Wildes Writing

 an Examination of Avatar the Last Airbender and Jennifer’s Body

Tim Wildes

            Avatar the Last Airbender and Jennifer’s Body are two narratives that explore themes of violence and vengeance in nuanced and experimental ways. They ask the consumer to consider the steps that ought be taken towards the greater good, and how far one ought go to take justice into their own hands, especially when such a violence has been committed against them. While there is not always an outright depiction of traditional haunting in the fictions, i.e. ghostly and demonic figures or characterizations/themes, there is an ever-looming presence of haunting presented as the repercussions of greater violence or terror¹.

Avatar the Last Airbender is a 2005 animated show from Nickelodeon that follows a young Avatar named Aang, who is tasked with bringing the tumultuous world surrounding him back to peace and balance. Each nation in the show is aligned with a specific element (Water, Earth, Fire, and Air, respectively) that reflect the bending capabilities (magical system of Avatar the Last Airbender), cultural backgrounds/practices, philosophies, and racial demographic of those who live within said-nation. The Fire Nation in-show has led a 100 years’ war of genocide and brutal imperialist colonialism against the rest of the world. The show, despite being a children’s animation, addresses extremely complex themes such as feminism, toxic masculinity, genocide, self-growth, spirituality, sexuality, and destiny. The show too, begs the question from the viewer, can violence ever be justified? Can it ever be morally ethical to exact revenge on those who’ve terrorized you in the past? To what degree? Finally, how should one interact with someone who’s committed horrific violence against them in the past?

            Jennifer’s Body, on the other hand, is a 2009 teenage horror-comedy film following a high-school girl named Needy, who’s best friend, the socially domineering popular girl Jennifer, is kidnapped, and metaphorically raped via satanic ritual by a touring indie rock band following a disastrous fire that took the lives and traumatized other people in their small town. Jennifer begins undergoing a mysterious change following this ritual; she develops an insatiable hunger only quenched by grotesque and sexually charged human consumption. Jennifer kills 2 men in her small town to fulfill her vampiric cravings, then setting her eyes on her next target, Needy’s boyfriend, Chip. Eventually, Needy learns what has happened to her friend and comes to understand that she must kill Jennifer to save Chip and their town from Jennifer’s consumption. The film explores too, the topic of violence as a means of vengeance. Jennfer’s rampage is embodied by and paralleled to her desire to strike back against those who have exacted seditious violence against her, being the boy band members, who figuratively raped her to achieve great success (as was the reason for their ritual).

            Both fictions display violence as corrupting, before being exposed to horrific violence then one need not be likewise horrifically violent, violence and terror in these mediums are learned to the viewer as being viral entities. In Avatar the Last Airbender, members of the Southern Water Tribe are peaceful and non-interventionary people, until one day when the Fire Nation attacks. Katara’s Southern Water Tribe village is attacked and decimated by the Fire Nation invasion; the Fire Nation kills all the tribe’s waterbenders as to ensure that the tribe had not the means to ever strike back against the Fire Nation in the future. In this invasion, a Fire Nation soldier kills Katara’s mother, who sacrificed herself to save Katara, who herself was the last waterbender of the tribe. In this attack, Katara learns hatred towards the Fire Nation and wishes desperately to exact vengeance on them, and more specifically, the man responsible for committing matricide, to avenge her mother. For the vast majority of Avatar the Last Airbender, Katara is determined, by a vicious rage, to kill the man who killed her mother. Katara, a peaceful young girl becomes an angry and vengeful seeker of vigilante justice because of her interaction with terror.

            Jennifer’s Body likewise demonstrates violent desires or acts of terror being derivative of great injustice being done unto one, there-in ‘transmitting’ or ‘infecting’ the subject to do the same unto others. Jennifer is presented to the viewer as being overall harmless, maybe Jennifer has the tendency to sneak out and go to parties and bars underage. Maybe Jennifer is generally sexually promiscuous, but it’s reductive and distasteful to say that this makes anyone objectively heinous or a construably bad person. Jennifer is just another high schooler when she asks Needy to go to the indie rock show with her at a nearby dive bar. After the bar burns down under mysterious circumstances², Jennifer, in a daze, is kidnapped by the band, Low Shoulder, and is the subject of a violent satanic ritual where-in she is bound down and repeatedly stabbed³ and violated as the band believes her to be a virgin, needed for the completion of the ritual to become successful. The ritual fails because Jennifer is not a virgin; because she is not a virgin, Jennifer becomes a demonic entity and starts attacking men to exact her revenge over Low Shoulder, feeding as a means of survival. Jennifer takes place in this terror because of the violence done against her, otherwise she would not have become this vampiric succubus.

            While these mediums of fiction share a common theme of terror as a means of justified vengeance, the way they depict the morality of so are quite different. Jennifer never displays regret for what she has been doing against the townsfolk of Devil’s Kettle, rather she seems enthusiastic about the opportunity to reap her own understanding of justice against the men who she views as pillars to patriarchal status-quo. First, Jennifer consumes the school’s most-beloved jock, representative of masculine gender roles in-of gender essentialism, and later, a young man who asks her on a date; Jennifer considers this an appeal to gender roles and the male’s evocation of them as his ‘right’ to Jennifer – this is analogous to the patriarchal ideology of a male’s ‘right’ to a woman for the reason of them having a cock and/or fulfilling a societally masculine role; by logic of patriarchy, they believe themselves to be innately greater than the women they objectify. Jennifer believes herself to justified in her terrorizing attacks against these men, Needy, however, understands that Jennfier is doing greater harm by killing these men unresponsible for nothing other than fitting a societally masculine role, Needy understands that Jennifer is stooping to the same level as those men who exacted terror upon her.

            Avatar the Last Airbender changes direction from this string of narrative, however. While in Jennifer’s Body, Needy is the one who stops Jennifer’s actions, in Avatar the Last Airbender, Katara comes to see her desire for vengeance as being wrong for herself; Katara resolves her desire by means of self-growth and forgives the man who killed her mother. When Katara finally hunts down her mother’s murderer she finds he is now a shell of the man he once was; he’s now, as dictated by the show, a pathetic and shrewd little man. Katara attacks and subdues him and is presented finally, with her long-awaited opportunity to kill him. In this moment, however, she stops herself because of the philosophical guidance of her peers that help her come to the realization that by exacting violence on this pitiful man before her, she is just enabling more violence, she will perpetuate the cycle that has harmed her so, and in so, she is no better than him.        

     While both fictional depictions of terror use self-justification as means of characters committing or feeling violence or hate, they tackle the concept of the ethics of vigilante justice as means of vengeance in different and nuanced ways. By doing this, they both further their own narrative and entrust the viewer to come to their own conclusions about what is and is not just. By allowing the viewer such an autonomy, the depictions are allowed to explore their respective depictions more deeply of what it means to justify extreme violence towards others as a response to extreme violence against yourself. Because of the nuance of each depiction, because of the invoked themes, be they rape or genocide, these stories stand testament to the flexibility of human ethics, and what it takes for someone to become too, the monster that has trespassed against them.