In Jennifer’s Body, stuck-up high school hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox) is brutalized and wreaks hideous vengeance on men in general and the perpetrators in particular. This is a familiar arc, used in such rape-revenge films as Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981). Action, reaction, gallons of blood. It’s not clever, but it has a crude inevitability.
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But Cody and Kusama also tinker with the rape-revenge narrative in ways that distance, complicate, and ultimately squander the visceral rush. The rape is not quite a rape but a virgin sacrifice gone horribly awry. (Adam Brody is gleefully oleaginous as an indie rocker who explains how tough it is for bands these days and then butchers Jennifer as an offering to Satan.) Jennifer is not just a wronged woman killing for retribution, she’s a demon killing for food. And they push the revenge all the way back to the credits, where it’s presented in a series of still frames.
Jennifer’s Body is different. The film centers not on Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims but on Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or “Needy.” Jennifer and Needy have remained friends since nursery school, even though Jennifer has blossomed into Fox, one of the sexiest women in the world, and Needy is played by the merely gorgeous Amanda Seyfried—a geek by Hollywood standards. Jennifer is shallow, dominant, and demanding; she drags Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, verbally shoots down guys, and runs around after indie rockers best left alone. Needy is sensitive, smart, and cautious, 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 friend she once loved is now a jealous bitch, not to mention a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.
In the earlier rape-revenge movies, patriarchy was an evil to be overcome. In Jennifer’s Body, on the other hand, an opening voice-over tells us that “hell is a teenaged girl”—or more precisely, the friendships between teenage girls. Cody claims that’s feminist, but I must confess, I don’t see it.
