Jennifer's Body
Jennifer's Body - dir. Karyn Kusama, 2009
Jennifer's Body is an early-2000s cult classic horror film that defies and subverts genre convention at every narrative turn. The film opens with the line: "Hell is a teenage girl," and indeed, the film centers on two teenage girls, Jennifer and Needy, as they navigate high school, sex, femininity, and the unease of the self. Jennifer is depicted as the stereotypical "queen bee" endemic to commercial teen films; she is popular, snarky, self-absorbed, and embodies a conventional Americanized beauty standard in her whiteness, thinness, and hyper-sexualized attractiveness. Needy, her best friend, is portrayed as the archetypal "sidekick" figure, nerdier, smarter, less popular, kinder, and less adherent to the norms of white femininity. Their toxic friendship ricochets and ultimately comes unraveled as the film progresses—namely, due to the turning point early in the film. Jennifer and Needy attend a local concert for a generic, white, male indie-rock band at which point Jennifer flirts with the lead singer, and afterwards, is invited to join the band for the afterparty. While Needy pleads with her not to go, Jennifer abandons Needy and joins the boys in a seedy van. The boys drug and subdue her, ultimately committing a horrific act of violence that should result in Jennifer's death but does not. After this attack, a newly demonic, cannibalistic Jennifer returns to her life, and begins to seduce, murder, and feed on male classmates. Needy is quickly made aware of this violence and attempts to stop it; ultimately, she kills Jennifer.
Birthplace of Monstrosity
The origins of Jennifer's monstrosity arise from a violent, sacrificial ritual executed by a group of young white men; she is drugged, tied down to a rock, and stabbed repeatedly in the chest whilst the boys perform chants and incantations as she screams. These men intend to sacrifice a young virginal woman to Satan in exchange for success in their musical career. The attack is at once ridiculous, hyperbolized, and horrific. The vapidity of these men in no way lessen their power over Jennifer's trapped body; their sacrificial language so absurd and improvised that Kusama obviously makes it so laughable as to force a reckoning with the ways in which the women's bodies are made fodder for senseless, stupid monstrosity that can be committed even by seemingly unthreatening individuals. As Moore writes in her text Body Horror, "When horror is made banal, a vocabulary for comedy develops" (Moore XII). The comedy underlying the film, its exaggerated, bloody aesthetics, and its teenaged, vulgar, self-serious dialogue, enmeshes what should stand as an unspeakable act of misogynistic violence in an undeniable humor, thus forcing monstrosity to exist outside of its usual space in the serious and unbearable. Rather, Kusama maximizes viewer discomfort and demands a confrontation with the commonplace proliferation of the imagery of woman-gore as entertainment. Thus the viewing, in its simultaneous discomfort and, as Laura Mulvey's critical "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" would argue, the "pleasure in the witnessing," function to displace character-as-monster and asserts the viewer-as-monster. While this scene of sacrifical ritual seems to be Jennifer's birthplace of monstrosity, it is, also, ours as well, if not more so. Such a model of spectatorship unhinges Jennifer as monstrous at all, in fact; the viewer indulges these men in their laughing, giddy cruelty and works as accomplices in their monstrosity, turning the woman's body into the site of abjection through which we can perceive our own vile desires and urge to poke fun at them.
However, the men perform their sacrifice incorrectly, as they believe Jennifer's virginity to be intact whilst it is, in fact, not. The origin of Jennifer's monstrosity, thus, lives in this attempt at ritual. Barbara Creed describes ritual as "a means by which societies both renew their initial contact with the abject element and then exclude that element" (Creed 8). According to the assailants' beliefs, the societal construct of virginity, rooted in heteropatriarchal structures of sexuality and ownership, supposedly protects Jennifer's body from its place among the abject. These men are wrong in their assumption and Jennifer's supposed "impurity" or non-virginity causes the sacrifice to backfire, and transform Jennifer into a demonic succubus. The attack fails to truly renew or remake the "initital contact" with the abject element and instead allows the abject to grow, malform, and interact with itself, outside of the assailants' realm of pleasurable witnessing. Such a subversion offers the abject, in its deep, shared bloodstream with cultural conceptions of femininity, an opportunity to claim and witness itself. This ritual actually displays Jennifer's contact with true monstrosity, not in herself or her own sexuality but with the brutalities and power-assertions of masculinity, consequently the terrorizing, even full-throated, ravenous urge to annhiliate, femininity. She comes to the understanding of herself that men wield upon her: girl as playground for men's divings into abjection, girl as that which man is void of, is not. And yet rather than accept that form of girlhood, she mangles it, ravages it. The film's opening claim that "Hell is a teenage girl" asserts abjection, and perhaps femininity, as hell, the most famous and ultimate land of monsters. Yet hell is not usually depicted as a birthplace, or a homeland, but rather, as a destination. Hell itself, like girlhood, in Kusama's view, is inhabited and embodied because of the exterior and interior monsters that push us into its recesses. Hell, because the monstrous does not appear so much ontological here, so much essential, as created, alchemized by the everyday traumas of girlhood, by the external monsters which girls then internalize. Yet at the same time, hell is not synonymous with evil here but perhaps a place of the most unencumbered, raw and truthful self, as a site of liberation.
