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Chapter 6
Don’t Stand So Close to Jennifer: Addressing Questions of Proximity,
Spectatorship, and Genre with Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s
Body (2009)
In this chapter, I expand the focus of my analysis from horror criticism to broader
concerns in feminist film theory. As I have identified in the previous chapter, horror cinema has
often been left out of broader conversations in feminist film theory, which pays greater attention
to genres thought to play more readily to a female spectator (such as melodrama). However, as
the new wave of women’s horror cinema demonstrates, the horror genre is more than capable of
addressing female subjectivity. Using Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body (2009)
as a case study, I place this film in dialogue with larger theoretical considerations of female
spectatorship forwarded by Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane and Anneke Smelik, who promote
the concepts of ‘proximity’ and ‘artifice’ as integral concerns to women’s identificatory practices
and viewing pleasures. With respect to Jennifer’s Body, I explore how the film exposes
femininity as artifice, and invites female viewers to participate more closely in the horror genre
through self-referential performances of gender.
Described by one reviewer, “as if Carrie were being re-enacted by the cast of Heathers,”
Jennifer’s Body revolves around the toxically co-dependent friendship between Jennifer Check
(Megan Fox) and the ironically nick-named Anita ‘Needy’ Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried). Friends
from their early sandbox days, the two girls attempt to navigate their increasingly tenuous
relationship after Jennifer is abducted by the band Low Shoulder as part of a desperate-for-
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success Occult ritual and subsequently develops an unnatural appetite for human flesh. Unable to
curb her new desire, Jennifer begins killing and devouring boys at her high school before
revealing her new supernatural abilities to Needy. Frightened by her friend’s powers, Needy hits
the books and determines that Jennifer has turned into a demon as a result of Low Shoulder’s
satanic ritual. Worried that her own boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) may be the next, Needy
confronts Jennifer at the school’s end of year dance, only to catch her ex-best friend feasting on
Chip’s neck. Unable to destroy Jennifer while also attending to a dying Chip, Needy later tracks
and kills Jennifer in her bedroom. Eventually committed to a correctional facility for the
criminally insane, Needy – now possessing some of the demon’s powers, which were transferred
to her after being scratched by Jennifer in their final fight – breaks out of the institution and goes
on to enact her own revenge by killing the members of Low Shoulder.
For all intents and purposes, Jennifer’s Body was set up to be a milestone in American
horror cinema. Upon its release, it would be one of the first times in over twenty years that a
horror film was spear-headed by two women artists, the other notable examples being The
Slumber Party Massacre (1982; directed by Amy Holden Jones and written by Rita Mae Brown)
and more recently, Twilight (2008; directed by Catherine Hardwicke and written by Melissa
Rosenberg). Furthermore, Fox’s character, Jennifer, was anticipated to be a drastic departure
from other strong-willed but primarily male-authored female characters of the genre like Regan
MacNeil (The Exorcist [1973]), Carrie White (Carrie [1976]), Laurie Strode (Halloween [1978]),
and Stretch (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 [1986]) who, although having suitably surpassed
the title of victim, arguably remained trapped by masculinist understandings of femininity and
womanhood. By comparison, Jennifer was supposed to be horror’s first feminist (Ball
“‘Jennifer’s Body’: Why Hollywood”). Even if her activist agenda was largely defined on the
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political grounds of devouring young men for breakfast, the promise nonetheless remained:
Jennifer’s Body was going to be different.
