Back to Back 32 - My Queer Demonic Bestie
Contrasting films where girl BFFs take a somewhat different approach to horror
Jennifer's Body (2009) - Director Karyn Kusama, writer Diablo Cody
Thoroughbreds (2017) - Writer, director Cory Finley
Genre: Parodic demonic possession horror (Kusama); alienated psychodrama horror (Finley)
Needy: Jennifer's evil.
Chip: I know.
Needy: No. I mean, she's actually evil. Not high school evil.
Jennifer’s Body dialogue, channeling some Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibes
Female-focussed horror - classics like Rosemary's Baby (1968) or Carrie (1976), for instance - has always been an intense and fertile ground for exploration of the deepest Gothic concerns about identity and its dissolution. If you subscribe to the Jungian school, you might even accept that, as well as them being an arena for women and queer folk to imagine, project and play out identity issues, cis-het fellas might see them also as a playground to explore their Jungian anima, their feminine-gendered side, and its fears and desires.
What is the succubus? The demon hag? The sacrificial virgin, the final girl? We all have our own subconscious relationship with these and other horror personae. So let’s take a look at a film that throws a combination of all three at us.
In recent years the field has become quite crowded - along with everything else on the Netflix whirl-a-gig - but in 2009 there wasn't so much girl-horror around. The first wave of feminist and queer Gothic horror had come and gone in the 1980s and was all but forgotten. There was Ginger Snaps (2000) but it was quite an outlier.
Then along came Jennifer's Body, with a boldness and confidence to its attitude to the horror genre, a flagrant disrespect to the conventions even of the schlock school of exploitation - and it did not do well. Crashed and burned on release, in fact.
Director Karyn Kusama blamed the studio for its poor performance, marketed as it was to young guys who liked Megan Fox and not to the young female demographic who would come to love it so much: the poster featured Hot Megan posing like a vixen on a schoolroom desk, with no sign of Amanda Seyfried's Needy to show the nature of the BFF relationship that was at the heart of the story.
Even so, the critics weren't kind either, many excoriating Megan Fox's performance most unfairly. Most negative reviews seemed to rate it as if it were a straight horror film, which it very much isn't, while missing the comedy element almost completely.
The prize for worst prediction goes to some schmuck by the name of Peter Hartlaub who in the SF Chronicle said "the chances that it will be somebody else's pop culture reference 27 years from now are slim to none." Well, eat shit, Peter! I don't know how things will stand in 2036 (and why exactly "27 years from now"?) but 2024 pop culture is here to tell you that you got it way wrong. Humourless takes on Jennifer's Body, from both haters and playas, would soon become endemic, as we shall see...
The film commits utterly to a comedy approach, the ironic tone never flagging. In the final showdown with the monster, the obvious tendency, even in a fairly tongue-in-cheek horror franchise like Nightmare on Elm Street, is to suspend the snark so the serious business of the elemental combat against evil can take its course. Not here. At this moment the action stops completely so the script can unleash some of its finest barbs:
Chip: She can fly?
Needy: She's just hovering... It's not that impressive.
Jennifer: God! Do you have to undermine everything I do? You are such a playa-hater!
Needy: You're a jerk.
Jennifer: Wow, nice insult, Hannah Montana. You got any more harsh digs?
It’s comedy that owes a lot to Buffy and to the flying snark of Tarantino. Surely this kind of sass can’t fail? And yet it did, at least at first. By now it’s recognised as an early-2000s classic of horror-comedy, and of queer horror.
If at first the queerness aspect of the film was wholly ignored, there is now the danger that a more exclusively LGBTQ critical focus might lead us to ignore other elements. Such as the evident fact that plenty, very many indeed, of straight-identifying women respond to and enjoy this film too. For instance, Barbara Creed's recent study makes a number of bold assertions in regard of the queer theme in Jennifer's Body:
Jennifer's Body draws on Judith Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender identity itself is... constructed through the repeated statement of ‘performative acts’ that naturalise gender as if were a normal outcome of biological sex... Jennifer's Body is the rarest of films... a singular example of a queer horror film that draws on a lesbian sensorium to explore lesbian desire, the queer gaze, and queer touch between best friends in a supernatural campy queer world. [1]
The problem with this approach is not that it is incorrect in any way to consider the gender themes in Jennifer's Body, or that there is no queerness here, when there evidently is. It's partly in the idea that a comedy horror film "draws on" academic arguments published in gender-critical texts, as if Diablo Cody were thumbing through Judith Butler's obscure prose when she wrote the script.
For an example of Butler's material on the issue, which supposedly is the inspiration for Cody's zinging dialogue, check the following:
The public assertion of ‘queerness’ enacts performativity as citationality for the purposes of resignifying the abjection of homosexuality into defiance and legitimacy. [2]
Which is simply to say that: coming out as queer in public defies the derogatory stereotypes of gay people. Though we might easily agree with a statement so stated, I doubt if more than 1 person in 100 could either agree or disagree with Butler's comment as quoted here without first rifling through a dictionary of culture-studies jargon. Though I don't know Cody, I'm hesitant to believe that this type of text is her preferred reading material.
