- Thanks to Stereo, the
free live broadcast app, for sponsoring this video. Before we dig into the video itself I have kind of a fun announcement. I'm gonna be using Stereo to host a live after show of this video tomorrow at 7:00 PM, UK time. This is something a bit new. It's the first time I've done any kind of post-mortem after
show for any of my videos. And it's not gonna be
just me talking at to you. A lot of the topics that I'm
going to cover in this video are things that a lot of people have their own thoughts about that I would really be interested to hear. And one of the exciting
things about Stereo is that you or anyone listening
can record a voice memo and essentially like call into the show with your own thoughts or
questions like as we're live. So yeah, tomorrow's show is gonna be a kind of fun interactive
conversation between all of us about like anything that's
covered in this video or the process of making it. Whether that's about the
feminist horror genre, internalised misogyny, what you thought about
Jennifer's body the movie or how Megan Fox has been
treated over the years. Basically, I would just
love to hear your thoughts. I've hosted a few other
live shows on Stereo already including one where I give
anyone who like messages in a personalised recommendation of like the next thing
that they should watch. And also a debate about what is the best gay movie of all time? Actually, two of my favourite, possibly my two favourite queer lady films are both historical. The South Korean film
called the Handmaiden. - [Dan] Oh I haven't seen it, that's been on my list
for the longest time. - Oh my God, Dan, it is genuinely one of the
best films I've ever seen. And it is the story of a girl who comes from a family of criminals and this con man basically
comes to her house and says "I have kind of scoped out this woman. "She has a load of money coming to her. "The money will then be
given to her husband. "And so my plan," This guy says, "Is to marry
her, to take her money "and then to commit
her to an insane asylum "so that I can keep all the cash. "And what I want you to do
is to become her handmaiden "to persuade her that I am like the suitor "that she should fall for." And it is just delicious
in every single way. If you miss those, then you
can listen back to any of them on the Stereo app, they're
all there for you already. So yeah, if you think you
might want to listen or join in or even host a show yourself then I'm gonna leave a
link to download Stereo in the description and hopefully
see you there tomorrow. "When facing the press, Megan is the queen "of talking trailer trash
and posing like a porn star. "And yes, we've had the unbearable time "of watching her try to act on set. "And yes, it's very cringe-able. "So maybe being a porn star in the future "might be a good career
option, but make-up beware, "she has a paragraph
tattoo on her backside "probably due to her rotten childhood, "easily another 45 minutes in the chair." You'd be forgiven for
thinking that these words written about actress, Megan Fox are the work of some kind
of like unhinged troll ranting on the internet, but they're not. The paragraph I just read is from a letter that totals over a thousand words and is signed simply
loyal transformers crew. A letter that was hosted
on transformer director, Michael Bay's website. When we talk about why the
movie Jennifer's body flopped, it quickly becomes apparent
that it's far more complex than just a film not working out. In fact, it's a story
that from every angle captures the truth of the
rampant misogyny in Hollywood. The story around Jennifer's body and the treatment of Megan Fox at the time involved personal attacks
potential career blacklisting and industry-wide sexism. Later in this video we're
gonna come back to this letter, why it was written, and
the impact that it had. But first let's look at the context around the release of Jennifer's body. Settle in gang because this
is gonna be a messed up ride. Internalised misogyny. So that letter is a pretty
clear example of sexism. Like it's not explicitly stated that the writers of the letter were men, but I feel like that's the impression that we're all getting here. The content of the letter
presents a very specific kind of sexism that's perpetuated by men, but in order for us to understand everything else that happened and why the public reacted to Megan Fox in the way that they did we also need to talk about
internalised misogyny. Internalised misogyny is pretty
much what it sounds like. Sexism and misogyny are so
ingrained within our society that oftentimes women will
essentially absorb them into the way that they think
about and treat themselves and other women and girls. It might cause you to
judge or dislike yourself, the women around you, or just
the idea of women in general. Sometimes it can be difficult
to separate your real feelings from the things you've been
told, even about your own body. Like, do you really want to
shave your legs for yourself? Or because you've been told you have to? Some women will turn that
internalised misogyny on other women who don't fit the narrow standard of acceptability. They don't see something
like growing leg hair as a harmless individual choice but something that other
women can and should be judged for not doing. They buy into the idea
that having leg hair means that women are inherently lazy unhygienic, unattractive or one of those filthy
man eating lesbians. Not because it's true,
but because society's idea of what a good woman is, is a woman with like baby smooth legs. Maintaining like a base
level attractiveness to the male gaze is an
inherent part of this. And the most messed up thing
is, it goes beyond this. It isn't enough to just
not be unattractive. You also can be seen to care too much about the way you look,
because if you care too much you must be flaunting it, asking for it. Somehow under the punishing gaze of external and internal sexism you have to balance your
weight across this line between the equally damning
stated of frigid lesbian and dumb whore. In a world where being valuable to men is an ideal to be strived towards, is it any wonder that some
