I Spit On Your Prom

A version of this appeared in The Chicago Reader way back when.
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Jennifer’s Body is a basic rape-revenge narrative. Towards the beginning of the film, stuck-up high-school hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox) is brutalized. Subsequently, she wreaks hideous vengeance on men in general, and, eventually, on the perpetrators in particular.  Action, reaction, gallons of blood.  It’s not clever, but it has a crude, inevitable elegance.  It works.
 

 
Or at least, it works in classic examples of the genre like I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45Jennifer’s Body, though, isn’t satisfied with the formula. Writer Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Karyn Kusama want something a little smarter, a little more hip.  They add some sparkling dialogue: in what is sure to become a classic line, Jennifer is described as “actually evil, not high school evil.” They include some wicked satire too; most notably Adam Brody’s gleefully oleaginous performance as an indie-rocker who earnestly explains how tough it is for bands these days just before butchering Jennifer as an offering to Satan.

So far so good. But the filmmakers also tinker in more fundamental and, unfortunately, less successful ways.  The visceral rush of the rape-revenge narrative is distanced, complicated, and ultimately squandered. They take the rape itself, and they make it not quite a rape, but rather a virgin sacrifice gone horribly awry.  They make Jennifer not just a woman wronged, but a possessed demon, who kills not for retribution, but for food. They take the revenge, and they push it back all the way into the credits, presented in a series of still frames, and performed by the wrong person.  And then they add a series of twists and turns, quasi-homages lifted from a melange of horror/exploitation gone by. Demon Jennifer turns evil like the guy in Christine and vomits like Linda Blair in the Exorcist.  She stalks the prom like Carrie, and gets a point-of-view shaky camera shot courtesy of a thousand slasher films. The movie even takes a  bizarrely unmotivated detour into women-in-prison films, of all things.

The most ambitious change, however, is the introduction of female bonding.  The classic rape-revenge films drew their energy, in large part, from a celebration of, and anxiety about, the castrating power of second-wave feminism.  Women, these movies averred, had been wronged, and those women were going to rise up and cut your dick off (literally, in the case of I Spit on Your Grave.)  Movies like Ms. 45 even made a sustained critique of patriarchy, linking workplace harassment, rape, and the general marginalization of women into a single crime — punishable by death.

But while rape-revenge films make much of feminism, they don’t, generally, make anything of sisterhood. In both I Spit… and Ms. 45, the women are notably isolated. They tell nobody about their suffering or their plans for revenge, because they have no one to tell.  The point of the films, indeed, is the spectacle of an isolated, lone, helpless, weak individual turning the tables on the patriarchy.   In short, for all their feminist gestures, the movies are for men; they’re about how men interact with women, rather than about how women interact with each other.

Jennifer’s Body is different. The central relationship of the film is not between Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims, but rather between Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or “Needy” (Amanda Seyfried).  Jennifer and Needy have been friends since nursery school, and they’ve remained friends even though Jennifer has blossomed into Megan Fox, one of the two or three sexiest women in the world, while Needy is merely run-of-the-mill jaw-droppingly gorgeous; i.e., a geek by Hollywood standards.  In classic popular kid/geek stereotype, Jennifer is the dominant shallow demanding one, dragging Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, shooting down guys, and running around after indie rockers who are best left alone. Needy is the sensitive, smart, cautious one, always careful not to upstage her friend, and…well, you know the drill. Over the course of the movie, Needy realizes that she and Jennifer have grown apart, and that the best friend she once loved is now a shallow, jealous bitch, not to meniton a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.

The combination of rape-revenge with fraught female friendship isn’t, in itself, a terrible idea.  Under the direction of more talented or thoughtful filmmakers, you could see it working out as the kind of feminist metaphor that Cody and Kusama seem, rather desperately, to be groping for. Jennifer’s victimization by, and subsequent embrace of, sexualized, partriarchal violence (“my dick is bigger than his” she says of one soon-to-be victim) could work as the wedge that drives her and Needy apart.  Rape and the revenge it spawns could be set against or contrasted with sisterhood.

