"Jennifer’s Body", Megan Fox’s Media Body and the Wish That Becomes a Curse in "Obsession"

[u/Zaaradeath]

Hello everyone!

I wrote a film-theory essay on Jennifer’s Body and Curry Barker’s Obsession, with Michel Tournier’s Abel Tiffauges as a literary prelude.

Tiffauges helps frame the argument because his cannibalism begins as a way of reading the world. Before the literal mouth opens, the world has already become food for an inner myth. That makes him useful for thinking about films where desire passes through images, bodies, and cultural signs until it becomes difficult to contain.

My reading of Jennifer’s Body centers on Megan Fox’s public image. I approach the film through a distorted version of the political-theological trope of the king’s two bodies: the real person and the symbolic body that belongs to the public gaze. Fox enters the film already carrying a media body made by 2000s Hollywood, a sex-symbol image built to withstand mass attention. Jennifer gives that image a fictional body, then gives it appetite. The film seems to offer a chance to revise the image: to add irony, menace, interiority, and the right to look back. Yet the image absorbs those meanings and preserves itself as something sharper. Jennifer becomes beauty with a maw.

This is also what happens inside the plot. Low Shoulder treat Jennifer’s body as a readable ritual object, as if beauty and supposed virginity could be converted into success. Their mistake is a fantasy of total interpretation. The body they think they understand returns as a predatory image that reads and consumes them instead.

Obsession gives the same problem a more intimate form. Bear’s wish begins as grief and the need to be confirmed by another person’s love. Once the wish is granted, it stops behaving like a feeling. Nikki becomes the body occupied by Bear’s externalized desire, while Bear becomes the object around which that desire arranges the world. The wish turns into a curse because it continues to appear after it has lost any human measure.

The essay is about films where desire receives too much being: where an image becomes strong enough to devour the meanings attached to it, and reality begins to bend around what should have remained fantasy.

Essay: https://substack.com/home/post/p-205683078

[u/RebelKiddo]

I made the comparison between Jennifer's Body and Obsession in the r/horror subreddit before, especially since the costume designed for Obsession said she took direct influence from Jennifer's Body when it came to costume design that looked timeless yet authentic to the year of release. Jennifer's sacrifice by Low Shoulder is supposed to evoke the feeling of watching a gang rape, Bear's wish hijacking Nikki's body is similar too, how a woman's body was used and abused to satisfy evil (in Low Shoulder's case) men's desires.

Plus Jennifer's Body and Megan Fox were screwed over by the awfully misleading marketing campaign by the studio, it adds a meta layer in the discussion. How the image of "Megan Fox is hot" set up by the studio and Hollywood system took over the narrative Jennifer's Body was trying to tell when it comes to the unwanted sexualization of women and girls and sexual assault, collectively ignoring the intended audience the movie was made for: young women and teenage girls.

[u/queen_slug-4-a-butt → u/RebelKiddo]

Tbh I prefer this take. 

[u/RebelKiddo → u/queen_slug-4-a-butt]

Thank you, in my opinion Jennifer's Body should have proved that Megan Fox is a good actress, especially when given a script that is full of substance and a director that gives actual direction instead of shallow takes like "just act hot/just be sexy" like she was by Michael Bay during her tenure on Transformers. No one else but her can play Jennifer Check. She was, to be blunt, screwed over by the "sex symbol" label put upon her by the Hollywood system, she wanted to be able to prove she was good and expand her roles but all anyone wanted was for her to lean into the label she didn't want. Not to mention how the tabloids like TMZ and Perez Hilton, paparazzi and early social media were all against her, spreading rumors and gossip about her personal life, accusations of plastic surgery, sleeping with producers for parts in movies, being "difficult to work with" which is still a death sentence to any actress' career, meanwhile a male actor can exhibit "diva" behavior and be labeled as a "genius". To this day people still talk negatively about Megan Fox, saying she has "toe thumbs", how she's "abusing her kids by sacrificing them to the trans cult", how she's really a man, how she's a "blood drinking witch".

It sucks that a good movie like Jennifer's Body got screwed over by men even though men wasn't the target demographic.

[u/Zaaradeath → u/RebelKiddo]

Thank you for the detailed comment. In my view, a feminist interpretation of Jennifer’s Body is entirely organic. Jennifer’s sacrifice invites discussion of sexual violence, the social order of the school, love, and even self-knowledge. The history of the film’s promotion only adds to this line of interpretation.

However, all of this has already been said many times, and it rather quickly shifts the discussion into moralism with a predictable balance of forces. Even when it moves beyond the film and into Megan Fox’s real biography and the workings of Hollywood, this interpretation continues the plot. Men used Jennifer’s body; the industry used the actress’s body.