When the film was released in theatres in September, neatly timed to coincide with the
beginning of the new school year, critical reception was rather ambivalent. Some reviewers,
mostly men, dismissed the film for its inability to shock and disparaged Kusama’s direction for
not providing enough thrills, gory or otherwise. 1 As Peter Hartlaub’s warns in The San
Francisco Chronicle, “know there isn’t a single good scare” (“‘Jennifer’s Body’ sags”). For
others, the film failed to provide its promised, feminist intervention into the genre and merely
replicated the same misogynistic tropes audiences have come to expect from horror. Speaking to
this upset, Sarah Ball of Newsweek writes, “it’s hard to feel for Jennifer as horror’s first feminist
when she’s basically written as a crass [sic].” She goes on to note, “This movie is not genre-
subverting so much as genre-reinforcing: it annihilates the symbolically feminine (emotion,
intuition, sensitivity) in one big ketchup splatter, all for the gain of the symbolically male
(physical violence, sexual aggression)” (“‘Jennifer’s Body’: Why Hollywood”).2 Other critics,
however, saw the film as successfully subverting generic conventions, and offering a highly
relatable representation of the social pressures put on adolescent girls. Addressing the
1 While I do not offer a sustained analysis of the gendered responses towards the film, I find it curious that from the selection of reviews I read (ranging from print and online sources), male critics tended to be more concerned with the genre’s integrity. This particularly gendered response would seem to fall in line with the male-authored critiques levelled at Twilight (2008), which similarly dismissed the film as romantic drivel versus hard-hitting horror (see Chapter 5). In fact, Jennifer’s Body was continually compared to Twilight in the popular press, as both became symbols of the difficulties of making horror for women. As Tom Charity from CNN writes, “The last time a horror flick tried for a distinctly female point of view the result was Twilight, which was more of a wan gothic romance than a chiller” (“Review: ‘Jennifer’s Body’”). 2 As I have mentioned, accessing a film’s feminist offerings is a decidedly fraught process. For instance, I disagree with Ball’s assessment that a feminist film needs to champion “emotion, intuition, and sensitivity.” In my opinion, a film like American Mary (2013), which arguably lacks all these qualities, can still be seen as offering an important feminist critique of sexual violence (see Chapter 4). Clearly, what is considered ‘feminist’ for one critic will not hold true for another. Given this variety, I have purposefully avoided determining a film’s political value or analytic worth on its critical reception as ‘feminist.’ For further consideration of feminism, reception and Jennifer’s Body, see Ben Kooyman’s “Whose body? Auteurism, feminism and horror in Hostel Part II and Jennifer’s Body.”
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hormonally-charged drama of the film, Dana Stevens for Slate Magazine writes, “[Jennifer] is
less a teenage girl turned monster than an exploration of the monster that lurks inside every
teenage girl” (“Jennifer’s Body”). A.O. Scott’s response from The New York Times is perhaps
the most cogent. He writes, “Jennifer’s Body is not only a fantasy of revenge against the
predatory male sex,” but “goes further, taking the complication and confusion of being a young
woman as its central problem and operating principle” (“Hell is Other People”). As Scott’s
comments cue, the ambivalent reactions towards Jennifer’s Body may be, in part, a result of the
film’s subject matter, which attempts to navigate the fraught and contradictory dimensions of
teenage girlhood with a necessary dose of self-awareness. Forced to operate within the
conventions of horror in order to address “the queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality
that we all know and sublimate,” the film exploits normative cinematic codes in order to turn the
genre “inside out” (Scott “Hell is Other People”).
In this sense, the film anticipates the very bind it must operate within; namely, that in order
to turn horror inside out it must also cozy up to the genre, getting as close as possible in order to
cannibalize it. Indeed, its closeness to genre is identified by some reviewers as hindering its
critique of gender in horror cinema, as it potentially replicates the very tropes and narrative
patterns it seeks to undermine. However, rather than disparage Jennifer’s Body for working
within genre, we should instead consider how the film uses closeness – both to the horror genre
and between viewer and image – to its ideological benefit by inviting the female spectator to take
pleasure in the on-screen spectacle of (monstrous) femininity.
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“Smart Bombs”
Feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Anne Kaplan, and
Teresa de Lauretis (amongst others), have argued that since traditional narrative cinema is
organized by the male gaze, the on-screen woman is typically framed as an object or spectacle to
be consumed by the presumed male viewer. This means that the image of woman on-screen
merely serves as a hollow signifier, a two-dimensional representation of traditional femininity in
service of male pleasure and patriarchal culture. Within this model, classical codes and
conventions “seduce” the female spectator with or without her consent into viewing, adopting
and eventually mimicking an expression of femininity that is distinctly artificial and non-
threatening to patriarchal ideals of feminine passivity (de Lauretis 143; Smelik 17). Combined,
the screen and the image on it act as a “mimetic mirror of masculine culture” that attempts to
limit the expressions of femininity and coercively circumscribe women into desiring and
eventually adopting traditional gender presentations and their accompanying social roles (Smelik
185). For these theorists, and Smelik in particular, the mirror re-presents an image of femininity
as seen through a patriarchal lens that ultimately works to disavow female subjectivity. The
metaphor of the mirror is thus used to describe the empty property of the on-screen image of
woman, which can be likened to a fun-house reflection that warps and distorts reality but yet
presents the image as an accurate portrait. Within most feminist film studies, the effects of the
cinematic image are totalizing and constrictive, offering women few avenues of resistance. This
approach, however useful, overlooks the ways in which more complex engagements between
female viewers and cinematic images may function.