The problem is that, for this to work, the film would have to, at some point, sympathize with Jennifer. You’d have to understand why Needy loved her in the first place; you’d have to see the two of them interacting in a way which made sense of their friendship. This never happens. Jennifer is a bitch before she’s violated, and she’s a bitch after she’s violated. Her transformation into a succubus is a fulfillment of her character, not a negation of it — it seems, in short, to be what she deserves, both for her shallowness and for her sexual precociousness.  When the two protagonists have their showdown at the film’s end, Needy tells Jennifer that she was never a good friend…and that seems to more or less be the case. Partially this may be Megan Fox’s acting limitations, but there’s never a moment where she does anything for Needy, or even seems to have straightforward affection for her. What did Needy ever see in her?

The movie does suggest an answer; one that is not at all, as it were, straightforward. The first time we see Jennifer and Needy, they’re sharing a meaningful glance and a flirtatious wave that causes a student sitting nearby to suggest aloud that they’re gay.  The relationship’s temperature only rises after Jennifer is demonified; there are several suggestive scenes, and one smoking hot encounter on Needy’s bed with tongue and all.  When Needy pulls away in disgust, Jennifer slyly mentions that the two used to “play boyfriend/girlfriend” at slumber parties.

That scene has been much publicized.  But for all the brou-ha-ha, the film never seems to consider the possibility of Jennifer and Needy as an actual couple. Rather, the lesbianism is played for titillation, for shock value, and for laughs.  Needy’s love for Jennifer is shown as a dangerous fascination that must be discarded. Cliff, the boyfriend is the sympathetic one; he’s obviously where Needy should end up, and part of Jennifer’s evilness is that she makes that impossible.  When Jennifer does, in a way, possess Needy at the film’s end, it’s seen more as debasement than empowerment; a loss of self and of possibilities.  In the typical rape-revenge, patriarchy is the evil to be overcome. Here, as the first line of the movie states, “hell is a teenaged girl”  — or, more precisely, the friendships between teenaged girls. Cody claims that that’s somehow feminist, but I must confess, I don’t see it.

9 thoughts on “I Spit On Your Prom

  1. I have started to think that calling a movie feminist is now a cheap publicity stunt because they know that people will join the debate and go and see it just to compare opinions. I think maybe that happened with Kick Ass; I can really imagine Mark Millar doing this.

  2. I have a friend who loves this film–she claims it perfectly captures the experience of being a teenage lesbian. I can’t speak to that, but I thought it was pretty terrible. Scoring Needy’s rampage with “Violet” was a great choice; pushing it into the credits was a monumentally stupid one. I think Amanda Seyfried tearing a bunch of indie boys apart could’ve saved the film if they’d let us actually see it.

  3. Hey Katherine! I’d be curious to hear why your friend thinks that…. The intense unhappy female friendships? It just didn’t seem nuanced at all to me…but mileage differs in this as in all things, I suppose.

    I hadn’t quite thought that through, but yes, the refusal to let us see the carnage seems pretty idiotic, and perhaps a sign of the films’ general nervousness about its own material.

  4. Well, she made a blog post about it, but it wasn’t a public post so I don’t feel right about quoting it or paraphrasing it in detail, except that it did have to do with intense and ambiguous female friendships, like you guessed. Sorry to leave you hanging. I could ask her if she wants to come over here and talk about it.

    The elision of the rape in Jennifer’s Body is totally okay with me; I can’t get into traditional rape-revenge movies because I have to endure the former before I can have fun with the latter. But the elision of the revenge is unforgivable. The bloodletting Jennifer does is all meaningless; it’s the band who have to pay, and that’s where the audience gets cheated.

  5. ————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …nice guys participate in and benefit from rape culture too.
    ————————

    I can see “participate in,” in the sense of how even a fervently anti-Vietnan War activist couldn’t help but be involved, as an American, in the war. (His taxes help pay for the bullets and bombs!)

    But in what way do “nice guys…benefit from rape culture”?

    (I guess I’m about to start “straw-womaning feminism” again; accusing it of making sweepingly anti-male claims, and such madness.)

    If you nicely indicate interest in a woman, in what you consider a nonthreatening fashion, is it a benefit that being immersed in “rape culture” will cause that woman to cringe in horror, others outragedly accuse you of being a threatening, intimidating creep?

  6. The culture is organized for the benefit of straight white men’s fetishes. Clint Eastwood is a nice guy, but he can go to strip shows and hire a prostitute. Aoyama is a nice guy, but he can have casual sex with his coworker and subordinate, or get a buddy to parade women before him like pieces of meat.

    Patriarchy has downsides for men too. But pretending it has no benefits is one way that nice guys convince themselves that they are nonthreatening and generally to be pitied.

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