Until I saw Jennifer's Body the only Megan Fox I knew was the scantily clad brunette who basked in the perfect bronze glow of Michael Bay's plasticky summer blockbusters, the Transformer series. To say she "basked" in his artificial light, though, is probably a misnomer; it's more apt to say she was simply on display, like a mannequin with changeable sexy facial expressions. Her character in Transformers is a cliche to say the least, a mass offense to feminism at worst. In either case, it's safe to say we did not get a fair opportunity to judge Ms. Fox as an actress so much as we did as a Forever 21 model.
When I heard of her role in the new teen horror movie, Jennifer's Body I figured this was redemption time. Poof, be gone, Mr. Bay! While she hit the big time in the director's toy robot movies that gave her wider visibility in a business that's dauntingly difficult to break into, it happened at the expense of becoming objectified as a "salty" piece of meat.
That is the screenwriter of Jennifer's Body, Diablo Cody's code for "hot." Fox sat quietly in her savory marinade but rose, ironically, as a hungry maneater. If there was ever a more clever and cunning response to the platitudes given her in Transformers, I can't fathom it: Jennifer (Megan Fox) tears boys limb from limb, savoring their flesh, ruthlessly. So much for that beauteous bronze glow, it's more like a first-degree sunburn now.
More than a response to the silly incoherence of the role Michael Bay provided for Fox, however, Jennifer's Body is foremost a teen picture--a woman's picture even, and of course, a horror. I like the sequence of those classifications, going from teen to woman to horror; swirl them all into one and you've got a dozen Lifetime movies--"We triumph because we're victims!"
But Jennifer is kind of a victim. She's got more than a fair share of daddy issues that leave her to the devices of a rather cruel gang of rockers from the city. Visiting her hometown of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, the guys lure her effortlessly away from her dedicated best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), in, of all things, a van. Not an up-to-date, modern mini-van; no, this is a full-on rapemobile, the kind from the kidnapping dramatizations in Unsolved Mysteries (coincidentally, that show ended its run with host Robert Stack in 2002 on the Lifetime network, go figure).
To parse through this line of thought though, as a teen film it works as a gory satire in its depiction of the impossible social pressures, emotional frailty, and physical uncertainty of being a teenager. "Hell is a teenaged girl," says Needy in the film's opening line. Jennifer's Body makes that a literal reality.
Directed by a woman (Karyn Katsuma) and written by a woman (Diablo Cody), this could also be classified as woman's picture. Two females lead the movie as both primary protagonist (Needy) and antagonist (Jennifer). The men are only minor characters, though ones that work as the only fuel for the girls' motivations. While Jennifer seeks revenge by gobbling up the guts of her dates like they were Thanksgiving turkeys, Needy has a more reasoned approach.
After a lifetime of neglect from her bestie Jennifer, Needy is at her pal's side devotedly, sympathizing with her plight of prettiness and cruelty because that's simply the state of the status quo. It's not until she comes to the mature realization that Jennifer keeps her around as a punching bag--she's the nerdy friend used and abused to build up her self-confidence--that their relationship dynamic takes a turn.
For those concerned with spoilers, stop here, but the fact that Needy pushes a stake through the heart of her vampire companion that brings us to the film's final bookend at her new residence at the psych ward, well, that too speaks to the tenuous nature of female friendships. More specificially though, what does it mean that Needy, a perfectly normal teenaged girl with a healthy love life and aptitude for scholastics ends her high school tour at a mental institution? That Jennifer, a pretty but utterly mean and insecure girl, is killed?
On the surface, there doesn't seem to be much hope anticipated or delineated in Jennifer's Body for young women. They can definitely speak up for themselves, but that isn't a much improved-upon statistic from another female director's films, Amy Heckerling's 15-year-old teen pic Clueless from 1995, for example.
Of course, looking at it as a horror solely, Jennifer's Body takes on a alternate meaning. Where young and adolescent women are dressed up in mini-skirts as meat for the killing in recent horrors (e.g. Saw), at least Jennifer's Body keeps the women at the helm, dressed for the most part, and packaged with a brain.
Still, Jennifer's defining characteristic, to me, comes back to its lead, Ms. Fox. She's the star. And she speaks. It may be in the tongue of Cody's clamoring colloquialisms ("Hey, Monistat." "What's up, Vagisil?"), but it's a big step away from Michael Bay's direction. That isn't a bad thing.