Jennifer's Body, continued.

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.

Jennifer's Body and Exploitation

Jennifer’s Body takes an approach to cannibalism that builds on the supernatural elements of Blood Diner and the constructions of masculinity explored in Ravenous and American Psycho. Unlike Blood Diner, the focus of the film is not on the ritual that creates the cannibal, but on her hunger: Its satiation makes a statement about the multiple masculine representations in small towns like the Devil’s Kettle of the film, as well as the limitations of female power within its context. In Jennifer’s Body, Jennifer (Megan Fox) is transformed into a cannibalistic succubus by a satanic ritual performed by indie band Low Shoulder to ensure their success. When she and best friend Anita “Needy” (Amanda Seyfried) hear them play at a local bar that suddenly catches fire, and Nikolai (Adam Brody), the band’s lead singer, recruits her for their ritual, thinking she’s a virgin. Because Jennifer has had multiple sexual experiences, however, the ceremony backfires, turning Jennifer into a demon-possessed monster who feeds on men.

Jennifer recounts the tale for Needy in a scene later in the film, and we see her experience with Low Shoulder in flashback. Jennifer calls them “agents of Satan with really cool haircuts.” From Jennifer’s point of view, we see the inside of their van on her drive away from the bar. There are occult books on the floor, and Nikolai declares, “God, I hate girls,” when she begins to cry. To stop them, Jennifer claims she is a virgin, not knowing they need a virgin sacrifice for their ritual. She tries to escape, but they’re determined because they believe it’s the only way they can succeed as musicians. As Nikolai explains:

“Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days? There are so many of us, and we're all so cute and it's like if you don't get on Letterman or some retarded soundtrack, you're screwed, okay? Satan is our only hope. We're working with the beast now. And we've got to make a really big impression on him. And to do that, we're going to have to butcher you. And bleed you. And then Dirk (Juan Riedinger) here is gonna wear your face.”

After saying some words from an Internet download, Nikolai begins stabbing her with a knife and then throws it into a bubbling whirlpool under the town’s waterfall. When Jennifer wakes up, she has been transformed into a demonic cannibal who feeds on men to maintain her beauty and strength. When her tongue lights up in flames after a kill, for example, she tells Needy she “feels like a god.”

By including sympathetic male victims, however, the film takes a more subtle approach to its ecofeminist message. Jennifer’s prey are not the typical villains found in revenge films but stock character types found in teen films: the class jock and the sensitive Goth poet. In both of the murder and cannibal scenes, the natural world responds to Jennifer’s violence, watching her raptly as she devours each of her frightened victims and providing a macabre interpretation of the woman/nature connection perpetuated by dualistic thought.

Blood Diner (1987) and Exploitation

In Blood Diner, Michael (Rick Burks) and George (Carl Crew) follow their Uncle Anwar’s (Drew Godderis) direction and construct what they call a perfect female body out of women’s body parts to host the spirit of a decadent ancient Egyptian goddess, Shitar. Their murdered victims become fodder for customers in their so-called vegetarian restaurant, providing humorous scenes of vegetarians inadvertently ingesting human flesh. 

Eventually, two inept but persistent detectives Sheba Jackson (LaNette La France) and Mark Shepherd (Roger Dauer), discover the boys’ plan to resurrect Shitar. They learn more about Shitar’s Lumerian Cult from an archeologist who explains how the gruesome goddess entices followers to participate in a literal blood feast. Michael and George plan to recreate this feast.

Although Michael and George successfully construct their goddess and bring her back to life with a ritual Uncle Anwar provides, their plan fails when a newly arisen Shitar feeds on George instead of the female virgin Connie (Lisa Elaina) they have provided her. Detective Shepherd shoots Michael, freeing Connie and angering George, who yells, “You killed my brother!” But Detective Jackson kicks George into a hungry Shitar’s fanged stomach, and she eats his head. With shots of electric low-budget effects, Shitar seems to explode in a blast, seemingly destroying her and the brothers who created her. The remains of the drugged revelers line the floor and stage in the club. When one wakes up, a police officer shoots her. 

But in a final scene, a woman in red walks away. It is Shitar transformed. A young man picks her up in his convertible and tells her, “You look hot, bothered, and horny.” Shitar smiles, revealing her fanged teeth. In this campy B cannibal horror film, Shitar may be the product of male exploitation. But she also destroys the colonizers who create her.

Blood Diner (1987) and Jennifer’s Body (2009): When Women’s Bodies Fight Back

Although director Jackie Kong’s Blood Diner and director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body differ in their approaches to the horror genre, they both integrate the supernatural into at least partial eco-feminist approaches to cannibalism. Blood Diner plays homage to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s B-horror Blood Feast (1963), transferring its tale of an Egyptian caterer combining body parts to resurrect a dormant Egyptian goddess to a late 1980s vegetarian restaurant. As an exploitation movie, Caryn James of The New York Times calls it “celluloid swill.” Blood Diner at its best is “bloody good fun,” according to Clint Morris of Film Threat, but at its worst, as Ken Hanke of the newspaper Mountain Xpress, suggests, the film is an “intentionally funny thriller [that] isn't as funny as the straight films it mocks.”

