What “Jennifer’s Body” Foretold

The 2009 horror film “Jennifer’s Body,” directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, is a high-school-centered tale of two girls who are unlikely best friends—one becomes demonically possessed (turning vampiric and cannibalistic, devouring only boys), while the other warily confronts the change. At the time of the movie’s release, it struck me as a sardonic satire, on young men’s swaggering vanity and high-school trivialities, that both boldfaced its politics and squandered its metaphysics. Rewatching it now (as of Wednesday, it’s available free on Tubi and free to Amazon Prime subscribers), I find the film’s derisive tone to be far less significant than the agony that it depicts—and I find its politics to emerge less from the overarching drama and the characters’ intentions than from the overwhelming symbolic power of its intricate premise. It’s a movie whose details risk getting lost in the hectic, gore-filled fury of its action—but the understatement and submergence of its details are themselves a part of the story.

The title character, Jennifer Check (played by Megan Fox), is the head cheerleader at her high school in the rural town of Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota. (The town is fictitious, but the waterfall it’s named for is real.) She’s outgoing, brash, stylish, cynical, and confident; she’s well aware that she’s considered beautiful and desirable, and she makes use of her allure to have adventurous fun. Her best friend—seemingly her only friend, the nerdy, style-challenged Anita Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), nicknamed Needy—is a classic wingwoman. (The unlikely friendship has its roots in early childhood, or, as Jennifer says, in the sandbox.) When Jennifer wants to go to a local roadhouse/bar to hear an out-of-town band that’s playing there—because she has designs on its lead singer—she recruits Needy to join her there, and Needy makes sure to dress enticingly enough but not so much as to compete with Jennifer.

A scene of the girls’ pre-concert primping, like the rest of the film, is narrated by Needy. The whole movie is told from her perspective and shown, as an extended flashback, from a mental institution, where Needy is being held involuntarily. There, she’s known by guards and other inmates for her truculence, even her violence. Thrown into solitary confinement after kicking a nutritionist (Candus Churchill) in the face, Needy begins to tell the story of her and Jennifer, which took place just two months before. At the bar, called Melody Lane, Jennifer schemes to socialize in a sophisticated way—at least, a high-school student’s idea of what’s sophisticated—with the lead singer, Nikolai (Adam Brody), by getting him the house specialty drink, a “9/11 tribute shooter” (even though she herself is underage and knows that, to get those drinks, she’ll have to flash the bartender). But Nikolai—himself a faux sophisticate, another small-town kid (one who pretends to be from Brooklyn)—talks of Jennifer to his bandmates with misognynistic condescension, considering her just another groupie there to be used for what he assumes is her virginity.

The details of the Melody Lane outing are so significant and so resonant that they lend the film most of its power. While the band is playing—and while the excited Jennifer is squeezing Needy’s hand so tightly that she leaves marks—a fire starts in the club’s rafters and spreads quickly, trapping many patrons. Jennifer freezes in fear but Needy pulls her to the bathroom, where they escape out a small, high window. They and the band make it safely to the parking lot, as other spectators run out, in the background, aflame and dying. Jennifer seems dissociated; Nikolai, who seems all too composed, invites the two girls to the band’s van and forces Jennifer to take a drink. Needy resists and tries to dissuade Jennifer, who appears to go with Nikolai willingly, but is clearly in no state to consent. As the van drives off, Needy was certain, she says, that something awful would happen.

Something awful does happen—Nikolai and his bandmates grievously and violently abuse Jennifer (though the incident is only seen later in the film, as a flashback within a flashback, when she ultimately tells Needy the story). Later the same night, after the fire, Needy is home alone (while her mother works a late shift), and Jennifer turns up in her kitchen, horrifically wounded, dripping blood. Saying nothing, Jennifer tears at a roast chicken in Needy’s refrigerator, roars, chokes, and vomits seemingly gallons of black blood that’s filled with needle-like ballast, before giving Needy something like a vampire kiss on the neck and leaving.