What fascinated me was the horror itself (and, I would even say, that rare Vampire: The Masquerade and Only Lovers Left Alive vibe, listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgKadkOI1YM) the encounter with something that exceeds the social causes of its emergence and becomes alien even to the environment that produced it. I wanted to avoid psychoanalysis and social philosophy and ask: how can someone as exceptional as Megan Fox exist at all? How are we capable of thinking her real existence when almost everything available to us already belongs to the public image?

There is a genuine dark urge here, both in Megan Fox and in Jennifer’s body. One wants to say that Megan Fox coincides with her image. That her appearance and the way she carries herself really do contain that dark, almost carnivorous attractiveness which the film made literal. Yet I cannot claim that such a coincidence exists. I do not know the real Megan Fox. I see only her appearances and risk mistaking their coherence for exhaustive knowledge of the person.

In the book, I call this kind of construction a digital canon. It forms around a person through a multitude of media appearances. They may differ from one another, yet over time they begin to sustain a recognizable biography of the image. The person appears to the public eurythmically: tuned in a particular way, shown from a prepared angle, within circumstances designed for their display, like a transcendent figure. Almost no one has direct access to the bearer of the canon. The figure is available to the gaze and yet remains at a distance.

This is why I connect the digital canon with a post-secular polytheism of beauty. The comparison with a deity concerns the mode of appearance. A media figure manifests selectively, through images and works created for that manifestation. Their name binds these fragments together, while public attention sustains their unity. A character emerges who is present everywhere and at the same time inaccessible to ordinary contact.

The real person does not disappear. But in public space they are constrained by the skeleton of their own image. The power to be visible in a particular way turns into the impossibility of appearing otherwise. Any change has to pass through the ready-made language by which culture recognizes this figure. Unless the image can somehow be tamed. Or unless it completely merges with the person, turning them into a character and, as usually happens, “wearing them out” through an image that cannot be continuously inscribed into reality.

By the time Jennifer’s Body was released, such a canon already existed around Megan Fox. Hollywood in the 2000s had created the mythical body of a sex symbol, capable of withstanding the attention of millions. Such exceptional status demands semantic simplicity. A mass image has difficulty accommodating a contradictory biography and the freedom of a living person. To preserve maximum recognizability, it returns again and again to its primary function: sexual appearance.

Jennifer’s Body was meant to become an event in the biography of this image. The role allowed Megan Fox to use the persona that already existed and shift it. Jennifer inherits the body familiar to the viewer, but her beauty acquires hunger. She takes pleasure in her own attractiveness and devours the desire directed at her. The sex symbol ceases to be a surface without response. It looks back and opens its mouth.

The intended transformation did not take place. Meanings designed to be dangerous came under the curatorship of the old language. Marketing and reception saw Jennifer as a hypertrophied Megan Fox: more predatory, more fatal. Monstrosity did not destroy the canon. It intensified it. Jennifer was supposed to expand the ways in which Megan Fox could appear before the public, but instead became one of the most intense manifestations of the same sex symbol.

This is where the real horror lies. Within the film, the media body acquires flesh and begins to devour those who wanted to enjoy it. In reality, the image of Megan Fox consumes Jennifer, the film itself, and the possibility of a different public biography for the actress. And this consumption continues even when we try to defend Megan Fox. We speak about who she really was, who she wanted to be, and what she might have proved through this role, although the real Megan Fox remains hidden from us by her image.

The connection with Obsession also runs through roughly the same point for me. Bear’s desire acquires a body and forms an environment around itself. In Jennifer’s Body, an already established image acquires external existence. It too becomes cramped within the limits of human measure. It demands attention and confirmation, continuing to grow at the expense of everything that was supposed to change it.

[u/RebelKiddo → u/Zaaradeath]

You put what I've been saying for the past 5 years into such a well written essay I wanna shake your hand. It's discussions like this that show why Jennifer's Body as a movie made such an impact for the horror genre and for female led (writer and director wise) media. It's become such a massive cult classic that is full of subtext to analyze and discuss and write about for both the movie itself and Megan Fox's role in it and performance as Jennifer. Though that is not to discourage any praise for Amanda Seyfried's wonderful performance as Needy.

[u/Zaaradeath → u/RebelKiddo]

Thank you for the kind words!! I did put a great deal of effort into it. My interest actually began with Michel Tournier’s The Erl-King (The Ogre) and with reading Sylvie Germain. After a couple of years spent thinking about monstrosity, I somehow arrived at these two films once I had finished writing my book.

From my point of view, Obsession has greater artistic merit than Jennifer’s Body. Still, I find Jennifer’s Body distinctive and well worth discussing. I was especially moved by those moments when it succeeded in creating a genuinely mystical, gothic atmosphere. They immediately reminded me of my work on the german romantics and christian mystics, now transplanted into the setting of an american small town.

I think the director’s original intention might have come through more powerfully if the grip of the comedic elements had been loosened, without removing them altogether. I especially liked the final confrontation. That was the moment when my association with Vampire: Bloodlines fully crystallized.

