somehow I lived til 2021 without having seen Jennifer’s Body (dir. Kusama, 2009). the movie deserves its cult status and does not deserve such a low score on rotten tomatoes. or maybe it does, but only if we lived in a world where real Movies got made, not advertisements for merchandise. I’d give anything for someone to make a zero-fucks campfest as bonkers as Jennifer’s Body in 2021.
I mean, ultimately it’s nowhere near a perfect movie. I can’t even say for sure if it’s a Good movie. not sure if it’s really my business saying if it’s Good or Bad anyway, but that’s an aesthetic discussion I’m not getting into now, not exactly. Jennifer’s Body is definitely a Fun movie, and it’s got grit and texture and takes silly risks and let’s itself be overrun with ideas. so few movies do that nowadays. and far be it from me to criticize a movie that burns Chris Pratt up in a fire explicitly symbolic of the World Trade Center attacks.
where it loses me is in the last 1/3, when Diablo Cody has to explain the mechanism of evil and tie it all up, and the film’s logic becomes too convenient. this hinges on easy “occult” cliches that offer very corny justification for Needy’s escape and revenge. when she goes into her school library searching for answers and finds an extensive “occult” section, me, being the pedantic librarian I am, I was like “yr school library would not have those books.” (later, Needy’s boyfriend “hangs the lampshade” on this when he asks her “our library has an occult section?”) but like, fine, like, the movie obviously relishes the absurdity of teen films and splatter flicks. the end just gets a little too Diablo Cody, and wobbles.
speaking of the occult (hoped for a more artful segue, but fuck you this is my blog), I started reading The Occult: A History, by Colin Wilson. truth be told, I’m ambivalent about the occult. And to maintain my ambivalence, or to prevent it from being too easy to determine what I “actually” think, I sometimes struggle with how much I should write publicly what I feel about my preoccupations. I don’t have simple explanations for my perverse fascinations, or for my idiosyncratic convictions. like, in The Occult, Wilson writes about faculties often termed paranormal or supernatural as being nothing of the sort, and that we all have some measure of perception that is subconscious, instinctual, not explainable by narrow conceptions of “logic.” this seems obviously true to me, based on my own experiences with premonition, intuition, and nonverbal communication. from this epistemological basis, though, one could easily follow lines of thought and feeling that would not only seem insane, they would feel insane. when one attempts to communicate felt truths from that alienated point of view, with all the conviction of someone asserting that 2 and 2 is 4, a mismatch of contexts gives the impression of psychosis. if you’ve ever read the writings of schizophrenics or any of those books that get labeled “conspiracy theory” on the back, you know what I mean. I have a stack of these books, plus books on shit like ESP, astral projection, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, etc., that I intend to read once my school work is done. whether it’s all true, or if I’ll go crazy, or if those are two sides of the same coin, we’re going to find out.
were it to have not been so horror-lore exposition-y, Jennifer’s Body obviously would have been a different movie, so my criticism feels a little meaningless. I most value art that commits to its premise, which hell fuckin yeah that movie commits.
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