Yet the next day, in school, Jennifer turns up unharmed, seemingly quite herself, albeit intensely sardonic, mean to Needy and to all, as their teacher (J. K. Simmons) speaks of the eight students who died in the fire the night before. After class, Needy confides in her boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons), about the horrific sight of the bloodied Jennifer in the kitchen just hours earlier—and Chip, without openly disbelieving her, advises her to see the school psychologist. That very day, after school, Jennifer flirts with Jonas (Josh Emerson), a varsity football player, and seductively lures him into the woods, where, as she begins to undress him and herself, she tears him up with her fanged mouth. The murder goes unexplained; she continues her stealthy reign of terror, killing other male classmates. Needy, meanwhile, notices that the entire school seems mournful and benumbed by the mounting tragedies—except for Jennifer. As the series of killings advances, Needy experiences telepathic visions that make clear to her, and to her alone, that Jennifer is the killer.

If there’s a telepathic connection between the two girls, it is in significant part based on the anguish of enforced silence, the recognition that the horrific experience that the one has endured and the other has witnessed will go widely unacknowledged and unredressed. Where real-world justice is doomed to fail, the movie’s plot offers a supernatural compensation. What all of Jennifer’s victims have in common is that they allow themselves to be attracted and seduced by Jennifer without having any interest in or relationship with her. Jennifer’s literal survival depends (for supernatural reasons) on her ability to gratify her vampiric, cannibalistic hungers, and thus to pursue her revenge plot unimpeded. Her silent duplicity toward Needy—in effect, her gaslighting of Needy—is a matter of life and death. The movie dramatizes metaphysical revenge on a world—or half a world—out of whack, on men who want only Jennifer’s body.

The power of the idea, though—of the silencing of both Jennifer and Needy in the face of a ruthless young patriarchy—is strangely subordinated in the movie. Its ambiguous aesthetic either deflects it with irony or vitiates it with rollicking spectacle, starting with the zingy, clattery patter with which Cody’s script decorates teen-age life. In the briefly recalled good times, Needy and Jennifer address each other as “Vagisil” and “Monistat,” respectively. Jennifer calls the bar fire a “white-trash pig roast” and Needy reflects on the country’s “tragedy boner” for the deadly fire. The script contains a plethora of pop-culture references with comedic spin, from Phil Collins (Needy has never heard of him) to Maroon 5 (upheld by Nikolai as heroes) to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (Jennifer thinks it’s a boxing movie). The movie’s fabricated slang seems to ricochet off the lockers in the high school’s hallways, but to purely ornamental effect—except to the extent that its gaudy clamor smothers the silencing of its two female protagonists. Cody’s megawatt script seems to commandeer Kusama’s direction, overriding the fierce and focussed ideas.

The film satirizes the bubble-like sanctimoniousness of small-town life with a subplot in which the band capitalizes on the tragic fire by writing a song about it, which becomes a sort of national dirge and makes them local heroes to Needy and Jennifer’s classmates. Yet the twist is far more than a mere mocking of maudlin expressions of public sentiment: when Needy calls the group out for its smarmy profiteering, another girl, an Asian classmate named Chastity (Valerie Tian), defends the band for its noble gesture—a strange symbolic representation of females publicly siding with predatory men. Neither the characters nor the local context emerge with sufficient substance to infuse the film’s grand design with meaningful psychology or politics. Also, the movie’s casting and characterizations are apportioned narrowmindedly and obliviously: the nonwhite characters—such as Chastity, the unnamed nutritionist whom Needy assaults, a prison orderly named Raymundo (Dan Joffre) to whom Needy condescends, and an exchange student called only “Ahmet from India” (Aman Johal)—are treated as mere dramatic props.

The vision in “Jennifer’s Body” of the danger, insult, dismissal, and abuse awaiting young women—and the desperate, self-destructive efforts to confront it—anticipates the immense power of such films as last year’s “Promising Young Woman.” It also anticipates that film’s aesthetic blind spots. Both films are ultimately more gratifying as illustrations of ideas than as experiences. In “Jennifer’s Body,” the pessimistic addendum of a metaphysical element—suggesting no way out except through supernatural intervention, whether divine or satanic—is conceptually grand but directorially slight. The film’s furious and empathetic foundation, tethered to its supernatural superstructure, made it a potential successor to “Twin Peaks.” Its impulses and implications, if not its relatively incomplete and flip world-building, are worthy of the comparison.