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As Smelik has documented in And the Mirror Cracked (1998), a certain degree of
successful intervention has been garnered by female/feminist filmmakers who have attempted to
present “the signs and significations of ‘woman’ and of ‘femininity’ differently from the codes
and conventions of dominant cinema, while […] still employ[ing] and deploy[ing] (rather than
deconstruct[ing]) visual and narrative pleasure” (2). The success of these filmmaking practices
has led Smelik to claim that the ‘mirror has cracked,’ which introduces “if not an actual
breakdown in classical forms of representation at least a shake-up within them” (6). Though
Smelik surveys a number of practical filmmaking tactics in her study, emphasis is placed on the
ability of these feminist filmmakers to introduce more ‘authentic’ or relatable images that skirt
the line between fantasy and reality and attend to the varied lived experiences of women.
The stake in no longer having the screen function as a mirror – to see it crack and to have the
splintering pieces damage the camera eye, as Smelik describes (6) – while important to the larger
project of feminist film theory and filmmaking practices, is perhaps doubly salient for horror
cinema given the overwrought images of tortured women within the genre.
Far from displaying a flawless feminine form that ought to be desired and re-performed,
horror cinema presents an altogether abject expression of femininity that often aligns female
characters with a compulsory victimization or with the monstrous. Historically, it has been this
same pattern of denigration that feminists have rallied against, and that served as the catalyst for
feminist film studies in horror cinema. Yet, what is perhaps lacking in these studies is a sustained
theory of female spectatorship that thinks through the relationship between the female spectator
and the images of women on-screen when created by women filmmakers. As discussed in
Chapter 2, when feminist scholars do pay attention to the female spectator of horror, it is
exclusively in the context of male-authored cinema. What remains to be charted is how this new
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wave of women’s horror may craft a different relationship between the female spectator and the
horror genre, and how in turn this affects representational strategies of gender.
Jennifer’s Body offers the possibility to not only re-think the relationship between the
female spectator and horror, but also overarching theoretical concerns about women’s
relationship to on-screen images of femininity. Deliberately scripted by Cody as an open
invitation for young women into the horror genre, the film positions female audience members as
‘in on the joke’ from the start, since much of the film’s work is to send up staple horror
conventions as a way of deconstructing the trap(pings) of traditional femininity (Kwan “Cody
exorcises demons”). Here, Cody and Kusama take great effort to ‘employ’ and ‘deploy’ the
codes of femininity in tandem with the conventions of horror cinema to reveal the ways in which
women are victims of patriarchy, while also respecting their capacity to navigate and exploit
misogyny to their own ends. As a result, the film expresses an ambivalence that female
audiences may relate to, showcasing the ways in which femininity is both pushed onto young
women, while also becoming a seat of power within a highly sexualized economy.
Early in the film, Needy is shown getting ready to go out to a local bar so that Jennifer
can swoon over the headlining act, Low Shoulder. As Needy tries on different outfits in front of
the mirror, she explains in a voice-over that she is to avoid any tops with cleavage since “tits
[are] Jennifer’s trademark.” Later, while at the bar, Jennifer attempts to convince her friend that
they should offer themselves as groupies for the band, much to Needy’s protestation. As Needy
begins to physically pull away from Jennifer, she is chastised by her friend who reminds her,
“They’re just boys. Morsels. We have all the power, don’t you know that? These things…
[planting her hands on Needy’s chest] these are like smart bombs. Okay? You point ’em in the
right direction and shit gets real.” While it is possible to interpret Jennifer’s advice as the result
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of postfeminism, the line more accurately serves as one of the first distinct moments of address
towards the female spectator.3 In this moment, the text invites her to identify with the characters
on-screen via a presumably relatable quip about female sexuality, and knowingly exposes
femininity itself as an embodied performance young girls are trained to master.
Responding to this moment, Faculty of Horror podcast co-host and Executive Editor of
Rue Morgue Magazine, Andrea Subissati remarks, “I saw myself a lot [in the scene]. I remember
being in high school and I remember finally developing the breasts I was scared I would never
get and getting all this attention from boys and feeling a real sense of power in being able to get
that attention” (“Episode 3: Jennifer’s Body”). For Subissati, the film mirrors her own personal
experience of adolescence, which in turn helps her to relate to the action on-screen, an
accomplishment, she suggests, few other horror films have achieved (she offers The Craft [1996]
as another notable example). Although there is a difference between the theoretical spectator
constructed by the film and its reception amongst a varied audience, there nonetheless remains
an interplay between the two that cannot be discounted. Subissati’s comment demonstrates this
interplay and, in turn, establishes the film’s ability to successfully deploy a female mode of
address.
