Abstract - Devil's Kettle: Sex, Consumption, and the Teenage Girl in the Work of Diablo Cody

Diablo Cody has a particular history with the commodification of female sexuality, which she discusses in “Pussy Ranch,” a weblog chronicling her life as a stripper in Minneapolis. This point of view is discernible in her screenwriting, even if it is not overtly the topic at hand. Her work both addresses and mocks the moral panic spurred by the pubescent and young adult female body – even as said body is vigorously commodified and ravenously consumed. This panic seems to stem from a fear of an endowed female sexuality – one that controls and manipulates, and one that the consumer is ultimately “consumed with” and “consumed by.”

I will focus on Jennifer’s Body (2009), a horror film about a popular high school girl who literally eats men (and boys) alive. Her body is a highly fetishized commodity that tempts her peers with indulgence, only to destroy them. Jennifer embodies the mythical vagina dentata almost literally, as her succubal appetite for male flesh is directly entwined with her sexual behavior. Moreover, her popular status, and, indeed, her very survival, are directly dependent on continued consumption – she is a consumer-citizen in the economy of high school politics. Ultimately, Jennifer’s body must be destroyed so that its effects might be controlled. Supplementing this close-reading with material from Cody’s other produced screenplays and teleplays – Juno (2007) and “The United States of Tara” (2009-) – as well as her blog “Pussy Ranch,” I will trace a portrait of the ways in which Cody discusses female sexuality in terms of performance, consumption, and discipline.

I will draw on several of the readings from class to discuss consumption and consumerism, including Crystal Bartolovich (“Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”), Jean Baudrillard (Consumer Society), and Karl Marx (“The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret”). Additionally, I will draw on the work of Linda Williams on body genres, Janet Staiger on “bad women,” Carol J. Clover on gender and sexuality in the horror film, etc.

Cody’s work stands as a provocative voice in the discourse of sex and consumption. She walks a delicate tightrope of exploitation and activism, and this orientation is ripe for analysis, even if it is not wholly satisfying to a staunch liberal feminist ideology. Her work serves to hyperbolize, and often allegorize, the cultural panic associated with young female sexuality. Even as the female sex organs must be defended, they must also be defended against, let they cause ruin to the body and body politic. Cody’s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of this anxiety lies in her choice of setting for Jennifer’s Body – Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota. The (fictional) town is named for a (real-life) waterfall formation in which river water disappears into a hole but, mysteriously, does not seem to exit again anywhere. Certainly the significance of this sinister all-consuming hole (that is also a tourist trap) cannot be underestimated in the landscape of the film, and it reflects Cody’s particular attention to the simultaneous commodification and anxious disciplining of female sexuality.