Jennifer's Body Problem
My last newsletter was about an obscure group of Christian mystics, so the logical next step is to discuss vampires. Obviously.
Not to sound too much like a Vice-Media-brand lukewarm take (but doing so anyway), but Jennifer's Body is probably one of the greatest films of our time. It's body horror, but not over the top. It's a vampire story with just the right amount of Camp. And it serves as a reminder that the truest theories of embodiment are best expressed by teen girls. Popular cinematic output likes to pigeon-hole teenaged girl characters as ditzy, small-minded, hormonal, sex-obsessed characters. And popular literary criticism likes to respond to this with the superficial feminist critique that this is reductive and flattens teen girls and their lived experience. "Teenagers have elaborate, complex interior lives!" "It's unfair to only portray girls as being slaves to their bodies and hormones!" I don't necessarily disagree with these criticisms, but I do think they're paying too much lip service to a mind-body dualism that robs the profundity from living and experiencing the world through the body of a teen girl. The raging hormones of adolescence makes teen-hood feel like an extended LSD trip. Adjusting to a monthly menstruation cycle where you feel hot, flirty, sexually insatiable, groggy, insecure, depressed, and anxious all in the span of 30 days is wild. It really does make us obsess over love interests and develop crushes at a particularly high-speed rate. And while I can't speak to the experience of growing up as a teen boy, I'd comfortably wager it's a similarly weird roller coaster. This doesn't preclude intelligence, though; teens—and teen girls specifically—can have 7 different crushes while understanding the literary theories of The Picture of Dorian Gray. But I think that people expect the material reality of growing up in a hormone soup to be suppressed in high-brow media. This is why vampires are a great archetypal tool to suss this out.
Making a movie about an adolescent human sacrifice victim who becomes a soulless, eternally damned vampire who eats the boys she sleeps with is just audacious enough to explore teen girlhood by circumventing the more typical RomCom plots and thus, avoiding the same old tired second wave feminist analysis. In becoming a vampire, Jennifer has the freedom to succumb to her hunger and chase boys to feast upon. Her story is centered on the quests she makes in service to her bodily appetite. Making a character a vampire allows for eroticism to come back to the forefront of her plot. I do sort of think that vampire lore eliminates the need for Georges Bataille's book Erotism, but whatever. It's still a great book.
There's also nothing better than Megan Fox saying, "I am a God" while burning her tongue with a lighter and watching the ashen tissue magically grow back in seconds. This reminds me of the countless hagiographies of teen girl mystics, but with a subtle subversion. So many girl-saint stories are focused on their mystical encounters with God, most of them being erotic in nature. Monastic young girls are given holy knowledge through these physical brushes with the Divine (and usually as a reward for committing to a vow of chastity, or refusing a marriage offer). It is characterized as "grace," but the gift of these experiences is both physical and intellectual in nature. The feeling granted from miraculous healing of wounds, or even sexual ecstasy, provides profound knowledge about the universe and the mysteries behind it.
Ultimately, a lot of frivolous RomComs are corny and do tend to cheapen the experience and wisdom of girlhood. The plots are often outrageous, or mundane and it just becomes too silly. The girl's body is problematized as a thing overburdened with anxious desire, rather than as something that can be used to acquire wisdom through said desire. We always think that a human—especially a human literary character—is a creature of reason, and all characters must have some sort of reasoned arc in order to be legitimate. Any focus on the body means the character is objectified, and either the author has intentionally objectified the character, or their objectification becomes the central focus of the critique arguing that their objecthood somehow distances them from being human. A flesh-eating monster, however, is empowered in her body; she is allowed to simply be a body in search of sustenance. People are both objects and subjects. I think also that the resistance to portraying real human feelings expressed through physical experience is an affront to mystical spirituality. Life isn't just about reason, and reason isn't the only thing that produces knowledge. I will gladly die on this hill.