JENNIFER’S BODY: ANOTHER UNDERRATED CINEMETALLIC MASTERPIECE?

Jennifer’s Body was screwed before a single image flickered in public. The immediate reasons were twofold.

First, Karyn Kusama directed it. That would be that same Kusama whose gritty indie-film Girlfight was celebrated, but whose pricey, high fashion futurist Æon Flux was shredded by the studio and then released without reviewer pre-screenings. The press surveyed the carnage, located the person least responsible— ironically, Kusama — and promptly laid blame on her.

Around the same time, Diablo Cody was still flush with the out of the box success of her first screenplay, Juno. Was it time to knock the attractive ex-stripper down a few pegs no matter what she wrote? Yes it was.

So — deadset on consigning Kusama to the dustbin of one-hit-wonders and eager to loathe anything Cody crafted, the critics promptly lowered themselves to the occasion by trashing the hard-to-pigeonhole Jennifer’s Body on its release in 2009 for reasons that were united mainly by their inchoate ugliness. But later for what may have explained Body’s kneejerk drubbing.

For I am here to praise Cody/Kusama’s great film, which may have MetalSucks readers going, “What the fuck is Jennifer’s freakin’ Body release doing in the New York Times of Metal anyway?”

Actually, this is the incorrect question. The correct question is, “With its with its story of two totally hot girls falling into a literal maelstrom of madness and mass cannibalistic murder, with its constant indie band hate, and Satanic sacrifice, and Megan Fox-near-nudity, with its scenes of insane asylum battles and escapes, of Sapphic transgression and Megan Fox near-nudity and her gleefully upchucking boys she just ate, which other film of the Oughties is essentially more metal than Jennifer’s Body?”

Seriously, if Fox Atomic, the film’s production company, wanted to seem really hep, they’d rent the film out to bands like Wooden Stake or Subrosa so they could mash-up Jennifer’s constant stream of fantastic images to make the videos of their dreams.

But I digress. The thing that first astonished me when first I saw Jennifer’s Body was its authors’ knowledge and respect of genre and how to use it.

Yes, Cody’s over-amped pop reflexivity can be a bit much. But what’s a stray line of over-snark when, like her patron saint Joss Whedon, a love of language yields so many delightfully out-there lines while a love of form crafts a scenario that seamlessly blends La Belle et la Bête, the Elizabeth Báthory legend, and John Hughes?

Also lost in the haze of pre-misconceptions was an appreciation for how Kusama went way beyond mere superior script visualization. Her lens brings a sensual understanding of in-screen gravity, of how the texture and colors of an image, aside from mood and emphasis, limns character.

The result is cinema that wows with shifting Blow Out-style spatial dynamics. That deciphers the DNA of Cocteau’s fantasies for a post-Buffy context. And trashes the very idea of bands like The Strokes or The Killers.

But most of all? Kusama is willing to just go there. To so empathize with a character’s anxiety she gambles the fate her film — until this point, strictly realistic — with a fall into some depopulated, Edward Gorey-esque suburban gothic, with the only color a sickening yellow coming from Jennifer’s killing floor. The sequence is elegantly horrific, rendering recent Tim Burton needlessly florid.

Anyway, some story. Jennifer’s Body is about Jennifer (Megan Fox), a nowheresville’s high school’s hottest chick.

And it’s about Jennifer’s BFF-since-childhood, the ridiculously over-significantly-named-Needy (Amana Seyfried), through whose POV we see the film.

After watching a crap indie band called Low Shoulder, Jen shows up at Needy’s one night looking insane and spewing ichorous black goo from the mouth. Hey — it happens.

The next day a boy shows up with his guts all eaten — and at class, Jennifer looks fabulous.

A few more boy-deaths, and we — not Needy — learn the skinny:

Somehow, Jennifer has found herself with the ability to look ever more hot, invincible, and possibly immortal as long as she eats boys, though men will do in a pinch. If she doesn’t eat males, she’ll feel and look terrible.

Like Buffy fans who knew the Monster of the Week mattered most for metaphor value, Cody/Kusama have only the most passing interests what variety of monster Jennifer has become (a reborn cannibalistic Satanic whatsit created when Low Shoulder sacrificed her to The Devil for mad fame.)

What matters is what Needy does once she realizes her friend is a Bitch Monster. Does she call the cops, an exorcist, a parent, another friend, anyone?

