Granted, that doesn’t pay out for her in the long run, but it’s Demon 101 in the here and now: by making Needy’s love for Jennifer into a Penthouse quote-quote “lesbian” photo-spread, the demon wants to sully and pollute it, to drive Needy and Jennifer so far apart that Needy will die in despair, and Jennifer can never be freed by the power of true love from this awful thing she’s become. Thus proving that if demons were capable of long-range planning or impulse control, they’d probably still be angels.
But let’s back up a minute and talk about how all this goes down, because it’s pretty amazing: Jennifer has a crush on the boy-band of the moment, Low Shoulder (led by The O.C. graduate Adam Brody), and demands that Needy escort her to their one Devil’s Kettle performance, at a seedy-ass bar which promptly catches fire and burns down. The last Needy sees of Jennifer is her shell-shocked BFF being pushed into the Low Shoulder tour bus . . . at least until later that night, when she wakes to find Jennifer covered in black vomit in her kitchen, looking like she’s been gang-raped and sacrificed to Satan. Which, it turns out, she basically has been; the guys in Low Shoulder have swapped her, along with their souls, for earthly wealth and power at the top of the charts, completely unaware that Jennifer wasn’t “even a backdoor virgin,” as she cheerfully confessed earlier on. And what do you get when you sacrifice a non-virgin? A possessed corpse with an endless appetite for horny, stupid dudes, apparently. Boo; cross out Jennifer.
Sandra: As an aside, speaking of Low Shoulder, the song “In the Trees” is super catchy (and actually by the real-life band Wildling). It’s funny — the song as it’s performed in the movie can’t help but get your foot tapping. It’s like the filmmakers are forcing you into a weird complicity with what the band members are about to do. (And, incidentally, “Death” by the White Lies pops up in this film as well, as it did in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.)
But more importantly, Kusama and Cody are playing with the idea of beauty and the power that it has over people — the love and hatred it inspires (both sides of that shiny coin being irrational). And the power that beautiful people have over others, if they’re willing to trade on their looks, which, really, is what the whole movie industry is about, isn’t it? And that’s without demonic possession. (Maybe.)
There’s a bond between these two young women, a real love, as you say Gemma, that transcends any complicated sexual component that exists. And when Needy realizes it’s not the real Jennifer any more, she sets out determinedly to get revenge for her, first by killing demonic-Jen, and then by breaking out of prison and slaughtering the band that sacrificed her to Satan. Which seems only fair. And yeah, there’s a bit of revenge in there for herself too — I mean, Jennifer really shouldn’t have eaten her ineffectual-but-not-completely-clueless boyfriend (the wonderfully named Chip Dove). I love when Needy tells Chip, “Jennifer’s evil.” And Chip replies, “I know.” To which Needy says, “No, I mean she’s actually evil, not high school evil.”
Despite the film’s satirical bent and its often irreverent and seemingly lighthearted look at both possession movies and teen girl dramas, Jennifer’s Body doesn’t shy away from looking at the real horror of what’s happening: a group of young men think it’s totally okay to murder a young woman to get what they want. The scene where they have Jennifer tied up and are ready to kill her in the name of Satan is absolutely awful, even if it’s not overly gory. That moment is the dark heart of the film, and Kusama shows it to you unflinchingly.
Gemma: I think, in fact, that it was this part of the narrative and the fallout it sparks between Jennifer and Needy that made audiences take against the film so hard, in wide release. They’d been promised a fresh version of American Pie, at least by the promotional materials, but what they actually got was an early #MeToo supernatural revenge narrative in which Fox and Seyfried sucking face on Needy’s ruffly teen girl bed is less a fantasy than a tragedy — or rather, what they got was the visual equivalent of the Hole song the movie is named after, in which Courtney Love moans about how a faceless abuser “keeps you in a box by the bed/alive, but just barely . . . They found pieces of Jennifer’s body . . .” Because here’s the sad truth: Jennifer, the amusingly mean but truly fairly admirable person Needy once knew, never less than absolutely herself, has been reduced to a murder victim with great lines, a dead body that only comes alive again when sex and cannibalism are involved. It’s like she’s been reduced to the moment of her own death, and is now driven to inflict the same sort of damage on everyone around her.
Which is why it’s so intensely satisfying that when Needy is finally able to take revenge for real-Jennifer, for the potential future Low Shoulder cared so little about; she does it to the sweet strains of another Hole song — “Violet,” with its wonderful, abuse-inverting chorus: “I told you before just how this would end/When I get what I want, I never want it again/Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to . . .”
So yeah, that’s the dirt — Jennifer’s Body’s not what you think. It never was. Seek it out, and confirm for yourself.
Sandra: I often say, your mileage may vary with some of the movies we’ve presented you with. And maybe I should say that some things in this movie will be triggering. But frankly — they should be. You should be upset by what you’re being shown. But that doesn’t also mean that you shouldn’t get skewered with a satirical arrow, no matter how much it hurts. Because that’s where the truth of things lies.
Cocktail: Demon Possession
Sandra: Armed with this cocktail you can fight off evil, I’m pretty sure! This comes from Uncommon Caribbean, and suggests using over-proof rum, but I’m sure it’ll work with whatever rum you’ve got in the house. Personally, I am fond of the Kraken.
Ingredients:
- 1 oz light or over-proof rum (“Jamaican duppy repellent”)
- 1 oz citrus vodka (or regular vodka plus a squeeze of lemon)
- ½ oz blue curacao (double it if you want a bluer hue)
- lemonade
- dash of Peychaud’s Aromatic Bitters
Directions:
Unusually, you don’t mix the bitters in with the drink for this one — you let it float on top, like blood! Mix the rum, vodka, curacao together in a cocktail shaker with ice, add the lemonade, shake, shake shake. Then strain into an ice-filled highball glass. Top with the bitters.
Ward off various unwanted devils with the strength of your breath.
Book Recommendations
Sandra: I’d recommend Craig Wolf’s new book, Queen of All the Nightbirds which just came out from ChiZine: about a teen succubus in high school, but set in the heady days of 1980s Oklahoma, with a suitable soundtrack threading through the pages. I already recommended Mike Carey Felix Castor books, but I am more than happy to press them on you again: especially since one of the main characters is a (semi-) reformed succubus. The Devil You Know is the first one.
Gemma: There’s been a surprising amount of YA literature released recently that reads like its authors grew up on a diet of Jennifer’s Body, Buffy, and maybe Supernatural, with The Ring for an occasional J-horror girl phantom side-dish. My two recs along these lines, therefore, would be Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake and The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco, both of which kick off duologies that star self-avenging ghosts of murdered girls and the living people who love/enable them. But both of those are also pretty het, so I’ll throw in a nod on top to Carlie St. George’s amazing short story “Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future,” originally published in Nightmare Magazine, which follows the trail of a slasher massacre sole survivor who becomes a semi-professional killer of masked maniacs, eventually assembling a found family of similarly inclined females around her. All are bleak, blackly funny, emotionally complicated and surprisingly thrilling, much like Jennifer’s Body.
Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).
I’ve only seen this movie in fits and starts, and it sounds like I need to give this a fairer shake. My husband has seen it and told me that it’s an underrated movie, so we’ll have to look this one up!