Given Subissati’s comment about recognition and identification, perhaps the metaphor of
the mirror merits some reconsideration. As Lucy Bolton suggests of feminist film studies in
general, perhaps all that is needed is to rethink women’s relation to the mirror in the first place.
Inspired by Luce Irigaray’s interjection that “the mirror should support, not undermine
[woman’s] incarnation” (quoted in Bolton 39), Bolton proposes we challenge notions of physical
beauty, artifice and reflection by asking, for example, “how [women] respond to [their] reflected
3 For an analysis of postfeminism and Jennifer’s Body, see Martin Fradley’s “‘Hell is a teenage girl?’: Postfeminism and Contemporary Teen Horror” (2013).
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image” instead of assuming an antagonistic relationship between the two (39). Subissati’s
comment regarding her identification with Jennifer provides a partial answer to Bolton’s
question. For Subissati, her viewing pleasure is enhanced by the film’s representation of female
sexuality as operating within the blurry boundaries between victimization and empowerment. As
she goes on to discuss, Jennifer’s quip regarding the eroticism of women’s breasts calls attention
to the ways in which young women simultaneously learn how to escape or at least combat
objectification by taking (back) ownership of their bodies. Subissati remembers it as a “fleeting
superficial power,” while also recalling what it feels like “to be empowered by that kind of
power” (“Episode 3: Jennifer’s Body”). In this respect, we may understand the moment of
mirrored reflection not as a foreclosure of possibility, but as an invitation to participate in a genre
that has historically isolated women, both on- and off-screen. Here, the introduction of lived
experience works to complicate the supposedly clear-cut power dynamics of the horror text and
create a more nuanced portrait of femininity that is conscious of the fraught relationship it holds
within the genre and within society at large.
“Someone’s Snack Pack”
As Jennifer’s Body demonstrates, this new wave of women’s horror cinema invites the
female spectator to share in the film’s critique of gender. The spectator’s constructed closeness
to the text is arguably a precondition of this cinema, and clearly part of this new wave’s
pleasurable offerings. Yet, this type of closeness would also seem to contradict previous
theorizations of female spectatorship, which treat closeness to the on-screen image as a problem.
Within the psychoanalytic heritage of feminist film studies, the female spectator cannot enter
into the same looking relations as her male counterpart because she lacks the necessary distance
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between herself and the on-screen female character.4 In sharing the same gender location as the
on-screen object, the power of her gaze collapses, leaving her unable to disassociate herself from
the cinematic spectacle since she – woman – is the image. Because of this uncomfortable
proximity, the female spectator may resort to a cross-gender identification in adopting the
male/masculine looking position, a narcissistic response wherein she becomes her own object of
desire, which contrasts the masochistic response of over-identifying with the objectification on-
screen. While all three options limit the access of women’s viewing pleasure, Doane’s theory of
the masquerade offers a potentially useful alternative.
Borrowing from Joan Riviere, Doane describes the masquerade as the conscious
construction of femininity, such that femininity itself is exposed as artifice. Through an
exaggerated performance of “the accoutrements of femininity,” (Doane, “Film and the
Masquerade” 49) woman may use “her own body as a disguise” (Montrelay quoted in Doane,
“Film and the Masquerade” 49). By recognizing the image as a performance of woman – as a
conscious manipulation of codes and signifiers – the female spectator manufactures the required
distance between herself and the on-screen object in order to take pleasure in cinema. Although
originally conceptualized as a theory of spectatorship, Doane later clarifies that perhaps the
masquerade offers a more appropriate description of woman’s status as spectacle rather than as
spectator (see “Masquerade Reconsidered”). In this respect, masquerade becomes a more
suitable model for describing the action on-screen, which can be explained as “a woman
demonstrat[ing] the representation of a woman’s body” (Bovenschen quoted in Doane, The
Desire to Desire 181). Via the masquerade, womanliness itself becomes hyper-spectacularized,
such that what one witnesses on-screen is the reflexive construction of the fantasy of woman.