Please. She eventually tells her new boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons), some of what’s going on after doing research in a library apparently on loan from Giles in Buffy, but Cody/Kusama know that we know that genre convention requires a disbelief/consideration/belief process before Chip can be helpful of any use.

So Needy goes it alone.

Which is the point. The sad irony is that the only thing everyone in Jennifer’s Body share is their disconnection from everyone else. It’s “social media” culture taken to its logical endgame, with people willfully stranding themselves in rooms with a screen and interface but with actual human contact this abstracted thing. After a short while, people can’t even get upset when kids die. Like it says: horror movie.

All of this is why Needy is so existentially needy, why it makes sense that she clings to her only real world friend, despite the whole monster thing.

As that monster, Fox is brilliant in limning her contempt for that body, that thing attached to her that makes everyone go crazy but gives her nothing and caused her to become a monster.

It’s in the way she struts it around as a weapon, completely disconnected from any sense of her own erotic agency.

And it’s in the way she drags her body into Needy’s house earlier, lips peeled back into a deranged grin that works as a one-smile demolition of all the idiot smiles she’s had to smile as the body in Michael Bay’s Transformer boy toy garbage.

Jennifer eventually eventfully needs Chip because 1) she’s jealous of sharing her girl with him, and more importantly 2) because he’s the good, smart boy a girl with a body like hers will always scare off.

Who’s needy now?

Again, we get Kusama willing to bet the entire film on a single image, this time a Jen/Needy kiss filmed in such extreme close-up it’s a total toss-up who’s kissing who. You could read this as the scary part of intimacy: whatever the case, it’s a beautiful, desperate, poetic last act that’s exactly what fanboys were not hoping for when word of a Fox/ Seyfried lip-lock leaked, and so much for that fan base.

Which leads me to the subject of how the film was received, a film beautifully-shot by M. David Mullen in a rich palette of Pacific Northwest greens, edited with pace and wit by frequent John Sayles cohort Plummy Tucker, and acted with deft empathy by its leads (all except for Fox, who critics seem to despise just on principle, though I’m not sure which one.)

In a word, the film was hated. The hatred male critics spared on this beautifully crafted film — it’s really something.

I believe that something has to do with the fact that, after nearly a century of presumed male superiority regarding everything in and about a movie — its protagonists, writers and directors, the way it views female bodies and other desirous objects — a movie like Jennifer’s Body, which, with tremendous glee, explodes all those aforementioned things, can’t help but ruffle a few feathers.

I mean, how could they not be?

This is a film called Jennifer’s Body that relentlessly finds wry humor in the pitiful urgency with which guys try to ogle Jennifer/Fox’s “good parts” while trying to claim they’re totally not doing any such thing.

And although Cody offers up a few dick jokes male audiences interestingly crave, she also supplies menstruation jokes that make them so uncomfortable. And when you mix a hungry Evil Jennifer with two guys who think with their dicks, the old line between humor and horror dissolves before you can figure out how to properly react to either.

Cody/Kusama just never let up. Most auteurs, hipsters or other conservatives would choose an extreme metal band to Satan-ize Jennifer. Cody chooses an indie band because what is a band like The Strokes other than a real hipster writers’ Hugh Herfner-ized dream vision of themselves?

Extreme metal, meanwhile, delights in the absurdity of its hyper-maleness, is proud of how cleverly ridiculous it can get. I can easily imagine Needy listening to a mix-CD of Slipknot, DevilDriver, and Otep after her final transcendence in blood (it’s a chick thing).

My assertion isn’t that radical: seeing girls chopped, diced, sliced, blow-torched, raped, gashed, beheaded — that’s just another day. You may feign being aghast, but feigning is really about as far as it gets.

When the tables are turned — and by two women, already! — and it’s dudes in peril and it’s Needy in a pink ball gown with her hair done like something from a Germanic fairy tale who has to do the rescuing, that’s some serious cognitive dissonance.

But whatever. Jennifer’s Body, like all monsters stories, is one of difference gone horrific, and so one of absolute, crushing loneliness.

And yet, as Needy’s ultimately triumphant narrative underlines, this is not a despairing film. There is pain, sadness and anger beneath the quips, but ultimately, there is patience and action.

You can’t actually see the body of the woman taking care of bloody business at film’s end, but you do know that Evil has been quashed, that a raised middle finger was involved, and the girl they called Needy is someone else in a new life.

-IG