Jennifer's Body, through its lens of campy horror, offers a unique glimpse into the world of queer female young adult friendship by its exploration of the relationship between the titular Jennifer, and Needy, the film's narrator. Jennifer’s Body was created by two women, and the female gaze is evident throughout. Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama, the screenwriter and director, respectively, of Jennifer’s Body have explicitly condemned the idea that Jennifer’s Body was intended for men. Both have expressed frustration with the fact that movies about teenage girls often revolve around men, so they intentionally created a film about the friendship between two girls to tell a story that wasn’t focused on men with the intention of marketing it to teenage girls (Buzzfeed). Jennifer and Needy’s relationship is a realistic, although bittersweet, depiction of intense queer female friendships.

One of the scenes most central to the largescale belief that the relationship between Jennifer and Needy was exploited in the film is the long kissing scene between Jennifer and Needy, which was extensively featured in trailers. The critical response of an immediate assumption that romantic actions between two women were a production for the pleasure of men reflects a larger cultural problem of fetishization of wlw relationships through the male gaze. Many wlw couples have shared the experience of men approaching them to try to “get involved” in their relationship. “Lesbian” is the top search term on major porn sites primarily trafficked by straight men, and ironically, one of the most outlandish suggestions made by the film's marketing team was to have Megan Fox host an amateur porn site (Buzzfeed). The widespread delegitimization of Jennifer and Needy’s romantic connection is merely a reflection of the way society views queer female relationships, and their relationship has evidence reaching far beyond a single kiss.

Jennifer and Needy never explicitly admit to having feelings for each other, but moments throughout the film clearly demonstrate key elements of a homoerotic friendship. The girls were not in a position to admit being in love with one another. Jennifer and Needy live in a small town, so small that the indie band that turns Jennifer into a succubus continues to get the town’s name wrong throughout the movie, calling it Devil’s Lake instead of Devil’s Kettle at their show. In general, small towns are often less progressive in views than the country as a whole, so Jennifer and Needy were likely not in a comfortable or safe place to explore their romantic interest in one another. In the opening scene of the movie, a student at their high school taunts Needy for being “totally lesbi-gay” for Jennifer, which Needy quickly refutes, although the camera shots following her gaze on Jennifer cheering undermines any defense she may have. Jennifer and Needy are each other’s only female friendship, and they have done everything together from a young age. Chip, Needy’s boyfriend, expresses frustration with her for continuously blowing off plans with him at Jennifer’s every beck and call after she interrupts their date to go to a last-minute concert with Jennifer. Later, when Needy sleeps with Chip, they are stopped by her visions of Jennifer, who is, out of jealousy, killing a boy that Needy expressed interest in. At the climax of the film, Jennifer, out of extreme jealousy of Needy’s relationship with her boyfriend Chip, kills Chip so that she can have Needy all to herself. The creators are straight women so, in the film, they interpret the central problem with Needy and Jennifer’s relationship to be that they were jealous of the other- Needy of Jennifer’s beauty and Jennifer of Needy’s happy life and boyfriend, which each girl confronts in this climatic scene. However, from a queer reading of the film, it is evident that the true problem at the core of Jennifer and Needy’s relationship is their unresolved feelings for one another.

Women are viewed as emotional and social creatures, and, because of this, female friendships are allowed to be physically close in a way that male friendships are not. Many girls hold hands, cuddle with, or even kiss their best friends, and it is not taken as a declaration of sexuality in the same way it would be for men. For young queer women, especially without older queer relationships to judge the scope of their own feelings and relationships off of, or a safe space in which to discuss and explore their own feelings, the lines between the actions of a platonic and romantic relationship blur. In Jennifer’s Body, Jennifer sneaks into Needy’s room, and begins to kiss her, an implicit declaration of her feelings, and when Needy breaks away, confused, Jennifer reminds her of “playing boyfriend and girlfriend” as kids. This reference to childhood is reminiscent of a common “blurred” experience for many queer women- kissing other girls as “practice for boys.”