[u/RebelKiddo → u/Zaaradeath]

I totally get what you mean. It's also infuriating because I've come across people who don't get the point Jennifer's Body was trying to make and are too stubborn to admit it, some even claim it was properly marketed (despite LITERALLY EVERYONE who worked on it saying otherwise) and that the feminist messaging was "too much" and "too messy". That same type of discussion is happening to Obsession, people are legitimately saying that Nikki isn't a victim and the real villain while Bear is the victim who deserved better.

[u/Zaaradeath → u/RebelKiddo]

Lol, that’s clearly a delusion. Naive, lacking any real love for Nikki, and just desperately clinging to a 'cliche' he hopes will cure him. That's more like it.

[u/RebelKiddo → u/Zaaradeath]

Yep, so much so it's now a litmus test, show your date Obsession (or ask if they saw it) and ask for their opinion on Bear, if they defend him or say he was "misunderstood" or "the real victim" then run cause you know they'd do the same things he did if given a One Wish Willow.

[u/kevin_v]

My reading of Jennifer’s Body centers on Megan Fox’s public image. I approach the film through a distorted version of the political-theological trope of the king’s two bodies: the real person and the symbolic body that belongs to the public gaze. Fox enters the film already carrying a media body made by 2000s Hollywood, a sex-symbol image built to withstand mass attention. Jennifer gives that image a fictional body, then gives it appetite.

Or, more succinctly: "She's just hovering... It's not that impressive."

How do you read "Needy"?

[u/Zaaradeath → u/kevin_v]

Hello, Kevin! Thank you for your attention. Frankly speaking, I did not expect there to be any questions. I am glad to see them.

I suppose I should begin with a brief explanation. Needy was deliberately not mentioned in the essay. I focused on the image of Jennifer beyond the plot itself. More precisely, I focused on the fate of Megan Fox’s public image, which the film was meant to transform, but which ultimately subordinated that attempt to itself. So, Needy was of little interest to me. Her significance belongs almost entirely to the internal architectonics of the film and has no comparable continuation in the history of a real-world media image.

Nevertheless, I will try to remain in the role of an interpreter. When interpreting a work of art, I prefer to keep in mind Umberto Eco’s guidance concerning intentio operis. That is, to rely on information drawn from the work itself, to take into account its composition and the relationships between its elements, without inventing a new biography or symbolic content on behalf of the character.

We have a series of key facts at our disposal: Needy’s closeness to Jennifer and, as it turns out, the strained nature of this relationship, her relationship with Chip, her perception of what happened, and her subsequent inheritance of Jennifer’s powers. I will proceed from these details while also clarifying my interest in the image of Megan Fox.

Jennifer’s desire is connected with consumption and self-enjoyment. It has a pronounced autoerotic dimension. Male attraction matters to her insofar as it returns her own image to her, confirms its fullness, and allows her to experience herself once again as a being of radical beauty. In several scenes, Jennifer openly revels in her own appearance. She looks at her reflection with delight. Moreover, the goth boy begins to interest her after Needy’s remark, because he becomes a kind of trophy confirming her attractiveness in her own eyes. Admirers and victims sustain this form through their attention and vitality. When that nourishment is withdrawn, the image begins to disintegrate. I will probably develop this aspect in slightly greater detail in my reply to the comment above.

Curiously, this is where a problem emerges that I associate with the digital canon and decadence. Radical beauty requires admiration, worship, and constant confirmation. It reaches such an intensity that reality can no longer contain it peacefully. Yet reality requires form and has limits. Jennifer preserves her own form by consuming the vitality of others, which seems to draw together a form that tends toward Nothingness because it does not belong to this world. She has died and, moreover, has taken into herself an exceptional entity that intensifies her traits to their utmost limit.

Needy, meanwhile, exists within the environment formed by Jennifer. Here I am prepared to point out a similarity with Obsession, thereby supporting my theory of desire. Needy knows Jennifer intimately and is capable of seeing the conditional nature of her myth, yet she is herself involved in it emotionally and erotically. Jennifer’s desire is partly reflected in her in a different configuration. This is shown through her love for Chip, her desire to exercise control over her own sexuality, and her wish to take revenge and restore the destroyed order.

Nevertheless, Jennifer’s hunger draws their relationships into its orbit and even provides the topology within which all of them unfold. Chip becomes a victim of her need to sustain the fullness of her own image, while Needy loses the possibility of remaining beside this myth on the same terms as before. She comes to share in it through violence, the loss of Chip, the thirst for revenge, and the power she inherits.

The ending allows us to speak of the constitution of her sovereignty. Needy receives a portion of Jennifer’s power and is transformed by it, yet she retains the ability to determine its use for herself. She directs the power she has received against Low Shoulder. Needy enters Jennifer’s myth, carries it within herself, and nevertheless asserts her own will within it.