While this specific scene of ritual may be the most obvious birthplace of monstrosity, Needy's quieter engagement with the monstrous-feminine is just as supple. Needy is the clear heroine of the film, a plucky, shy, booksmart, more conventionally moral protagonist, and yet Jennifer is immeasurably more interesting to watch. The monstrous-feminine, defined in Jennifer's Body as unhinged, self-serving, and uncontrollable female desire—and devouring of men, masculinity—fascinates, repels, and engages viewers in its complete defilement of the rules of gender roles, and its desired behaviors. Needy presents as a character resentful towards Jennifer's weaponization of femininity, and unaware of her own relationship with gender. Needy's specific birthplace of monstrosity seems to live somewhere in her close friendship with Jennifer, even after she becomes aware of Jennifer's demonic status. The tempestuous, uneven relationship between these girls obsesses and irritates Needy, yet she does not let herself abandon Jennifer. She is mesmerized by the monstrous-feminine, even prior to Jennifer's transformation, and accesses its freedoms through her friend rather than through herself; she visits the monstrous through a toxic friendship.
Visible and Invisible Monsters
Jennifer is turned into a succubus. She looks like a teenage girl, acts like a teenage girl, but is something else altogether, unruly and unmanageable. The function of the succubus, a literal, well-known, inhuman monster, works as a container, an allegory for the seeming underlying monstrosity of uninhibited female hunger. In one scene of the film, Needy confronts Jennifer about her bloody rampage, and says, "You're killing people." To which Jennifer replies, "No, I'm killing boys [emphasis mine]." A subtle reframing of the very notion of humanness emerges in this fragment of dialogue: Kusama flips the cultural, well-enshrined construction of womanhood as inhuman, disposable, and one-dimensional, and insists quietly that in this world of girl-monsters, manhood is inhuman, disposable, and one-dimensional, male lives a currency with which one can be flippant. The enshrined and ensnared female body returns its abject status to the men it attacks and devours. Jennifer's cariacatured monstrosity, complete with a fanged, hideous, overdone demonic face and roar,
Needy adheres to many notions of internalized misogyny, complete with abundant shame surrounding sexuality and female desire. Her own shame throbs and ebbs in the form of her romantic and sexual desire for Jennifer. Near the middle of the film, Jennifer creeps in through Needy's window, pesters her, and asks to sleep over, reminding Needy that "they always share her bed." A slow overtone of homoeroticism finally comes to momentary fruition: she and Needy share several intense, sensual kisses, before Needy panics and pulls away, exclaiming, "What the fuck is happening?" The fact of Needy's attraction to the abject, to Jennifer, even in her knowledge of Jennifer's monstrosity, unsettles her most throughout the film. This current of desire hearkens back to Creed's analysis of the lesbian vampire archetype. Creed writes that, while the horror film "consistently places the monster in conflict with the family, the couple and the institutions of patriarchal capitalism," (Creed 61), rarely does it "challenge the gender basis of the heterosexual couple." The queer subtext often threaded throughout female vampire films comes to full, visual fruition in Jennifer's Body for this singular, minutes-long scene, thus causing an undeniable "category crisis" (Cohen). Desiring sameness, as constituted through queerness in this instance, is perceived as the most abject, particularly in that most culturally undesirable thing, femininity. Without the male gaze, homoeroticism should be empty, and femininity should not be able to fulfill itself, as it is always construed as an absence, a wound, a hole. Yet Jennifer's Body presents this moment of queer, feminine encounter as more fulfilling than any of the heterosexual sex scenes in the film. Thus this fulfillment satirizes the associations of femininity and narcissism, fully exaggerating such voracious femininity as a literal succubus. In her book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, Sady Doyle describes this specific formation of gendered monstrosity: "The fear of female sexual liberation has always been partly a fear that women will develop desires that don’t include men" (Doyle 73). The encounter represents a willing collapse of boundaries, represents the nudging of a border before returning to stand behind it.
The scene above also represents a satirized exaggeration of the monstrosity of the culturally-understood "female" body. A tear-stained, desperate Needy confronts Jennifer, attempting to persuade her out of eating her boyfriend. Needy accuses Jennifer of insecurity, and pointedly targets anxieties associated with the feminine, policed body, reminding her of a time period during which Jennifer "didn't need laxatives to stay skinny." Jennifer, furious, responds, "I am going to eat your soul and shit it out." The vileness of these expulsions extend the abject into cannibalism and insist a connection between the enforced starvation of femininity, and the always-looming desire to consume the vile and abject. Needy asks, "I thought you only murdered boys?" To which Jennifer acknowledges her literal hunger for men and women, as a euphemismistic expression of queer desire, monster-ified so ridiculously and campily because of Kusama's awareness of the cultural monsterification of queerness in any sense: "I go both ways." Finally, Needy's boyfriend rises to stab Jennifer clean through the gut with a pool leaf skimmer. Slowly, achingly, she pulls the skimmer from its gory, bleeding wound, and asks Needy if she has a tampon, and says, "You seem like you might be pluggin'." The language of menstruation, what is often portrayed as a kind of self-cannibalization intrinsic to an imagined volatility and monstrousness within women, affects the whole scene, reminding the viewer of the monster as self-aware, as bodily and understanding that what spectators may consider more monstrous than the literal succubus is the open discussion of such bodily functions, of the culturally abject.