Another problem with this approach is in considering the film only through the prism of queerness, as the description of the film's fictional world as a "supernatural campy queer world" seems to imply. There is a great deal in the film about straight relationships of young men and women, and in fact the ongoing and growing tension between the friends as "lesbi-gay" (as the bitchy Chastity calls them) and their attraction to various boys around the high school is at the heart of the film.
Moreover the supernatural element in the film seems to me to be its least queer aspect, except for a very funny throwaway line at the end where Demonic Jennifer says she goes both ways.
The demonic ritual itself is invoked by a bunch of indie rocker dudes to achieve music success, and the demonically possessed Jennifer preys on men in a fairly obvious analogy to the femme-fatale stereotype associated with a beautiful girl like herself. It's played out as a war of the sexes, and how could anything be more trad-straight than that?
Creed comments on this aspect:
What Jennifer’s Body does is establish Jennifer as sexy, provocative, and a stereotypical cheerleader and then sets out to deconstruct that image. She is the Body Beautiful par excellence who, when she metamorphoses literally becomes what is buried beneath that sexist image — the male nightmare of the seductive but abject man-eating female monster which is also a stereotype but this one has a fatal bite. [3]
All of which is true, though there's a a problem with that last assertion: "this one has a fatal bite". Surely, Barbara, all man-eating female monsters of male nightmare by definition must have a fatal bite, not just Jennifer? To drop into Buffy-speak for a moment: like, that’s the whole point of being a monster in the first place, you know?
The film is an exploration of youth identity, boys included (complete with cool rockers and awkward emos) and gender relations (girls being coerced by men into unwanted relations who go on to deceive men into unwanted relations, revenge fantasies of the powerless, and so on...) which is all much too complex and messy to be shoved onto the Procrustean bed of queerness alone.
The final problem with this culture-studies approach is its overbearing seriousness - its dorkiness, if you will. There is little humour to be gained, however true it may be, by claiming that Jennifer's Body is:
A classic that creates its queerness through the performance of gender as a construction, the representation of the supernatural to unsettle heteronormativity, the entanglement of human and nonhuman, and the creation of a new origin myth of the monstrous-feminine as the queer and dangerous demon. [4]
Though critical comment doesn't have to be a laugh a minute, this fairly tortured analysis, though true in a very few points, misleads with its very solemnity, making something joyous seem frankly rather dull.
If the film is designed to realize a “representation of the supernatural to unsettle heteronormativity", then honestly I don't feel very much like seeing it. Sounds like a mega-yawn, in fact. If, on the other hand, it's about a sexy girl-demon who has conflicting feelings about her friend, swings both ways, and is whipsmart snarky - why, of course, yes please! It’s all a question of style.
-—INTERMISSION—-
American meritocracy has become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth, privilege, and caste across generations. A social and economic hierarchy with these comprehensive, dynastic, and self-referential qualities has a name: an aristocracy.
Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap (2019)
What is class in America? Most Americans ignore it, clinging to the residual legacy belief that if you work hard enough, you can "make it". This particular sustaining fantasy of the collapsing sclerotic giant was once known as "The American Dream".
The inhabitants of the swanky manorial homes of Thoroughbreds know better. They were born into it and intend to keep it that way. With that kind of class, a network of contacts and some startup ‘loans’ from family that needn't be paid back, you can indeed "just Steve Jobs [your] way through life" as Amanda intends to do. Just keep up your end of the bargain and don't slaughter your repulsive family members for being obnoxious shitbags, alright? And don't scare the horses.
So we just looked at Jennifer's Body, which has a lot of fun with sexual politics and the tensions between gay and straight, friends and lovers. Now with Thoroughbreds comes a pair of BFFs who don't really like each other at all, who are not playing out an excess of sexual desire or exuberant transgression, but instead are placed in the most exquisitely privileged alienation and depersonalisation and who struggle to show any desire for anything.
Emotional restraint is the key to the lead characters and also to the tone of the film throughout. It shares so much with Jennifer's Body, but tonally is the polar opposite. Where the earlier film showered us with gore and revved us up with kinetic editing and rock music, here the key violence happens offscreen and is signalled by a static, slowly zooming long take. The superb music by Erik Friedlander is eerie, minimalistic and sinister.
It is a much colder world, the world of Lily and Amanda, than that of Jennifer and Needy. Amanda (Olivia Cooke) is considered a possible psychopath after violently killing her horse Honeymooner (the first act of violence that happens offscreen). But is she pyschopathic or something else? Amanda has her own thoughts about her counsellor's diagnoses:
First it was borderline personality, then severe depression, now she thinks I'm antisocial with schizoid tendencies. She's basically just flipping to random pages of the DSM-5 and throwing medications at me. But at the end of the day, I have a perfectly healthy brain. It just doesn't contain feelings.
