Jennifer’s Physique As a woman—I imply, after I was youthful—I might watch movies about lovely ladies within the hope that I may by some means be taught magnificence, the fairytale story; that, by proximity, magnificence would rub off on me; that I may contour myself in its picture, or put it on. I used to be irrevocably satisfied that magnificence would save my life.
Stunning ladies reside life on simple mode. Folks provide you with no matter you need while you’re a lovely lady. That is type of true, however nothing in life is free. In return, what they demand is you.
Jennifer’s Physique is a movie about finest buddies, BFFs with matching necklaces to show it: Jennifer Verify (Megan Fox, token lovely lady of the 2010s) and Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried, made down into Jennifer’s awkward sidekick). It is usually a movie about magnificence: its privileges, its torments, its hierarchy. On the prime of the pyramid perches the eponymous Jennifer, who’s the common object of want.
The simple joke is embedded within the title—it’s Jennifer’s physique that everybody loves; Jennifer’s physique that, in 2009, was the movie’s largest selling point; Jennifer’s physique that strikes by way of three-quarters of the movie after Jennifer, the human lady, is sacrificed in a satanic ritual. Right here, she is doubled, or changed—actual Jennifer is gone, tied up and stabbed to demise by an indie band making an attempt to run a Faustian get-big-quick scheme, supernaturally switched out for a bloodthirsty succubus sporting her pores and skin.
Even earlier than she will get kidnapped, killed and possessed, Jennifer is a fairly dangerous good friend—she’s dismissive, aggressive, controlling. Magnificence lends a Young-Girl a sure form of energy, nevertheless it’s at all times, clearly, a mortgage; braided with a painful consciousness of its personal subjective nature, its temporality, it totes alongside its attendant insecurities, which simply harden into cruelties. That is the fantastic thing about girlhood, of highschool dances and faculty events: you might be solely lovely by comparison. You might be entered in a horse race, positioned in a line-up. Simply girly issues: if you happen to haven’t had a poisonous BFF, you’ve been one.
In fact Needy turns into secondary. Even Jennifer is subordinate to her personal picture.
We don’t see Jennifer preparing within the first twenty minutes of the movie; she simply seems on the display screen, instantly lovely. After her possession, she is pressured to protect her magnificence (straight equal together with her vitality, her literal life power) by eviscerating boys, consuming their souls. Magnificence is high-maintenance.
Jennifer indiscriminately smears basis over her face, which—we’re directed to imagine by the tears in her eyes, by their sunken hollows—pales compared to its former glory. Now that she is not a lovely lady, effortlessly so, her grooming rituals are determined, abject. They remind us—and her—that, regardless of her new boy-killing capabilities, she’s only a shadow of the lady she was.
To make your self up is to create your self; to adorn your self with a face, a determine. The digicam implies that Jennifer (possessed) placing make-up on won’t ever be as lovely as Jennifer (alive), whose reminiscence looms over her from its place on the dresser, smiling in miniature, with shiny pores and skin and lips and hair. The brutal economic system of magnificence—in its efficiency, the beauty-relation, it takes as a lot because it provides. Textbook poisonous good friend.
Nobody actually tells you this while you’re a woman, although. You simply suppose magnificence will save your life. For the girlbloggers who worship Jennifer, the movie constitutes an unattainable revenge fantasy: a manifestation of the violence ladies do upon themselves—upon one another—turned again at a world that calls for magnificence, methods you into it, then consumes it remorselessly.
Magnificence offers Jennifer with entry—to boys, to booze, to the band that ruins her life—and informs her adolescent confidence, nevertheless it comes with strings hooked up. Although she wields it like a weapon, the blade cuts each methods. She is desired—simply desired, by no means feared (till her demonic fangs emerge), by no means beloved (besides by Needy), by no means revered. She doesn’t appear to have any buddies, simply admirers and targets and ex-flings. So what if she will be able to seduce anybody? So what if she will get free pictures on the native bar?
Jennifer’s bravado—the adornment, the false floor, the flawless portrait—belies her struggling, her loneliness, her single-minded attachment to Needy (who has a boyfriend), the naked face within the mirror: the one she’s making an attempt to hide. When the BFFs lastly, inevitably come to blows, Needy strikes at Jennifer’s mortal weak spot—her insecurity, her futile makes an attempt to disguise it. How could she ever be insecure? She was the Snowflake Queen.
It doesn’t matter what number of crowns you win, what number of boys you eat. In photos, boxed and packaged for comparability and consumption. beautiful girls are definitionally insecure. The twin engines of competitors and commodification breed vicious self-criticism; vainness, the other side of the coin, breeds violent self-obsession.
On this story, everybody loses. Like they are saying—beauty is pain.
