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An overlooked and underrated film, but one of my personal favorites is Jennifer’s Body. Despite many critics hating the film, it has become somewhat iconic to parts of this generation, with scenes such as Megan Fox burning her tongue with a lighter and saying “I am a God. “ Upon watching this movie on a summer night at my best friend’s house, I too became instantly obsessed. This 2007 film is both a parody on comic films like that of Mean Girls as well as those in the horror genre. Jennifer’s Body stars Megan Fox as the hot and popular cheerleader, Jennifer. Amanda Seyfried plays her dorky best friend Needy. They are an odd match, as Jennifer is the boss of Needy in a sense, telling her not only what to do but what to wear. One night they go to a bar to see a band Jennifer likes perform.  In between the performance and Jennifer flirting with the band members, the bar catches on fire and begins to burn down. Needy gets them out to safety by busting through the bathroom window, but Jennifer’s decides to leave with the band in their van rather than staying with Needy. Needy returns home only the have Jennifer show up a few hours later covered in blood. This where the film truly begins as Jennifer’s attics start. Jennifer breaks into Needys house silent and covered and blood and digs through her fridge for food, as Needy watches in terror. The days following this Jennifer acts as if nothing ever happened and goes about her life as normal, but peculiar enough some of the boys in their town turn up dead. While this all sounds more like a bad horror film than a comedy, bare with me.

The genius of Jennifer’s Body is all built around the idea of the hot 2000’s high school mean  girl. Jennifer is completely self involved and sometimes rude. Many of the things Jennifer says that’s are often found funny can be explained with the incongruity theory and the benign violation theory. In one scene Needy’s boyfriend Chip asks Jennifer about the band they are going to see and Jennifer’s responds quickly “eat my ass Chip”. Everyone I’ve ever showed this movie finds this comeback hilarious.  What makes comments that Jennifer says like this hilarious is they’re an unexpected and in a sense unnecessary type of mean comment. Although it’s rude the comments are in not way actually bullying or personal enough to hurt Chip so it becomes quite laughable. This is benign violation, although Jennifer is being mean no one is truly being hurt, so it comes across rather funny instead.
Many of the things Jennifer says is sort of just Jennifer saying things, as it’s not what you’d expect a normal human to say. They are often rude or dumb out of the blue as it fits her character. Jennifer has a care for things only of herself, which is often funny because what’s she’s talking about is often irrelevant to the actually situation. This plays into the incongruity of the film as sometimes Jennifer just says things, or often the situations would never really happen, but we as the audience accept it all anyway.
Jennifer’s character  is all about personifying that idea of the high school mean girl and making her actually evil, like a demonic Regina George. Jennifer’s Body takes the ideas of Mean Girls a step further, and actually does it quite well to the point you can forget it’s a sort of parody. I think all in all the movie is actually quite hilarious and an interesting take on the idea of the mean girl, I hope you all get the chance to watch it and enjoy.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 27, 2018 at 7:02 AM

    That way Jennifer seems completely oblivious to the fact that she's obnoxious also puts a superiority factor in the movie. While Jennifer is very self-centered, she has flaws that she can't see but others can.

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  2. Shane HerronNovember 30, 2018 at 9:53 AM

    So it seems like this is in a sense a hodgepodge parody that channels a variety of popular genres: the 80s high school movie as remade in the 90s and 2000s, horror movies and then the parody of horror movies. In a sense, we've reached the third degree--a movie paying homage to movies that parodied and paid homage to an earlier generation of teenage horror and comedy movies.

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