By W. Scott Poole
There are plenty of horror fanboys, and a lot of fan girls, who’ve been anxiously waiting to take a peek at Jennifer’s Body. The film’s combination of Megan Fox’s sex appeal and Diablo Cody’s signature dialogue (made famous in Juno and the United States of Tara) offers a feast for two disparate and usually incompatible groups: adolescent boys and those who like to like to see the conventions of the horror subverted with a bit of clever irony.
Fox plays Jennifer Check, head of the cheerleading squad who is deeply and sincerely lusted after by every raging hormone in her high school. In a nod to the evangelical paranoia of the 1980s, a “satanic rock band” (who in this 21st century update is an emo band called “Low Shoulder”) attempts to use Jennifer as a virginal sacrifice to Satan. Bad things happen, we learn, when you try to sacrifice a non-virgin to the Devil. Jennifer becomes an avatar of the Evil One and begins killing, and eating, every boy she can seduce while playing out a drama of toxic friendship with her best female friend, aptly named “Needy.”
Horror films, even the schlocky ones, draw on a host of cultural and religious anxieties. Panic over both female and male teenage sexuality, and its alleged dangers is certainly not a new theme in American culture. In 1734, Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards complained, with a thinly veiled metaphor, that the teens of his parish spent too much time in “company keeping.”
But Cody taps into an even more powerful stream of American religion and popular culture that I explore in my new book Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Jennifer is not the first woman to find her body becoming an instrument of Satan in the popular imagination. One woman accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England appeared to her victim floating above his bed and wearing a red bodice. Late nineteenth century discourses about contraception and abortion regularly made a connection between female sexuality and demonic influence (an image in the book from the National Police Gazette shows a young woman with scaly demon emerging from her vagina with a caption that reads “The Female Abortionist”). In the early twentieth century, silent film gave us “vamps” like Adele Farrington who, in a pre-code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan told adolescents a similar story of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, attempted to lead men to destruction.
Cody has tried to turn the horror convention of the female victim of male violence on its head. Unfortunately, she may have simply replicated another, darker convention of women as source of evil. At the end of the day, Jennifer’s Body may have evoked more demons than it exorcised.
W. Scott Poole is associate professor in history at the College of Charleston. He is the author of the forthcoming Satan in America: The Devil We Know.
I've been waiting for this movie for so long but it didn't satisfy me after watching. It's boring and story doesn't get my interest.
Posted by: movies and advertising | December 04, 2009 at 02:24 AM