4 See Mulvey “Visual Pleasure”; Doane “Film and the Masquerade”.
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Jennifer’s Body is, at its heart, a study on the masquerade, on the artifice of femininity
itself as performed in its most monstrous permutation by a hyper-femme demon. In exposing the
trappings of femininity, the film creates an altogether unique horror film character in Jennifer,
who, rather than skirting the lines of gender (as Clover’s Final Girl) or is made monstrous
because of it (as Creed’s monstrous feminine), actively manipulates her femininity in order to
survive. On the one hand, we may constitute this manoeuver as its own reaction against the
overwhelming masculinity of the horror genre, as a way of easily performing a non-threatening
intervention that works to hide its subversive underpinnings (e.g., working within convention to
destabilize it). On the other hand, in exposing femininity as artifice, the film importantly
constructs a tenable viewing position for the female horror spectator who is invited to share in
this disruption and its broader critique of gender.
The risk of this strategy, of course, is that it will be misread as an uncritical
objectification of Jennifer/Fox for the male gaze, as a number of reviews demonstrate. At the
time of release, Roger Ebert described the film as “Twilight for boys,” completely obfuscating
the female-centred audience both Kusama and Cody worked diligently to address in their
promotional interviews for the film (“Jennifer’s Body”). Peter Travers for Rolling Stone
Magazine put it even less eloquently, describing the movie as “Hot! Hot! Hot!” (“Jennifer’s
Body”), while Michael Sragow of The Baltimore Sun dismissed the plot entirely, suggesting “No
one is going to like this movie for its brain.” (“‘Jennifer’s Body’ is dodgy”). Focus was
especially pulled to Fox’s performance, which inspired a number of misogynistic reviews that
position the actor as a prop in an already shaky film. Joe Neumaier of The New York Daily News
suggested that “Fox merely needs to look either vacant or evil, which the Transformers boy-toy
does spookily well” (my own emphasis, “‘Jennifer’s Body’: Megan Fox”).
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Again, it is Scott who recognizes the film’s tactics, predicting that “[t]he inevitable
critical sneering at Ms. Fox’s acting abilities will miss exactly this point. Her blunt, blank affect
belongs to the character, not the performer, and is part of the film’s calculated tease” (“Hell is
Other People”). Purposefully playing on Fox’s history as “always an object,” exemplified
perfectly by Neumaier’s descriptor “boy-toy,” Scott recognizes the knowingness in the casting
decision. As Stevens also points out, Fox has “never been given a chance before to be anything
but a body on-screen,” and the film exploits this history to its gain (“Jennifer’s Body”). This is
not then a failed performance by Fox, but rather a highly successful one in which persona and
function collapse, such that Fox herself becomes a self-aware performer of the feminine object.
What Fox is able to do is provide audiences with the idea of the feminine, one that is itself unreal
and merely a masquerade.
Indeed, the entire design of the film is meant to accentuate Fox’s ability as Jennifer to
perform the fantasy of available femininity. One notable example occurs when Jennifer, having
developed a taste for boys after turning into a demon, returns to school post feeding. In
comparison to the other students who are dressed in dark shades, Jennifer wears a cropped pink
sweater patterned with hearts, low-rise jeans, accompanying heart earrings and a bright shade of
pink lip gloss to accentuate her predatory mouth. Her high-femme performance is exaggerated
even further by the film’s camera work and editing, which centrally frames Jennifer and cuts the
sequence into several slow-motion shots. This short montage is a recognizable trope in the
lexicon of teen films, wherein the (newly-transformed) popular girl is given a slow-motion walk
down the hall to show off her appearance. In many ways, the hallway walk is the contemporary
equivalent of the performative ‘staircase sequence’ of previous woman’s pictures, when the
newly-remade heroine descends down the stairs for all to see. Identified by Doane as the “locus
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of spectacularization,” the staircase, like the high school hallway, provides an architectural space
that organizes the spectator’s look towards the female object (The Desire to Desire 136).
However, while these conventions are typically played for a male gaze, Jennifer’s Body resists
this co-option through exaggeration and parody, and additionally by organizing its action
through Needy’s meta-look.
