B. Ruby Rich claims that films by women often receive praise for certain elements, while feminist undertones are ignored. Rich goes on to say that because of this feminist theory needs to focus on how films by women are being received. The best example of this is Jennifer's Body.
Nearly 10 years after the feminist horror comedy Jennifer’s Body premiered, flopped, and was declared dead on arrival, it’s beginning to live again. It may have gotten a 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes when it came out — and, even worse, a 34 percent audience rating — but the narrative is shifting: The internet is suddenly full of critics reclaiming the movie and naming it a forgotten feminist classic.
Here’s what made Jennifer’s Body an easy-to-hate flop in 2009, and what makes it a beloved cult classic in the making in 2020. When Jennifer’s Body premiered, it was viewed as a sex romp for straight teen boys, and as such, it was a failure. The marketing leaned heavily on the idea that Megan Fox was hot and that marketing campaign emerged from two years of relentless media coverage of Megan Fox, sex symbol.
It’s become a case study in what we value in movies and what we dismiss, and how those values can shift over the course of a decade. The movie’s poster featured Fox in a miniskirt and tank top doing a leg-emphasizing pose on a chair with “HELL YES” scrawled on the blackboard behind her. The trailer is mostly composed of shots of Jennifer strutting around her school hallway; in trailers and interviews, the publicity team hyped up the idea that Fox and Seyfried were going to kiss. If you knew anything about Jennifer’s Body when it came out in 2009, it was probably that it was going to give you the chance to see Megan Fox being sexy.
But when you try to view Jennifer’s Body as a spooky sex romp for men, it disappoints. None of the men in this movie have enough of a presence for audience members to project themselves onto, the way audiences could with Kristen Stewart’s Bella in Twilight.
The men here — including a post-The OC Adam Brody and a pre-Parks and Recreation Chris Pratt — are mostly just bodies to be disposed of and are either entirely unthreatening or simultaneously threatening and pathetic.
The central mystery of Jennifer’s Body is the question of what happened to Jennifer in the van with the band. While we don’t find out the answer until close to the end of the movie, it’s framed from the beginning as a potential sexual assault.The band drove her into the woods, tied her up, and sacrificed her to Satan in a bid for fame and fortune. But because Jennifer wasn’t a virgin, the sacrifice went wrong, and it ended with her becoming possessed by a demon and craving human flesh. In a post-#MeToo world, the implications of this storyline look uncomfortably familiar. It’s the story of a group of powerful men sacrificing a girl’s body on the altar of their own professional advancement — and it’s also the story of them using her torment as a bonding activity.
What Jennifer’s Body offers up in response to the trauma and tragedy of what happened to Jennifer in the van is the cathartic fantasy of what happens next, of Jennifer turning her trauma against her attackers, of her using her victimized, violated body to wreak bloody vengeance on the patriarchy. And lo, suddenly Jennifer’s Body is not a sex fantasy — it’s a revenge fantasy.
And that revenge fantasy is grounded in the emotional truth of the toxic, codependent, profoundly meaningful friendship between Needy and Jennifer. “Sandbox love never dies,” says Needy at the beginning of the movie. And throughout the rest of the film, even as Needy and Jennifer turn ever more firmly against each other, even as they work to hurt each other as badly as they can, it’s always clear that theirs is the most important relationship in each woman’s life. The men in this movie are really beside the point. Some of them are victims and some of them are antagonists, but none of them are as important as Jennifer and Needy — either to each other or to the audience.
The fate of Jennifer’s Body speaks to the question of who gets to set the conversation on what movies.
So what causes this shift? How does Jennifer’s Body go from a failed sex romp to an ahead-of-its-time feminist cult classic in 10 years?
Part of the critical reevaluation can be traced back to the conversation around #MeToo, which throws the movie’s themes into especially harsh relief. But it also speaks to a larger shift in what the default gaze of the film critic is supposed to be. In 2009, it was reasonable for swaths of critics on Rotten Tomatoes to assume that the default lens for a teen horror flick was a straight male one; that movies like Jennifer’s Body were made primarily for a straight male audience, and that if they failed to appeal to that audience, then they failed as movies.