Homoerotic friendships rarely end pleasantly. For many girls I knew growing up, the eruption of drama of their friendship ending was proportional to the extreme intensity of their relationship. In the all-female boarding schools of the 1800s, girls in so-called "romantic friendships" cut all contact when they graduated and were married off to men. In Jennifer’s Body, the resolution of the film occurs when Needy is forced to kill Jennifer, the girl she’s been in love with since primary school. As women in these homoerotic friendships grow older, friendships end over undefined frustrations, which, in hindsight, is often frustration with a lack of resolution with a relationship or discussion of feelings or jealousy over affections with a boyfriend, or all, three, as is the case in Jennifer’s Body. Loss of a friend with whom you are so close is devastating. For young people, who are less likely to have yet experienced many other painful events in their lives, that heartbreak can easily become a defining moment, and the overwhelming pain of that heartbreak fits perfectly into the horror genre.

Jennifer’s Body is rife with moments of gore - close up shots of Jennifer’s mouth filling with demon-like teeth and devouring boys until they look like “lasagna with teeth” and body horror- Jennifer vomiting blood and black, simmering bile all over Needy’s kitchen floor after getting turned into a succubus and trying to eat real food. However, juxtaposed with these horror elements, Jennifer’s Body still has many elements of the typical high school rom-com. Before Jennifer is cursed, she and Needy get dressed up for a concert, where the camera pans to them exchanging fleeting, curious glances and holding hands during a love song. Later in the film, the girls are granted one moment of explicit romance as they kiss passionately in Needy’s bed. The horror elements of this film are over-the-top to the point that that any fear on the part of the audience can be rationalized away. The true horror of the movie comes more subtly- in the deterioration and ultimate loss of Jennifer and Needy’s relationship.

The horror-comedy genre that Jennifer’s Body falls in is the perfect delivery method for the story of an erupting homoerotic friendship. The horror film industry is inherently subversive in nature, and the “horror comedy” (horror-omedy? com-orror?) genre in turn runs counter to the horror genre. The inherently subversive, niche nature of this genre lends a space to explore the complexities of homoerotic female friendship that does not lead to a relationship or perhaps even a true confrontation of those feelings, as is the case with Jennifer’s Body, that is not found in other genres.

Against the background of a movie so defined by camp, from the plethora of made-up teenage slang to an indie band’s incantation to the devil printed off the internet, the intensely queer relationship between Jennifer and Needy stands out for its heart-breaking realism.

Works Cited

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Freeman, Susan K. “Romantic Friendships (Part 1).” Learning for Justice, www.tolerance.org/podcasts/queer-america/romantic-friendships-part-1.

Grady, Constance. “How Jennifer's Body Went from a Flop in 2009 to a Feminist Cult Classic Today.” Vox, Vox, 31 Oct. 2018, www.vox.com/culture/2018/10/31/18037996/jennifers-body-flop-cult-classic-feminist-horror.

Ide, Wendy. “Jennifer's Body.” The Times UK, The Times, 31 Mar. 2010, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jennifers-body-nrq36d5wwx9.

Jennifer's Body. Directed by Karyn Kusama, performances by Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, Twentieth Century Fox, 2009.

Laryssa. "Jennifer's Body Aesthetic Post." Pinterest, 2019.

Peitzman, Louis. “You Probably Owe ‘Jennifer's Body’ An Apology.” BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed News, 9 Dec. 2018, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/louispeitzman/jennifers-body-diablo-cody-karyn-kusama-feminist-horror.

Sharf, Zack. “Karyn Kusama: Watching 'Jennifer's Body' Only Get Marketed to Teen Boys Was Painful.” IndieWire, IndieWire, 28 Dec. 2018, www.indiewire.com/2018/12/karyn-kusama-jennifers-body-marketing-misogynistic-1202026860/.