What allows the film to obfuscate the power of the male spectator and to re-establish the
action in relation to women audiences is its deployment of the female gaze, both via Kusama’s
camera and Needy’s organizing point-of-view. After the prologue, the film’s central action
begins at a high school assembly, where Needy is watching Jennifer perform a cheerleading
routine. In her voice-over, Needy establishes, “There’s Jennifer,” her narration serving as another
important element of the film’s address and emphasis on female subjectivity. Again, slow-
motion is used to draw attention to Jennifer, as the film cuts between Jennifer waving to her
friend in the stands and Needy responding with an affectionate grin. It is a small moment overall
but a neat visual summary of the film’s mechanics as a whole: here, Jennifer and her femininity
are put on display for a female onlooker, as both women are invited to share in the enjoyment of
the spectacle. If previous horror cinema was often hindered by the (over-)determining gaze of the
male filmmaker, even when displaced onto the film’s heroine, Jennifer’s Body demonstrates how
the meta-textual workings of the female filmmaker’s gaze – coupled with that of the on-screen
female character of Needy – allows for alternative looking relations in horror. Through these
alternative negotiations, the film is able to offer a self-aware critique of femininity that
emphasizes the work of genre in constructing women as pure spectacle.
As Katarzyna Paszkiewicz suggests, the film’s critique of gender is sustained by its
subversion of the monstrous-feminine trope, revealing monstrosity itself as a device much like
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the masquerade (Genre 81;82). For Paszkiewicz, monstrosity and femininity operate in tandem
to expose each other as constructed conventions capable of being exploited for female pleasure.
Indeed, part of what makes Jennifer such an exaggerated spectacle of femininity is her status as a
monster; the more she feeds, the more beautiful and alluring she appears. However, rather than
reaffirm Creed’s innate alignment between femininity and monstrosity, the film is careful to
emphasize Jennifer’s monstrosity as a construction. Addressing this tactic, Paszkiewicz writes,
“Rather than being a monster, Jennifer becomes a monster” (Genre 82). Much in the same way
the film revels in the artifice of femininity, so too does it represent monstrosity as a performative
identity placed onto Jennifer.
If Jennifer’s Body is meant to signal a new iteration of horror cinema that plays with and
exposes the gendered conventions of the genre, it is only appropriate that the central catalyst of
the film’s narrative – the moment of Jennifer’s demonic possession and transformation into a
hyper-femme man-eater – should be a result of a divergence from ‘the rules.’ After researching
the Occult in her high school library, Needy explains to her boyfriend Chip that Jennifer’s newly
formed monstrous identity is a result of Low Shoulder’s botched attempt at a Satanic offering.
For the ritual to work, the band had to sacrifice a virgin and Jennifer, as she herself quips earlier
in the film, is not even “a backdoor virgin.” As Needy deduces through her research, Jennifer’s
monstrous origins can be traced to a singular moment of rupture from pre-established codes that
demand the ritual and the narrative be played out in a specific way. Defiance or failure to comply
by these rules is precisely what allows Jennifer to materialize as an altogether uncontainable
creature who threatens the safety and sanctity of formulaic conventions.5
5 The film goes on to poke fun of the dominance of masculinist narratives and conventions with enjoyable one-liners from Jennifer such as “PMS isn’t real Needy, it was invented by the boy-run media to make us seem like we’re
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Here, Jennifer’s monstrosity is given a source of origin by way of a markedly violent
event, thereby disrupting any innate alignment between women and the abject, and repositioning
the monstrous as an effect of patriarchy (similar to compulsory femininity). Early in the film,
after being coerced by the lead singer of Low Shoulder to ride in their van, Jennifer is taken to a
remote location in the woods where the band can conduct their Satanic ritual. As Jennifer pleads
for her life, the frontman ignores her and continues into a diatribe about the difficulties of
‘making it’ as an indie band, asking Jennifer to understand their predicament. Acting as though
his hand has been forced, the band leader unsheathes a sacrificial blade and begins to frantically
stab Jennifer. In proper horror form, the underlining implication of sexual assault within the
scene is displaced onto an act of violence. As identified by Clover, violence and sex, while
relationally linked, act as substitutions for one another in horror (29). Here, Jennifer’s
victimization in the sacrificial ritual is undoubtedly meant to read as a gang rape.