In 2020, other critical voices have gotten louder and more prominent. The straight male gaze is no longer the default gaze for aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes; other voices are in a position to set the conversation. And that means stories that are designed first and foremost for women, that strive to create a female gaze, aren’t assumed to be failures as a default. These movies can be taken on their own terms.
On the other hand, as manifest in Pretty Woman, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sex and the City, and dozens of other pop culture artefacts of the time, post feminism suggested that empowerment was best achieved through self-objectification, shopping, and sublimating anything that resembling engaged feminist politics. Feminism was the f-word.
This thus brings us to the point that merely having female characters(even strong ones at that), does not necessarily make a piece of work feminist. The notions of empowerment can vary widely and even when a film has feminist undertones, it can be exclusionary in many other ways. For instance, the above mentioned films had white, privileged characters at the forefront, with sexual emancipation or career progress being the only noteworthy feminist issues taken up.
ANALYSIS: TRAINWRECK (SPOILER ALERT)
Trainwreck personally left me unsatisfied. It begins well with Amy seemingly living a carefree, empowered life. She is professionally successful, independent and only wants sex, nothing more from men. Then she meets a nice guy, who wants marriage and two kids. Here begin the typical rom-com stereotypes. Bad girl figures out that her unruliness is the source of all unhappiness; becomes perfect lady in order to win back man. But it’s not as if Amy disposes of wry intelligence or eviscerating insight to win the man. She doesn’t lose weight, or buy a new wardrobe, or express anything like self-hatred. She just disposes with the behaviours she did out of fear.
So the movie does avoid the sacrifice stereotype and doesn't reduce Amy's autonomy even in her pursuit of a partner. But while some praise Schumer’s film as a “celebration of women’s rights” in its portrayal of sexual liberation, I’m divided on this front. The way the movie portrays it is that she sleeps with many guys, gets wasted every night, and smokes weed on the sly in public when she’s too annoyed/stressed to deal with what’s going on around her. All of these are shown as manifestations of her emotional scars and not hallmarks of liberation. There are some who feel that the film functions as a critique of post feminism, which has been equated with consumerism and sexual liberation only.
While it is understandable that empowerment is not merely about having a lot of sex or necessarily implies being alone, I find it bothersome that we never end up celebrating women who choose this. Amy has never wanted to be married or have children and yet ends up with a man who wants all this. As someone who feels likewise, it feels like she is compromising on her fundamental values. It also seems to lead us to the conclusion that Amy's lifestyle would ultimately leave one unhappy; that a satisfying career, friendships and sex couldn't possibly fill the "void" of a romantic partner in a woman's life. This is why, while many declared this film a feminist masterpiece, I feel otherwise.
OTHER PERSPECTIVES
Coming from a black feminist perspective, American scholar, Bell Hooks, put forth the notion of the “oppositional gaze,” encouraging black women not to accept stereotypical representations in film, but rather actively critique them. The “oppositional gaze” is a response to Mulvey's visual pleasure and states that just as women do not identify with female characters that are not "real," women of color should respond similarly to the one denominational caricatures of black women. Eg: black women are usually either sexualised or shown as matriarchs.
Janet Bergstrom's article “Enunciation and Sexual Difference” (1979) uses Sigmund Freud's ideas of bisexual responses, arguing that women are capable of identifying with male characters and men with women characters, either successively or simultaneously.
Miriam Hansen, in "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship" (1984) put forth the idea that women are also able to view male characters as erotic objects of desire. This is evident in Sex and the City.
Carol Clover, in her popular and influential book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film ), argues that young male viewers of the Horror Genre (young males being the primary demographic) are quite prepared to identify with the female-in-jeopardy, a key component of the horror narrative, and to identify on an unexpectedly profound level. Clover further argues that the "Final Girl" in the psychosexual subgenre of exploitation horror invariably triumphs through her own resourcefulness, and is not by any means a passive, or inevitable, victim.
We can thus conclude that feminist film theory is an ever growing subject with many perspectives. But the most important function it serves is to raise questions and help us understand the extent, roles and representation of women in fictional narratives on screen.
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