Jennifer’s Body (2009)

directed by Karyn Kusama

Arya Naidu

If you haven't watched Jennifer's Body, I'm sorry. Not to you, but for you. I'm sorry you haven't witnessed Megan Fox at her most iconic. I'm sorry you haven't seen Adam Brody with a crescent-moon neck tattoo and smudgy eyeliner. I'm sorry you didn't get to hear a pre-Mamma Mia Amanda Seyfried declare, once and for all, that "hell is a teenage girl."

Here's what happens: Low Shoulder, a rock band (led by Brody), mistakes Jennifer (played by Fox) for a virgin, but she's not even backdoor. Because of the band's mistake, they botch a satanic sacrifice in Jennifer's hometown of Devil's Kettle. It's not subtle.

Jennifer becomes a succubus. Jennifer needs Needy (Seyfried), her best friend, more than Needy has ever needed Jennifer. This need is so intense that it freaks everyone out. Jennifer also needs to eat. Jennifer eats boys because it's fun and because they make her hair thick and shiny. If Jennifer does not eat, Jennifer's skin does not glow. Jennifer eats boys until she needs Needy so much that she tries to eat her, too, because she "goes both ways" (it's not subtle!).

Needy does not get eaten. Needy kills Jennifer. Needy sets out to find, and kill, Low Shoulder.

Here's what also happens: Jennifer wears tiny skirts with low rises. She takes what she wants and uses her long legs and tits that she calls "smart bombs" to do it. She kisses Needy, with tongue and spit and lip, in a scene that made every bi-curious girl in 2009 go incognito to search "if i liked that one part in jennifer's body am i gay????"

I don't remember what the internet told me, but I remember how I first felt watching that scene. I remember rewinding it and watching it again. I remember humming that one Low Shoulder song about trees while I got ready in the mornings. I remember sucking in my stomach so I could fit into the kinds of tiny skirts Jennifer wore. I remember sucking and sucking and sucking, wishing I was tiny enough to see my ribs, wishing I was thin. I remember screaming when I couldn't pull the skirt or short or jean over my hips. I remember pinching and crying and starving.

High school was a string of violence. Always small, always to me and by me, but violent nonetheless. I made deals with myself, little agreements that meant nothing until they meant more than any glimmer of relief they might've given me. As a brown girl with big thighs, I told myself that the only way to survive my very white, very conservative school was to thin myself out. I'd make myself sleep in on weekends so I wouldn't eat breakfast. I'd skip lunch and brush my teeth right after dinner so I wouldn't be tempted by dessert.

Whenever it would backfire and I'd inevitably binge, I'd be angry. I'd tell myself I was misunderstood, but I was just hungry. I'd get on the elliptical out of shame and watch clips of whatever actress I was obsessed with that week, someone who always had a boy in rotation and a body like Jennifer's.

Jennifer's Body is smothered in camp and sex. It's sometimes ridiculous, but what lives inside is violent. Jennifer's failure as a sacrifice serves as a catalyst for all the gnawing and luring and hunting that she does. The attack she undergoes at the hands of Low Shoulder begets the attacks that she seeks out.

What's left, when the production of it all is stripped away, is the everyday violence of girlhood. What's left is Jennifer slapping makeup over breakouts when she hasn't had enough boy. It's the way she loses her sense of self when her hair doesn't fall the way she wants it to, the way she knows it can if only she could consume more, if only she could do what she has convinced herself needs to be done. What's left is Jennifer deciding that the consequences of looking dull or unremarkable are worse than death.

And yeah, the movie straddles those everyday moments by the waist while holding a box cutter between polished nails. But how obvious must a violence be for us to name it as one? Maybe it's punched in the face and hit right on the nose, or maybe it's softer: a slower burn that never breaks skin. Violence is violence is violence; it haunts all the same.

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Jennifer's Body was released on the heels of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Men were at the center of the movie's buzz. Marketing was about Megan Fox's body, and press was about comments Megan Fox had made about a powerful director. Leading up to its premiere, the target audience seemed to be guys who wanted to see Megan Fox on a big screen. When Jennifer's Body was about so much more than Jennifer's body, it was criticized.

In 2018, with the swell of the #MeToo movement, fans reclaimed Jennifer's Body. Without 2009 weighing down the conversation, just enough time had passed to make Jennifer feel new again, and to allow what she embodied to become novel.

The initial reactions to Jennifer's Body have not been erased by its cultural resurgence or cult-classic status. They're still there; the violent and gory and hard-to-stomach parts of the movie are all still there, too. But those reactions are quieter now, soft enough to leave plenty of room for the rest. As a society, we've shifted. We've been kicked in the shins, rocked to the core, and now, 15 years later, Jennifer is as much a hero as she is a villain.

Sometimes, I feel my teenage self clawing at me. I can feel her ghost watching me, waiting to see what I'll do. Because a decade past 16, I've got an evolving autoimmune condition and a body that has gone through so much. And still, healing does not erase. It continues and grows and shapes and shifts and kicks in the shins, rocks to the core, but no, it does not erase.

The movie's final shot is of Low Shoulder's lead, bloodied in a hotel room with a knife in his gut. Needy is seen walking away. This is after she gets locked up for killing Jennifer, after she picks at the bite that Jennifer took out of her shoulder, after she breaks free.

Needy becomes something like Jennifer by the end. She is even more feral, though, even more aching and starving. And Jennifer stirs inside of her like a feast, like penance in place of a prize, like a ghost.

Together, they are angry and misunderstood. They are a hell of their own. They are teenage girls, and they are hungry.

Arya Naidu is a writer and editor from St. Louis. She has an MFA from Arizona State University, where she earned a Swarthout Award in Writing and served as Social Media Manager for Hayden's Ferry Review. She is an ex fitness instructor (for now).