Megan Fox is also not the main character; and she's not the boy hero's plucky sidekick (there are no boy heroes in this movie). Instead, she's the toothy, gory, puke-soaked object of repulsion and disgust. In short, she is the monster.

And she's a very specific kind of monster, too. She embodies one of the scariest demons who haunts girls' dreams: The popular, pretty girl who pretends to be your friend while secretly trying to steal your boyfriend, your pride, and your life. Written and directed by women, Jennifer's Body is a film made in a women's genre about women's problems. It's a movie about why women want to stab Megan Fox in the tit with scissors.

An otherwise fairly illuminating io9 post linking the box office failure of Jennifer's Body to misguided, male-centric marketing contains this surprising (for me) statistic: the built-in audience for horror is predominantly female. In this context using hot Megan Fox pictures* to market a film about dysfunctional female friendships written and produced by the writer of Juno is even more misguided than you'd otherwise expect.

I, too, might have seen the film if it hadn't been marketed as porn.

* not Google search bait

SF meme of the day: women in tubes. What a strange preoccupation for Golden Age SF to have. Via Posthuman Blues.

Dollhouse, on the other hand, really was pretty decent. Definitely the best episode of the series so far. If I have complaints—which I do—it's with:

1) The Echo reprogramming / mole bit, which drew a little too bright a line around the silliness of the show's premise. How did the mole accomplish the insertion of such a detailed, uh, parameter, in the fifteen seconds Topher happened to be away from his desk? It reminded me of a classic bit from Family Guy:

Brian: Hola! Um...me, me llamo es Brian. Ahh, uh, um lets see, uh, nosotros queremos ir con ustedes.
Mexican: Hey that was pretty good. But actually when you said, "Me llamo es Brian," you don't need the "es." Just, "Me llamo Brian."
Brian: Oh, you speak English.
Mexican: No, just that first speech and this one explaining it.
Brian: You...you're kidding right?
Mexican: Que?

2) The attempted rape and murder of Mellie is an illustrative example of how hard it can be to separate commentary on misogyny from misogyny itself. (See Joss's interview at NPR for more on Joss's self-awareness about this problem.) The violence in the scene is exceptionally brutal, and the way it is shot is a deliberate quotation of the Jenny Calendar scene from Buffy Season 2. The audience is primed first to think of the usualness of this sort of filmic violence, in other words, so that the subversion of the woman-in-refrigerator trope has more salience.

On the other hand, the scene can only be described as pornographic in its composition, from the way the characters are dressed and blocked to the camera's fixation on Mellie's body. It's the same sort of problem that arises when Dollhouse (which is at its essence as show about misogyny and rape culture) uses Eliza Dushku in short skirts speaking in a breathy voice to promote itself. Joss has a lot of feminist cred and you certainly want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I'm sure we're all cognizant of the realities of the television marketplace and corporate interference—but this remains a needle that Joss will have to be very careful in trying to thread.

On the more global level of mythology, Dollhouse 1.6 works very hard to expand the show past the tight hermeticism of the first few episodes. Through the Wolfram-and-Hartization of the Dollhouse and the urban legend trope this world has suddenly grown a lot larger and a lot more interesting. Now this is a show that's as much about global capitalism as it is about sexual violence, and really about the intersection of the two—which seems very promising. I'm excited to see where Joss takes these ideas now that he has a freer hand.