Hell Is a Teenage Girl: Jennifer’s Body and the Succubus as Social Commentary
Gender & Power in Pop Culture, Spring 2022
After the 2007 film Juno was lauded for its screenplay, writer Diablo Cody decided that her next project would be the horror film she’d always dreamed of writing: a female-focused, darkly funny revenge fantasy about a girl eating boys. The result? A movie almost universally panned by audiences and critics alike that reached cult classic status in the late 2010s. “Chick flicks” struggling to gain respect in Hollywood is nothing new, but the rarity of Jennifer’s Body lies in the number of external factors that prevented it from reaching its target audience until nearly a decade after its release. Though Jennifer’s Body is a horror movie with an outlandish premise, it presents a truthful and nuanced portrait of female friendships—exploring sexuality, hegemonic femininity as it relates to power, and how patriarchal systems pit young women against each other.
Despite having been best friends since childhood, Needy and Jennifer are in constant competition with each other, particularly for the male attention women are taught to crave. Needy’s first descriptions of her friendship with Jennifer establish how they fit into different archetypes—she claims that “People found it hard to believe that a babe like Jennifer would associate with a dork like me” (Cody). Needy is the plain Jane to Jennifer’s unattainable beauty, and this even manifests in the way they dress and behave. They wear different color palettes and silhouettes; Jennifer always looks perfectly styled and wears clothes that compliment her body, while Needy’s go-to look is more laid-back and modest. While getting ready for the Low Shoulder concert, Needy narrates: “‘Wear something cute’ meant something very specific in Jennifer-speak. It meant I couldn't look like a total zero, but I couldn't upstage her either. I could expose my stomach, but never my cleavage. Tits were her trademark” (Cody). Needy is able to rationalize this manipulation by reminding those around her that they’ve been best friends for years. It’s not until much later, when childhood memories appear in flashbacks, that she realizes how toxic the friendship has always been. Even while knowing that her beauty and social status give her the upper hand, Jennifer perceives Needy as a threat, so she continues patterns of controlling behavior—expecting unwavering devotion, verbal affirmations, and priority over Needy’s other interpersonal relationships despite her cruel behavior. The most explicit manifestation of this competition, however, comes after Jennifer’s possession. Jennifer finds Colin and Chip enticing only because Needy has expressed interest in them. After lying to Chip about Needy’s infidelity to seduce him, she demands that he tell her she’s better than Needy—Jennifer uses her victims for both physical power and male validation. However, neither of them acknowledges the role of the ever-present male gaze in their conflicts. Their friendship relies on the self-policing performance of femininity described by Sandra Lee Bartky: “Since it is women themselves who practice this discipline on and against their own bodies, men get off scot-free” (149). In this case, they enact this discipline not only upon themselves, but upon each other. The climax of their rivalry, the fight that ends in Needy killing Jennifer and destroying the demon possessing her, later works out in her favor. She absorbs enough of Jennifer’s powers to escape from jail and enact the ultimate revenge by murdering the members of Low Shoulder. Whether this is motivated by the pain of losing her best friend, her boyfriend, or any semblance of normalcy in her life is left open to the viewer’s interpretation.
Adding another layer to the complexity of Jennifer and Needy’s friendship is the homoerotic undercurrent that doesn’t come to fruition until more than halfway through the film. The pep rally scene shows Jennifer spinning flags in slow motion before smiling and waving at Needy. Chastity, a classmate of Needy’s, leans forward to tell her that she’s “totally lesbi-gay,” to which she responds with a scoff, “What? She’s my best friend” (Cody). Later, Jennifer calls out Chip’s thinly masked jealousy over the time the two girls spend together; the sexual tension between them is obvious to everyone except Needy herself. Karyn Kusama repeats the slow-motion motif over the course of the movie to highlight moments that see Jennifer through Needy’s gaze and, by proxy, that of queer female audiences. Needy is visibly upset when Jennifer takes her hand at the concert, only to drop it seconds later. Similar hurt plagues her when Jennifer leaves Melody Lane in Low Shoulder’s van, and the camera pans past Nikolai in the foreground to focus on Jennifer as she’s taken away. After Jonas’s body is found, there’s a 45-second scene that sees Jennifer swimming naked in a vast lake, climbing out, and putting her clothes back on, presumably to wash herself of her victim’s blood. Needy narrates the hallway scene (yes, the one that spawned countless knock-offs of the pink and red Gap Kids hoodie) in which Jennifer struts through the school, seemingly unfazed by her town’s tragedy. Jennifer and Needy’s kiss, which is both the culmination of Needy’s desire and a turning point in the girls’ relationship, is shot in real time, but feels like a suspension of time because of its close-up, intimate shots. These scenes all have the slow-motion effect in common, and their erotic view of Jennifer’s character could easily be interpreted as inviting the male gaze. However, the larger context of Jennifer and Needy’s attraction to each other indicates that this film was, in fact, made with the female gaze in mind. It becomes clear that their dynamic is not for the fetishization of men, but rather an examination of the gray area between friendship and romance that so many young women experience with their friends, as well as a critique of compulsory heterosexuality that often bars the same women from exploring their sexual identity. Slowed-down shots make a couple of appearances after this, but having learned of Jennifer’s demonic transformation, Needy infatuation with her has been replaced by fear. A couple of days after the kiss, Needy hallucinates that Jennifer’s smile is covered in blood. In their final fight, the latter half plays in slow-motion—it is only when Needy stabs Jennifer in the heart that the action returns to regular speed, signifying Needy’s sudden realization of the gravity of having killed her best friend. The repeated incorporation of these effects subtly conveys the evolution and deterioration of their relationship.
