THE WAY MICHAEL BAY photographs Megan Fox in the Transformers movies—as a teenage boy’s pinup fantasy and yet hilariously more woman than a boy can handle—is far in advance of the demon/victim role Fox plays in Jennifer’s Body. Even though Jennifer’s Body screenwriter Diablo (Juno) Cody makes post-feminist noises that flaunt then punish female sexuality, the film is actually utterly confused about what life feels like for a girl—or boy.
Cody’s back-to-high-school premise pits Fox’s dark-haired Jennifer against blonde Needy (Amanda Seyfried), best friends demonstrating the classic bad/good, lust/love female dichotomy that comes from Betty and Veronica all the way back to Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel.
Basically unserious, Jennifer’s Body is mixed up about the privilege of teenage sexual license, the buzz of our culture’s rampant licentiousness, and it adds a strange undercurrent of guilt—both Jennifer and Needy suffer the dangers of sexual activity and social expectation.Their exploitation by boys, revenge/protection of boys and eventual mortal conflict between each other (“Jennifer’s evil. Not high school evil, but evil,” Needy says) all derive from adolescent insecurity and spiritual resentment. It’s not any truer than Heathers, Mean Girls or Juno— although gullible kids might think so.
If Jennifer’s Body doesn’t easily slot into any previous horror movie’s moral template—not Cat People, Carrie nor Fatal Attraction—that’s only due to Cody’s own confusion and director Karyn (Girlfight) Kusama’s poor skills.They’re not knowledgeable enough to create comparable archetypes of sexual experience.Vanessa Hudgens and Alyson Michalka played more complex and affecting versions of these roles in Bandslam—and neither was embarrassed with the name Needy. Between Juno and Needy, Diablo Cody pathetically reveals her own personal issues. And yet, this over-calibrated genre manipulation proves she’s Hollywood’s most superficial slickster since Tarantino.
Despite its girly credits, Jennifer’s Body isn’t deeper than a Michael Bay money shot; it’s just an opportunistic, pseudo-feminist, sex-phobic alternative. Diablo Cody nit-picks the culture that makes Megan Fox’s sexuality possible whereas Bay brandishes Fox the way WWII pilots painted Rita Hayworth on jet bombers.