Through this assault, Jennifer experiences the horror of being rendered into an object via
the trauma of sexual violence. Here, she is forcibly placed under the control of the male gaze,
which demands her sacrifice in order for its success (one can recall DeLauretis’ quip that “story
demands sadism” [134]). While the entire sequence is horrific, the most disturbing moment
occurs right before Jennifer is stabbed by the band leader. Pausing before he plunges the
ritualistic dagger into her body, the band leader croons, “Jenny Jenny who can I turn to, you give
me something I can hold on to. I know you’ll think I’m like the others before,” before eventually
building to an unsettling crescendo and singing, “Jenny don’t change your number, eight six
seven five three oh nine.” In this moment, Jennifer’s identity is erased and diminished to a
popular music reference, her objectification now complete.
crazy,” and “I forgot to read Hamlet. Is he gonna fuck his mom?” In the latter, the Oedipal drama collapses into the Shakespearean story, as the film irreverently treats male narratives as ‘all the same.’
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So, as much as the film shows Jennifer as capable of exploiting her femininity and
monstrosity for her personal gain, it is equally invested in exposing the violent effects of
patriarchy that forcibly render women into performative, sexual objects. However, instead of
relishing the objectification of Jennifer as a ‘typical’ horror film might, and rather than treating
her status as object as ‘normal,’ the film instead presents the lingering effects of violence as
forcibly grotesque. Returning to Needy’s home after her assault, Jennifer confronts her friend in
the kitchen. The first time the audience sees Jennifer after the attack, she is only as a shadow
moving across the wall behind Needy; importantly, Jennifer initially appears as an impression of
a body that ought to be there, the image or trace of the person who used to be. When Jennifer
does reveal herself to Needy, it results in the most chilling visual of the film. Shot in a tight
medium-close up, a beaten Jennifer silently looks at her friend and smiles. As her lips curl up, we
see her bloodied mouth. The image is undoubtedly grotesque, and an antithesis to the portrait of
Jennifer as the hyper-feminine demon she will become. Having been rendered an object by the
band’s assault, Jennifer takes back her subjectivity in the moment of the smile. Soon to transform
into an avenging feminine fury, Jennifer retaliates against the patriarchal conditions that birthed
her monstrosity. By exploiting the very femininity that is culturally demanded of her, she regains
control of her body while also taking control of the bodies of male others through consumption.
However, the process of reclamation – whereby Jennifer uses her monstrosity to reclaim
her subjectivity – is ultimately presented in ambivalent terms. Towards the end of the film,
Jennifer sits in front of a mirror preparing for senior prom. Not having fed recently, she appears
emaciated and gaunt, her hair even beginning to fall out. As the camera moves closer to the
mirror, Jennifer begins to apply foundation, at first in smaller dabs and then smearing it across
her face. The result is a garish image of femininity that stands in stark contrast to the framed
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picture of a smiling Jennifer that rests beside the mirror. As the twin images of Jennifer signal in
this sequence, monstrosity and beauty can be seen as two sides of the same patriarchal coin, with
artifice remaining contingent to both categorizations. Like the diegetic mirror in the sequence,
the more metaphorical ‘mirror’ image of the film itself rather than naturalize femininity (and
monstrosity as a condition of being a woman) instead exposes the cultural constructedness of
gender. Indeed, these mirrors reveal a potent image of the violent effects of patriarchy, which
mutilate the female form and render it an empty shell of itself. In contrast to the framed photo of
a plucky and cheerful Jennifer, the garish mirror image of a makeup-splattered monster shows a
Jennifer unable to perform the artifice of femininity others have come to expect and that she
herself has relied upon to feed. What was first a playful manipulation of the codes and signifiers
of femininity – both by character and by film alike – becomes in this moment an ultimate
breakdown of the female subject.
While this is not the last image the audience is given of Jennifer, it is certainly a powerful
one that suggests any attempt by Jennifer to regain her subjectivity after her assault has
ultimately failed. Fractured into twinned images – beauty and demon – Jennifer can no longer
materialize as a unified self; again, in this moment, she is rendered purely as a grotesque object
of spectacle. Is it enough then that the film is ‘in on’ this construction? Is it enough that this is
part of the film’s setup, which must show the damaging effects of patriarchal violence in order to
comment on it? It is this lingering sense of ambivalence, of irresolution, that prevails, as the film
ultimately proves troubling as much as it troubles.
Weekly Reading Response:
300 Words
Must Referencing These two: Screening – Jennifer’s Body
Reading: Vena – Dont Stand So Close to JenniferFile
This assignment asks you to respond rather than just to summarize what was covered that week. Maybe you wish our discussions/materials had gone further and you can think of other places you’d apply that week’s ideas. Maybe you disagreed with an interpretation of a film/concept and want to offer your own thoughts / counterexamples. Take it where you want