More satiric teen thriller than horror, Jennifer’s Body may be lampooned as “a premeditated cult classic” by Nick Pinkerton of The Village Voice, but it also received high marks from The New York Time’s A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and Dana Stevens of Slate.com. Scott declares, for example, “Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama take up a theme shared by slasher films and teenage comedies—that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know and sublimate—and turn it inside out.” According to Scott, Jennifer’s Body “tak[es] the complication and confusion of being a young woman as its central problem and operating principle.” Dana Stevens asserts, “Jennifer’s body is luscious and powerful, sexy and scary, maddening at times, but impossible to stop watching. So is Jennifer’s Body.” And Roger Ebert declares, “This isn’t your assembly-line teen horror thriller. The portraits of Jennifer and Needy are a little too knowing, the dialogue is a little too off-center, the developments are a little too quirky …. I’d rather see Jennifer’s Body again than Twilight.”

Despite their glaring genre differences, however, Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body both reverse representations of Wendigo/wetiko, exploring female bodies and the landscapes they are said to represent from an ecofeminist perspective. In Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body, women successfully defeat their oppressors, at least in the context of their respective films.

An Elephant Sitting Still and Ecology

A three hour and fifty minute film set in a gray industrial mining city somewhere in Northeast China, Bo Hu’s first film (he died before the final cut of the film was released) focuses on the lives of four characters who ultimately share the same horrific space and ecology, similar to what Krzystof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue did in 2000. To highlight both characters and their connection to this eco-disaster, Hu throws in the dynamic use of the long take via Steadicam that PT Anderson displayed in Boogie Nights and deep focus exploitation of space that is clearly influenced by Citizen Kane, sometimes showing us four or five planes of action at the same time. The film’s plot lines ultimately converge, and we and the characters are left in a limbo of a very long take late at night. The possible influence of Robert Altman’s vision jumps out at this end point.

The clearest and most depressing aspect of this film is not the characters’ dilemmas, nor the potential solutions that may unfold (well after the story is completed), but their situation and environment. Each character is having a horrible day. A grandfather is being told by his son and daughter-in-law that they want him to leave his own apartment for a nursing home, so they can have more space, and his beloved dog dies in a very distasteful way. Two high school students find themselves on the run (right out of Rebel Without a Cause). One because he has violently defended a friend who lied to him about stealing a phone, and the other because she was outed on social media for her affair with the high school Vice Dean. All three have miserable home lives.

Added to the mix is a local gangster whose affair with his best friend’s wife leads to her husband’s suicide, right out the bedroom window they just occupied. One could walk away trying to keep this hyper melodramatic set of storylines in some kind of logical order and actually succeeding in doing just that. Bo Hu weaves these lives together in spaces that are more depressing than their personal problems.

From an eco-perspective, this city is also a nightmare: Gray streets, blue gray barely illuminated interiors, endless mining trains pulling across a flat landscape that has been sucked dry by industrialization. The need to run away is dramatically structured by the plot of the film, but escaping this grim landscape would be reason enough. The air is clearly thick with pollution, and living conditions are cramped and soulless. The grandfather’s (a pensioner) trip to the nursing home his family want to stow him is a descent into purgatory. Every time a character turns, their stories get worse—but not as bad as the physical world they inhabit. An Elephant Sitting Still offers only a dark promise of change in a night-time shot outside a bus, and we’re left wondering whether or not the elephant’s cries accompanying our characters’ dimly lit soccer game mean this dire eco-disaster will end. 

Thank you, Joe!

Denis's Trouble Every Day and the Wendigo Cycle, continued

In the second brutal cannibal scene in the film, Shane confronts hotel maid Christelle in the hotel employee locker room to (the film suggests) avoid having sex with his wife and devouring her. After the multiple images of Christelle as both maid and human, however, the camera pulls away instead of veering in on her body as landscape. 

What begins as a stolen sexual moment shown in medium long shot, however, becomes a violent rape scene amplified by Christelle’s unanswered screams. Unlike the vivid cannibal sequence with Coré, however, the horror is revealed visually primarily after the attack, with shots of Christelle’s now-motionless body and Shane’s bloodied face. Tears run through his blood, as well, matching the lines of blood on the curtain during his post-murder shower.

He and June are reunited with a puppy to provide the warmth he cannot. But the suggestion that Shane’s one attack might have satiated him becomes less reliable when juxtaposed with June’s frightened and distrustful eyes when he hugs her and asks her to take him home. 

Although Trouble Every Day complicates a frontier myth that constructs a land as female to justify the exploitation of its resources, its conclusion offers no solution to the destructive results of the metaphor. Instead, Shane’s seeming ability to contain his desires by satisfying them through the literal cannibalizing of the native “other” continues the wetiko/Wendigo cycle Forbes describes.

Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, continued

In Denis’s Trouble Every Day, the metaphor of the land as woman is complicated in two ways: Coré becomes both cannibal and cannibalized because her Wendigo disease was forced upon her by Leo and Shane’s experiments with exploited South American resources. And even though he leaves Paris unscathed, Shane too contracts the infection from their post-colonial research. 

Defying the frontier myth, both male and female bodies become landscapes in Trouble Every Day, especially in the film’s two key horrific cannibal scenes. In the first, Coré seduces a neighbor, who breaks into her house and pulls down the boards Leo has hammered across her bedroom door. She teases him first, climbing on top and kissing him. But then her kisses turn into bites, continuing even when he yelps for her to stop. 

The extreme close-ups suggest the intruder’s body is a landscape, with a camera hovering over body parts while she bites and pulls off his flesh. She kisses him as he struggles to breath but pokes his wounds with her fingers and laughs. The approach, as Ian Murphy states, is “anthropological,” with “copulating human bodies registered in an unusual manner: not as clear figurations or distinct forms, but as dislocated swatches that took several moments for a viewer to recognize and identify as muscle, hair, or skin.” The result is a transformation of body into a landscape on which, as Laura U. Marks puts it, Coré, “grazes” (162).