The first victim we see is Jonas (Josh Emerson), a football player upset about losing his best friend in the bar fire. She lures him into the woods and claims his friend told her they would make a great couple: “Feel my heart, Jonas. I think it’s broken,” she exclaims and begins taking off his clothes. The atmosphere grows eerie when animals begin surrounding them in a weird Disney’s Snow White moment. When Jonas looks at the animals nervously, Jennifer tells him they’re waiting, and opens his shirt and pants. “You’re going to see your buddy really soon,” she tells him and attacks.
When she lures the Goth poet Colin (Kyle Gallner) to a deserted house, rats and roaches appear right before she kills and eats him. Each of these masculine character types, the film suggests, both satisfy and strengthen the supernatural Wendigo. By choosing males so willing to ravish her perfect body, however, Jennifer serves as both cannibal and cannibalized, perhaps ineffectively avenging the damage done to frontiers of nature and women’s bodies.
Jennifer’s role changes, however, when she shifts her attention to Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s boyfriend. Unlike Josh and Colin, Chip rejects Jennifer’s advances after she lures him to a pool house on the way to the school dance. Needy hears his calls, but when she reaches him, Jennifer has already bitten him. He’s dying but hands Needy pepper spray to protect her. Jennifer vomits black blood and rises above the pool: “Do you have to undermine everything I do? You’re such a player hater,” she tells Needy. Needy confronts her about Chip, and before Jennifer can kill her, Chip spears Jennifer with a pool tool. “You gotta tampon?” she asks Needy and jumps out a window. “I should have believed you. I’m sorry,” Chip says and tells Needy he loves her.
By murdering Chip, Jennifer has also transformed Needy, sparking her to return for revenge with a box cutter. Jennifer bites her, but Needy cuts a cross into Jennifer’s body and takes her BFF necklace. Jennifer falls back on the bed and Needy stabs her in the heart. Jennifer’s breathing stops, and her color returns. Jennifer’s mom finds Needy, and in the next scene, Needy is in solitary at the mental hospital that opened the film. She tells the audience, “I’m a different person now.” She has absorbed some of Jennifer’s powers because she survived the bite and floats up to a high window in her cell and escapes in her bunny slippers. The knife that turned Jennifer into a cannibal appears, along with the red balls from science experiments. Needy picks up the knife and hitchhikes toward Low Shoulder’s next concert, telling a driver “tonight will be their last concert.”
The film ends with a photomontage of the band after their concert, first with groupies partying in their hotel suite. Then images change to blood and their bodies covered in plastic. The photographs look like forensic evidence now. A last shot shows us Needy in a surveillance camera walking away and pulling up her hood. Needy defeats both cannibals in Jennifer’s Body, destroying an indie band whose success was built on Jennifer’s violated body and the succubus they perhaps inadvertently created. By rejecting the construction of woman as victim, Jennifer’s Body may also disrupt a pastoral fantasy and frontier myth that feminize nature in order to exploit it.
Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body illustrate the negative consequences of a pastoral myth that constructs frontiers of both the natural world and of women’s bodies as nurturing mothers or seductive and promiscuous whores. They may also demonstrate the need for “a partnership ethic” like that historian Carolyn Merchant describes, in which “the needs of both humans and nonhumans would be dynamically balanced” (206). These films leave viewers with more complex visions of cannibalism, a gendered disease with multiple sources but only one cure.
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