Jennifer is an excellent example of how hegemonic femininity gives women power, and Bartky’s Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power presents a fascinating lens through which we can examine Jennifer’s demonic possession as an allegory for the “proper” performance of femininity and its consequences. She conforms to many of the expectations placed upon her as a woman: revealing and ultra-feminine outfits, smooth skin, shiny hair, a slim yet shapely body, piercing eyes, and just enough makeup to enhance her features without looking “over the top.” She encapsulates the male fantasy of looking perfect without appearing as though she put too much effort into it. Though she regularly passes off racist and ableist comments as casual jokes, she never gets called out for it, which is likely due to the fact that it’s 2009 and nobody wants to criticize a beautiful woman to her face. Jennifer’s sexual experience becomes her downfall—Needy discovers that her demonic possession was caused by Low Shoulder offering Jennifer in a sacrifice that called for a virgin. Interestingly, the band still receives their desired fame, and she is the one who must deal with the consequences of their misunderstanding. This mirrors how, in real life, sexually promiscuous women (whose experience is often exaggerated by others) will be shamed for the same actions that bring their male partners praise. Post-transformation, Jennifer’s strength and appearance are dependent on how often she feeds: when she’s full, she looks her absolute best and displays remarkable healing powers that make her nearly indestructible. In the aforementioned slow-mo hallway scene, she quite literally exists in brighter colors than everyone around her, and her movements are nearly identical to the ideal feminine walk as described by Bartky: “A woman must stand with stomach pulled in, shoulders thrown slightly back, and chest out, this to display her bosom to maximum advantage. While she must walk in the confined fashion appropriate to women, her movements must, at the same time, be combined with a subtle but provocative hip-roll” (136). While on the phone with Needy, she burns her tongue with a lighter and watches it heal before announcing, “I am a god” (Cody). When she’s hungry, she’s pale, with flat, matted hair, breakouts, dull skin, and puffy dark circles around her eyes. It’s worth noting that all of these things are popularly known as signs that a woman is “letting herself go”—she hasn’t been taking care of her skin, styling her hair, or getting the beauty sleep she needs to maintain the ideal image of femininity. Additionally, Jennifer’s beauty is a large part of what allows her to seduce her male victims. Therefore, eating boys is integral to Jennifer’s life force (or rather, that of the demon), and a failure to maintain her diet threatens both her supernatural powers and her ability to obey beauty standards. Her cannibalism and adherence to hegemonic femininity might outwardly appear as a personal choice, when both are anything but: “Femininity as spectacle is something in which virtually every woman is required to participate...The precise nature of the criteria by which women are judged, not only the inescapability of judgment itself, reflects gross imbalances in the social power of the sexes” (Bartky 140). Jennifer’s state of being is fictional, but also an all too real representation of how, “even when the mastery of the disciplines of femininity produce a triumphant result, we are still only women” (Bartky 151). She faces an inevitable fate; she must either continue to feed the demon or escape it through death.
Jennifer’s Body was marketed towards young adult men by its distributors, despite the protests of both Cody and Kusama. In a 2019 interview, Cody told Fox, “I had sent [a marketing person] this articulate defense of the movie and here is how it should be marketed and said, ‘What specifically are you thinking?’ And he wrote back: ‘Megan Fox hot.’” This is an unfortunate microcosm of the misogyny Fox has faced for the majority of her career: being put into a box as a sex symbol while her intelligence and talent are ignored. The film’s redemption arc in the wake of feminism’s embrace of female sexuality has been especially satisfying to watch. For all the obstacles along the way, Jennifer’s Body has at last gained attention for its creators’ original intentions, and its newfound appeal paints a bright future for queer feminist cinema.
Works Cited
Bartky, Sandra Lee. "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power" from Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (eds.), Writing on the body: Female embodiment and feminist theory pp.129-154, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997
Boone, John. “Megan Fox and Diablo Cody Interview Each Other for 'Jennifer's Body' 10 Year Anniversary.” Entertainment Tonight, Entertainment Tonight, 22 Sept. 2019, https://www.etonline.com/megan-fox-and-diablo-cody-interview-each-other-for-jennifers-body-10-year-anniversary-exclusive.
Cody, Diablo. Jennifer's Body. 20th Century Fox, 2009.
