On September 18, 2009, “Jennifer’s Body” hit over 2,500 cinemas nationwide. It, previously, had its world premiere at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was effectively that year’s “The Goldfinch,” on September 10. (One glowing review, from Variety, called the film “not exactly lifeless;” our own Playlist review isn’t very charitable either, granted, it’s got a stick in its craw about the adaptation of the original screenplay, which the reviewer loved). It would go on to become the 118th-best performing film of the year, net dismal scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, and barely recoup its $16 million budget domestically. But 10 years after its apparent failure, “Jennifer’s Body” has gone on to become a beloved cult masterpiece among the audience for which it was originally intended: young women. Now, critics are intent on celebrating — and rewriting — its herstory.
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“Jennifer’s Body” was screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up to “Juno.” Still radiant in the gleam of her first Academy Award win, studios gave the screenwriter carte blanche to create her dream project. Cody, a self-proclaimed, outspoken feminist, conjured up a preternaturally gorgeous teenage girl (Jennifer, played by Megan Fox) who, after becoming the accidental slutty sacrifice in an emo band’s pledge to the devil, is reborn as a succubus who must eat men to retain her beauty. The film is told from the perspective of Jennifer’s mousy counterpart, Needy (Amanda Seyfried), whose already-fraught relationship to her callous, mercurial best friend strains further once said best friend starts committing murder.
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On paper, it’s the kind of horror film that — post-critical smashes like “The Lure,” “Revenge,” “The Witch,” and “Thoroughbreds” — would probably kill today. (Even the most experimental episode of “Barry,” which features a young girl, bloody-mouthed and screaming, owes a debt to it.) But ten years ago, critics called it a “dumb [movie] made by smart people” that “sinks like a stone.” Director Karyn Kusama, a woman of color, was relegated to the studio-funding-less margins of Hollywood for the foreseeable future. People began to question Diablo Cody’s wit. Critics called Megan Fox “Fandango bait to the fanboys” and “a sexpot who [can’t]…act well,” lamenting that she “does not appear naked.” To say that these reviews missed the point of “Jennifer’s Body,” a self-referential exploration of femininity, girlhood trauma, and Megan Fox’s own hypersexual public persona, would be an understatement. Yet countless critics, both male and female (though mostly male), bemoaned its willful ambiguity: “Jennifer’s Body” was too serious, too glib, too sexy, not sexy enough. Like the women who made it, “Jennifer’s Body” refused to walk the patriarchal line, and it was subsequently punished.
“There was a lot of negativity around the movie, because I was very outspoken at that time,” Diablo Cody told me in an interview last year. “Megan Fox was very outspoken at that time, and was talking about Michael Bay and all kinds of shit … But she was punished for it. People don’t like women with big mouths, and there were a lot of them on that project. So, you know, let’s chalk it up to misogyny.”
Today, critics are indeed blaming the film’s failure on misogyny — plus male-gaze-y marketing, the pre-#MeToo era, and a fundamental misunderstanding of lesbian camp. There was a small boom in pro-Jennifer essays online last fall, as (mostly female) critics recalled the film’s unrealized potential. As Constance Grady pointed out in Vox, “in 2009, it was reasonable for swaths of critics on Rotten Tomatoes to assume that the default lens for a teen horror flick was a straight male one.” That presumed perspective was hardly a coincidence: Of the reviews aggregated for the film on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic combined, 153 were written by men and 42 — less than a quarter — were written by women. Though of course plenty of women hated the movie and plenty of men liked it, the growing appreciation for “Jennifer’s Body” points not only to a broader cultural shift but also to stronger esteem for female voices in cultural criticism.
Slate’s film critic Dana Stevens, one of the few to praise “Jennifer’s Body” in 2009, said via e-mail that she’s defended or recommended the film “in many a late-night bar conversation” over the last ten years, mainly due to its “audacity and black humor.” Looking back, she also recognizes the film’s outstanding #MeToo resonance, particularly in its depiction of its villains, the indie band Low Shoulder: “The deal they made with the devil — partly based on their false and sexist assumption that Jennifer was a virgin — catapults them into a world of success and public adoration, while literally ripping their victim apart and condemning her to an afterlife of unquenchable hunger and rage, a good analogy for the plight of an assault survivor.”
Meagan Navarro, who advocated for the film’s cult classic last year in Bloody Disgusting, said, “It’s long past time we embrace [‘Jennifer’s Body’].”
“I really wanted to do the film justice,” she told me, when asked why she felt the need to defend it nine years after its release. She wanted to give it the serious consideration “that it was never afforded upon first release, especially because the trauma themes, in particular, might help anyone going through something similar.”
Anne Cohen, who profiled the film as part of her Refinery29 column Writing Critics’ Wrongs, wrote me that “Jennifer’s Body” is “the perfect example of why we need diverse voices in film criticism.” Like Navarro, Cohen, and Vox’s Constance Grady, who all saw the film for the first time before they became critics, I watched “Jennifer’s Body” long before I studied film in college or published my first review. But the film’s outstandingly bad reception left me, a gay teenage girl, equally torn between wanting to kiss my best friend and howl like a leviathan, feeling even more at odds with the world around me than I already did. Though it’s temptingly meta to imagine myself and my “Jennifer’s Body”-defending comrades as the Needy Lesnickis of film crit, taking down all the Low Shoulders who dismissed, scorned, or fetishized the movie, I didn’t become a critic out of my own revenge fantasy. I did so because I wasn’t hearing my own voice reflected in the cultural conversation.
In a post-Weinstein, camp-gone-mainstream world, critics might be more ready for a homoerotic monster parable about how the world (to borrow a Jennifer phrase) eats girls’ souls and shits them out. Karyn Kusama helmed the much-lauded Nicole Kidman vehicle “Destroyer” last fall, leading many reviewers to realize that’s she’s actually very good at what she does. Diablo Cody continues to make female-centered stories that polarize, but often delight, critics. (Last year’s “Tully” was a festival favorite.) While there are some parts of the 2009 critical swamp that may never be retroactively drained — the hits to Megan Fox’s burgeoning career, for one — it’s comforting to see the outlook on works like “Jennifer’s Body” evolve and progress.
Call it a #MeToo revelation, a case for louder and more diverse voices in film criticism, or both. Either way, today’s attitude toward the cult horror hit offers a swift rebuttal to last decade’s detractors: “Wow, nice insult, Hannah Montana. You got any more harsh digs?”
