How Jennifer’s Body Captured the Rich Complexity of Queer Love
Popping out queer in maturity can embody a variety of rejigging of 1’s recollections. At the very least it did for me. “Did that friendship imply the identical factor to each of us?” “Was that admiration or a crush?” “What was that childhood fascination with Brendan Fraser and Keanu Reeves actually about?” I’d be mendacity if I mentioned I absolutely internalized the queerness of Jennifer’s Physique once I first noticed it in early 2010 — on DVD, months after lacking it in theatres. It could nonetheless be a couple of years earlier than I embraced and even acknowledged my very own bisexuality. However the movie spoke to me on a couple of ranges. Core to that was the connection between its protagonist Needy Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried) and her finest buddy Jennifer Examine (Megan Fox).
Jennifer’s Physique, from screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama, tells the story of a teen woman who’s possessed by a demon after a ritual to make some hipster indie rockers well-known goes fallacious. We see Jennifer’s transformation right into a literal man-eater (or boy-eater to be completely exact) from the attitude of her BFF and sometimes-lover Needy, who needs to save lots of not simply the boys Jennifer is snacking on but additionally Jennifer herself.
As has now been very well-documented, the movie was a serious miss each critically and commercially upon launch, later constructing a cult following over time. However Jennifer’s Physique wasn’t simply rejected. Its core themes have been ignored, thanks no less than partially to an abysmal advertising and marketing marketing campaign and twin backlashes in opposition to Cody and Fox. Amongst these core themes was the movie’s exploration of queer love. And it wasn’t a neat and tidy exploration of queer love. It didn’t give us purely evil queers, or happy-go-lucky flawless queers. It didn’t inform us what to really feel or the right way to really feel it. It didn’t even label Jennifer and Needy as a pair.
As a substitute, it gave us three-dimensional queer characters — flawed, conflicted, stunning, passionate, hurting, repressed, liberated — and allow them to exist onscreen as they have been, leaving it to us to tease aside what all of it meant on our personal.
This isn’t some act of queering by the use of subtext, although. The Jennifer/Needy dynamic is explicitly each platonic and romantic, with the road between these typically blurring. Needy introduces Jennifer through voiceover, watching admiringly as her lifelong bestie performs on the flag group. “Sandbox love by no means dies,” she says, because the Black Youngsters’ lyrics “you’re the woman that I’ve been dreaming of ever since I used to be a little bit woman” play on the soundtrack. If you happen to want an additional nudge, a fellow scholar, noticing Needy’s fixation, leans in and says, “You’re completely lesbigay.”
That’s one of many opening scenes. Later, we see a possessed Jennifer kissing Needy, who, regardless of rising suspicions about her buddy’s crimes, leans proper into it. “We at all times share your mattress when we have now slumber events,” Jennifer says, earlier than reminding her of their historical past of “enjoying boyfriend/girlfriend.”
Once I interviewed Karyn Kusama for my e-book on Jennifer’s Physique, she informed me it was necessary to her that the movie’s queer components be protected, that the connection between Needy and Jennifer be explored in all its wealthy dimensions. Sadly, the kiss particularly was largely written off as fodder for the titillation of straight teen boys.
The movie’s enduring enchantment, and its continued elevation as an underappreciated basic, is sort of not possible to learn exterior the complicated humanity of its heroines, and the deeply layered depth of their bond. “Once I consider myself as queer, I like to consider the entire prospects my humanity may entail,” Kusama informed me.
After we speak about capital-R Illustration, the implication is that there’s a proper manner and a fallacious technique to embody sure identities on display. After many years of some teams being handled as both one-dimensional, non-existent or disposable, the fallacious manner is pretty simple to identify. We all know it after we see it. However the best manner is more durable to pin down. It both works or it doesn’t. It feels both truthful or not. Jennifer’s Body feels truthful.
At a time when the CEO of Netflix is suggesting that leisure has no bearing on the actual world, I’m reminded that Jennifer’s Physique very a lot helped me think about the entire prospects my humanity may entail.
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