Her affectless demeanour is not that much different from that of the supposedly normal Lily, who benefits from a few tips on how to fake emotions you don't really have.
Amanda has an explanation for what happened to her horse that is plausible as a defence against sadistic psychopathy but is still chilling as an account of someone with an iron determination to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal, to put the animal out of its misery. Lily hears all that and isn't really shocked, just alive to the fact that her friend has unlimited reserves of grit and absolutely no taboos.
For Lily has a problem that belies her stylish appearance, her elegant poise. In fact she has two problems which bump up against each other as uncertain superpositions. First there's her arrogant and unsympathetic stepfather Mark.
His behaviour towards her is uncaring and aggressive at best, and there are even dark hints that he may be abusing her. When he asks Lily to come upstairs to speak to him alone, Amanda immediately leaps to her friend's defence and becomes his enemy. Later it is Amanda that first suggests that they murder him.
In contrast to that there's Lily's own behaviour. Right from the start she has sold her company to Amanda's mother as a friend-for-hire at $200 per hour. Though ostensibly more normal than her weird horse-killing friend, she is remarkably similar in affect. And when the force of Amanda's outsider personality and her cool intelligence become clear, Lily is there to make use of them. Strangely it is the absolute egomaniac Mark who makes the most salient points about Lily:
You couldn't possibly understand someone else's point of view, could you? Not mine, not your friend's. Definitely not your mom's. Because in your brain, all these people are just little offshoots of your consciousness. We're all your maids, aren't we? Your cleaning ladies. Your personal trainers.
Amanda has her own take on this critique: "Honestly, he's not even that off-base. I mean, empathy isn't your strong suit." Previously she noted Lily's passive-aggressive opposition to her stepdad and the fact that she won't openly resist because he's enormously rich. Why bite the hand that feeds?
The outcome of these two interpretations - Lily as victim of abuse, Lily as manipulative user - existing simultaneously but not necessarily exclusively, is to create an unsettling sense of uncertainty. Along with the jarring music, the alienating framing with lots of mid-range shots and negative space between the characters, and the intrusive sound design of everything from potato chips to a rowing machine, all serve to make everything uncomfortable.
As the story develops, Lily learns so much from Amanda. At first, about being honest about her own feelings, to herself at least. Then, observing how Amanda manipulates the hapless drug-dealer Tim, she learns how to effectively use those who are weaker than her. Her final lesson is how to eradicate all vestiges of empathy and hypocrisy and come to fruition as a merciless sociopath. Amanda is both teacher and willing accomplice to this process.
The film is a tight 90 minute thriller, a dry black comedy with evident signs of being developed from a stage play. It takes place in a succession of rather static dialogue-heavy vignettes. It could do with a little more variety in setting and perhaps more fluidity in transitioning from scene to scene: the use of hard cuts between self-declared "chapters" doesn't add much to the experience.
The cold hard cinematography, made in high-definition video with a predominantly white colour palette, suits the sterile environment of the upper-class mansions and shiny health-spas of the movie's world. Though I miss the graininess and rich colour of film, it has to be said that this look is thematically appropriate.
There are so many influences here, most clearly from the stageplay and film Equus (1973, film version 1977). That story also concerned a troubled teenager, this time a boy who mutilated horses. But that tormented young man, a working class stable hand, had no agency, unlike the privileged pair here. Perhaps most similar of all is American Psycho (1999): Patrick Bateman's place in the elite echelons goes hand in hand with a deep sense of self-loathing, his agency as powerful as his urge to manipulate.
Thoroughbreds is a film that knows what it wants to be and very much is that thing. The purity of its purpose is present in the cinematography, the characterisation and the unsettling music and staging. The details are everywhere fussed over. Right at the beginning after Amanda walks through the house prying into all the details, after their awkward reintroduction as fake friends, she asks Lily for food. She munches on potato chips and the sound is harsh and crunchy, absurdly intrusive. As they finish and walk away from the kitchen, a servant swoops in and clears away the packet.
The servant is not seen or mentioned before or after this, and has no name, is a blurry, out of focus presence who is barely in the scene. If there are other servants in the house they may as well be ghosts. This maid has her function and performs it, the embodiment of Mark's words that for them (him included, as it happens) "people are just little offshoots of your consciousness." But of course these words apply to everyone who is beguiled by their privilege, not just Lily but an entire class of new American aristocrats.
NOTES ON SOURCES
[1] Barbara Creed Return of the Monstrous-Feminine; Feminist New Wave Cinema (2022) p.112
[2] Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (1993) p.21
[3] Creed, p115
[4] Creed, p.117.