Kiss and Kill: Celebrated Sexuality in Jennifer’s Body
Yet, in 2009, we weren’t all in on it. Critics called out a kiss the girls share as exploitative, just making Seyfried and Fox make out for an audience of teenage boys. Had I watched this in high school in 2009, I might have missed it too.
“Hell is a teenage girl.”
This is an unlikely first line for a movie marketed to straight, teenage boys in 2009. But such is the beginning of Jennifer’s Body, reimagined in marketing talks as a sort of gender-flipped Twilight. However, this was not the film made by Diablo Cody, of Juno fame, and Karyn Kusama, who’d go on to direct such films as The Invitation.
Jennifer’s Body was always intended as a movie for teenage girls. Sandbox friends Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) and Needy Lesnicky (a mousy Amandra Seyfried) go to a concert at a bar in their Minnesota town, Devil’s Kettle. When the bar catches fire, Jennifer emerges in a daze and goes off with the band in their van. Distraught, Needy calls her boyfriend Chip, who she continually neglects for Jennifer. Jennifer turns up at Needy’s door later, covered in blood and famished. That night, Jennifer develops demonic superpowers; now, she eats boys and receives superhuman strength, speed, and sexuality.
In 2018, the film attained a sort of cult status in light of #MeToo: fans understood it as a revenge fantasy and realized that the movie was always good and we’re “just now starting to get on its level,” as Constance Grady writes for Vox.
Watching the movie for the first time, I couldn’t help but see how queer it is. Needy and Jennifer have been friends forever, an unlikely pairing today as Jennifer’s a bombshell on color guard and Needy’s a mousy “dork” who, instead of cussing, says things like “Oh, cheese and fries!” The film is framed by Needy’s narration from prison, where the film begins, and we jump back to simpler times in the high school gym, when Needy and Jennifer wave lovingly at each other. Needy calls Jennifer a “babe” and a classmate interrupts the voiceover to say Needy is “total lesbigay.” Needy’s staunch insistence that Jennifer is her best friend, that the classmate is way off-base, creates a sort of wink-wink for the whole movie. Though both girls date other boys, we’re all in on how they also like each other.
Yet, in 2009, we weren’t all in on it. Critics called out a kiss the girls share as exploitative, just making Seyfried and Fox make out for an audience of teenage boys. Had I watched this in high school in 2009, I might have missed it too. Without acknowledging my own feelings — coded as a longing for “friendship” with other boys — I would have only seen it through a straight lens. Or rather, I would have seen it through the parts of Needy and Jennifer that haven’t articulated the depths of their feelings.
But everything is there. Though Needy and Chip plod through a wholesome relationship — Chip wants to eat at the Cheesecake Factory after the spring formal — Needy always keeps one foot in Jennifer’s realm, turning down plans with Chip to be with her. They call up Laura and Carmilla from Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire novella Carmilla, two women who develop an intense, physical companionship as the brunette Carmilla comes to visit the blond at night. Jennifer and Needy leverage their relationships with boys to make the other jealous. There’s so much tension between the two of them: how close do you really stay with a childhood friend you have nothing in common with, if not for something else?
The writing is ironic, the script chock-full of sassy one-liners. Though some don’t age well, a lot employ the exaggeration of camp akin to But I’m a Cheerleader. A pallor and teen acne grip Jennifer when she goes long without eating boys and she complains, “God, it’s like I’m one of the normal girls.” Needy buys a box-cutter at Home Depot which Jennifer, in the heat of a fight, calls “so butch,” and at the bar Jennifer reveals she’s “not even a backdoor virgin.”
Camp pervades its aesthetic, too. One day after feeding, Jennifer struts through the halls wearing a pink heart hoodie and oversize heart earrings. The night of the bar fire, she crouches like a starving werewolf in Needy’s kitchen, picking apart a Boston Market rotisserie chicken with her fingers. And with camp finding a special place in queer art, it seems like such a natural choice for a movie exploring the dynamic between these girls. Its exaggeration of teenage desires brings into hyper-focus what the girls really want: each other.
When we read the film as a dramatization of Needy and Jennifer’s attraction and codependent friendship — which isn’t hard to do; both Cody and Kusama intended for the film to mine dynamics between teenage girls — it transforms. Or rather, we understand it as the film it always wanted to be.
So why is it significant? It takes sexual repression and turns it on its head. The movie ripples with sexuality. How could we ever miss the desire these girls feel? (Plus — at the end, Jennifer famously says she goes both ways when Needy is shocked to learn she would feast on her, too). When Needy and Chip have sex for the first time, the camera cuts back and forth between their tentative approach of each other’s bodies and Jennifer devouring an emo boy from Needy’s creative nonfiction class. Needy sees blood appear on the ceiling above her and knows something’s wrong. They’re sandbox sisters bonded by blood. They feel such a pull to each other’s bodies that concludes in blood and destruction.
Watching Jennifer’s Body today feels like a celebration. I can remember the culture in 2009. This movie that feels so alive and textured with bisexuality remained closeted; only now can we love it the way it wanted to be loved. Now, we can realize the monster was always out of the closet.
