Needy Lesnecki (Amanda Seyfried, “A Mouthful of Air”) put it best: “Hell is a teenage girl.” Her own teenagehood is defined by fawning and fumbling over her lifelong best friend, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox, “Dakota”). Jennifer is cruel, controlling and, by the end of the film, a literal man-eater. Even more importantly, she represents the bisexual monster in the closet. Her dynamic with Needy is messy, and it provides a shockingly dimensional look at the raw and repressed sides of Queer teenagehood.
To introduce Jennifer, narrator Needy word vomits a stream of compliment upon compliment, only to have her daydream interrupted by a classmate saying she’s “Totally lesbi-gay” for her attractive, mean and cooler friend. This is in the very first scene and sets the almost ironically Queer tone for the rest of the film. It almost feels embarrassing to admit this scene in “Jennifer’s Body” is what introduced me to the possibility of a woman being Queer. My own digital presence aside, it indirectly introduced the word “lesbian” into my prepubescent dictionary. Queerness was a completely abstract concept at this point. As a sixth grader, I didn’t yet know any gay family, celebrities or friends. There wasn’t any blatant homophobia in my upbringing, especially from my immediate family and close friends, but rather a glaring absence of anything deviating from heterosexuality. Young and unknowingly Queer, this was a complete absence of self.
The plot of “Jennifer’s Body” is exquisitely absurd — an unsuccessful indie band, Low Shoulder, attempts to sacrifice a virgin to Satan in exchange for unparalleled success. Unbeknownst to the band, their target virgin, Jennifer, is not quite a virgin, and she refuses to die in peace. Instead, she is turned into a succubus with an appetite for (mostly) boys. From this point on, she eats a variety of men to sustain herself, often choosing her prey based on their proximity to Needy.
After the Satanic ritual, she seeks out Needy. Blood-drenched and delirious, Jennifer saunters around Needy’s kitchen looking for a meal of meat. A terrified and naive Needy repeatedly asks what’s wrong and tries to dissuade Jennifer from eating her mom’s thawing chicken. Jennifer ignores her and vomits a black, tar-like liquid all over the kitchen. Before leaving, Jennifer pulls Needy close to her and breathes down her neck, slowly moving to a gentle kiss and biting Needy’s throat. There is a brief flicker of temptation — to eat her friend and occasional sweetheart — before she asks if Needy is scared and throws her into the wall.
Horror aside, my own experiences with Queerness feel more similar to the intense friendship between Needy and Jennifer than other pieces of media representing relatively-realistic teenage love. Lucy and Amy sleep with the enemy, Megan and Graham run away together and Esti and Ronnit find each other again in adulthood. But those weren’t my experiences, and I will never get to have that type of story.
I mourn the absence of teenage fantasies and discoveries. I wonder how different life would’ve been if those years were full of young and clumsy loves, rather than the deeply repressed and yet somehow mutually obsessive, borderline humiliating, intense friendships I had with girls in my same position. There is melancholy in this irreplaceable loss. Still, I feel an exhilarated type of envy for the budding Queer kids who do get these experiences, the ones who won’t have to stumble into a movie and then a decade-long mediation of what their Queerness really is.
This article feels like a choked-out confessional. There was a sense of terror in recognizing my own Queerness — when I discovered the concept of Queerness, I knew nearly immediately it fit. There was no transitional period between my discovery of Queerness and my recognition of being Queer myself, so there was no time to warm up to this new identity. My own Queerness can still feel like a hard thing to hold. It is slippery; it is something that I can’t seem to keep grasped between my hands.
In “Jennifer’s Body,” Queerness is a knife wielded between Jennifer and Needy. They desperately need each other but ultimately destroy each other.
In the scene that most shocked my younger self, Needy loses her virginity in an underwhelming exchange with her boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons, “The Late Bloomer”) while in a dual narrative with Jennifer. In a different house at the same time, Jennifer is seducing and eating Collin Gray (Kyle Gallner, “Scream”), Needy’s emo-poet friend. In this montage, Needy’s strange psychological connection with Jennifer is further instilled — while in the missionary position with her boyfriend, she is envisioning Jennifer and repeating words that Jennifer is saying in real life to Collin. This eerily resembles an earlier scene in which Needy acutely senses Jennifer’s presence without actually seeing her and shows that their connection existed far before Jennifer turned supernatural.
After this montage, they end up in bed together. Needy runs home from Chip’s bedroom to find Jennifer sitting in her room, waiting for her to arrive. Jennifer nonchalantly confirms the fears and suspicions Needy has had regarding her bloodlust. To amplify the emotional dissonance felt by Needy, Jennifer begins seducing her after the confession. This, in itself, is nothing new to their dynamic — Jennifer and Needy often blur the lines of platonic and romantic love. She nostalgically asks Needy to “play mommy and daddy like they did when they were little” as she pushes off her glasses and twirls Needy’s hair. Finally releasing an hour’s worth of tension, they spend one of the few silent scenes in the film kissing and holding each other.
I was in eighth grade the first time I came out. She was my best friend, a confident and open-minded middle schooler who let me cry and struggle through my realizations and embarrassments. I’ve passively come out what feels like a hundred times since then, but never publicly, and never like this. Only friends and strangers online know my most open secret — something that can be easily elicited or guessed by anyone besides my family. Jennifer, refreshingly bold, states that she “goes both ways” before attempting to eat her more-than-best friend Needy. She is explicit and blunt in her sexuality — two things I have never been. A joke in conversation or a side remark has been the extent to which I discuss this part of myself, even though I never exactly sought to keep it private. In many ways, having the knowledge of my Queerness at such a young age was an immense privilege. Since that first vocalization of it, I have known with a sturdy sureness that I am, in fact, Queer.
Rather than repeated stabbings, satanic rituals and the demonic entity inside Jennifer, it is Needy that ultimately kills her. In yet another homoerotic montage, Needy appears at Jennifer’s house to avenge her boyfriend — the one Jennifer enviously killed — and end the bloodlust that’s taken hold of Jennifer. They levitate in a mid-air murder tango, and Jennifer bites into Needy before licking the blood off of her lips. Still, Jennifer isn’t killed until Needy rips off the matching BFF necklaces they share and stabs Jennifer where the necklace once laid. In their final exchange, Jennifer mutters “My tit,” to which Needy replies “No, your heart.”
To tie together the ending, we then see flashes of Needy’s final act: killing the mediocre indie band that caused this entire mess. With this act, she avenges her dead friends and the lives Low Shoulder indirectly ruined. It reads as an act of forgiveness for what has happened and all that could’ve been, especially between Jennifer and herself.
I hadn’t intended this article to be anything too narrative or intimate, but instead just a light story on the absurdity of a film that defined my Queerness. A film I still often watch, a film too ahead of its time, a dark comedy that seems to be a recurring Halloween costume. There is nothing new or revolutionary in this confession, but it is shiny and terrifying and vulnerable all the same.
Daily Arts Writer Ava Burzycki can be reached at burzycki@umich.edu.