women end up seeing other women as competitors to be judged? When we look back at
the way that Megan Fox and other women like her were treated in the era around the
release of Jennifer's body in the two thousands, they were very clearly
marketed as sexual commodities and then had the same system
that cast them in that role encourage other women
to condemn them for it. This idea of internalised
misogyny is nothing new. It didn't just like pop up in the era of leave Brittany alone. But the advent of
popularisation of the internet exploded this already toxic trend with gossip blogs and easy
access to paparazzi photos, anonymous tips and forums that validated this kind of hatred. Online spaces can be filled
with jealousy and derision, particularly towards
women in the spotlight, but internalised misogyny
isn't just a jealousy thing. If you're taught being a woman is lesser, that women are weak, then things associated with women, the colour pink for
example, become the enemy, rather than the system itself. So many of us will have gone through the, I hate the colour pink
phase, not for any reason tied solely to pure colour preference, but because of what the
colour had come to mean to us. In the throws of internalised misogyny, you believe the lies that society
says about people like you except you don't see them as lies. Instead, you see yourself as the exception for not being what they say. We can see this play
out across this period in the, not like other girls mentality. Pieces of pop culture, like
Pink's song, Stupid Girls, the classic bimbo to bookworm meme. And it's a phenomenon that
Fox herself is well aware of. Megan Fox and Transformers. So in the throws of this
era we have Megan Fox this actress who is
absolutely skyrocketed to fame for her role as Mikaela
Banes in the 2007 movie, Transformers. Almost immediately she went
from relatively unknown to being plastered on the front of fashion and gossip magazines. Even being awarded the title
of sexiest woman in the world shortly after the movie premiered. Chris Lee of the Los
Angeles times called Fox "The first bonafide sex
symbol of the 21st century." And people seemed to agree. Although this was Fox's breakout
role, it wasn't her first. Gaining increasing notoriety
is her role at the age of 15 in Bad Boys two. She was dressed in a stars
and stripes bikini and heels and ended up being asked
to dance under a waterfall because she was too young
to be seated at the bar with a drink in the scene. Bad Boys two like transformers
was directed by Michael Bay. Yeah, the Michael Bay from the letter at the beginning of this video and FYI we're gonna see a lot more of him later in this story, when
we look at how exactly that letter came to be written. The role of the glamorous sexy starlet was not one that Fox was used to. Speaking of her childhood
in rural Tennessee, she said, "My dad used to hunt ducks "and my mom would put them in the pot. "We lived really modestly,
we had very little money." A few years after these public
accolades started to come in all based on her looks, she did this interview with cosmopolitan where she said that,
although she was confident in her personality, she's
completely hysterically insecure, self-loathing introverted and neurotic about the way she looks physically. But for better or worse, the
role had been created for her. She either embraced and
exploited it or rejected it and risk losing everything. At first Fox chose to exploit it. Knowing the whole time
that what she was doing was an artifice. She cultivated this public persona. This Raven haired vixen,
tattooed and ballsy, aware of her sexuality, outrageous in everything
she said in interviews. When in reality, she'd only
ever slept with two men both of them long term boyfriends and to everyone who knew her well she was kind of known
as a bit of a homebody. In this period she was never really seen like falling out of
clubs or partying hard. She was talking the talk
but not walking the walk as it were. But juggling these private
and public versions of herself seemed to be taking a toll. At the time when she was
promoting Jennifer's body her interviews were getting
increasingly more open and frank and honestly kind of disturbing. "Those are literally his
directions sometimes, be hot. "I've had that note on set before. "Mike, I'll say, who am I talking to? "Where am I supposed to be looking at? "And he responds, just be sexy. "I get mad when people talk
to me like that, then again "audiences don't come to
Transformers to see us. "They're there to see the
devastation and the explosions. "It's been a crazy year. "I've learned that being a celebrity is "like being a sacrificial lamb. "At some point "no matter how high the
pedestal they put you on "they're going to tear you down. "And I created a character as
an offering for the sacrifice. "I'm not willing to give my true self up. "It's a Testament to my real personality "that I would go so far as to
make up another personality "to give to the world. "The reality is I'm hidden
amongst all the insanity. "Nobody can find me." To me all of this culminated
around Jennifer's body in 2009 and the fallout that came after it I think it's important to look
at the way that the treatment of Megan Fox as a sexualized young actress played into the initial
failure of the film because the public perception of Megan Fox that was created by these
movie studios and publicists defined the way that Jennifer's
body was sold to the public. It was all based around the idea that Fox's inherent and only
role in movies and in life was to be a sexual object. Jennifer's body director Karyn Kusama has actually talked about the fact that some of the initial ideas for the marketing of the
movie, were to have Megan Fox host an amateur porn
site to promote the film. Like that's the level of sexualization that we're dealing with here. And the most ridiculous thing about it is that that movie that
they were trying to sell, this sexy movie, was not
what Jennifer's body was. Reviews at the time said things like "If you're in search for a
way to ogle Megan Fox's body, "there are a lot better ways of doing it "than subjecting yourself to this." And, "Jennifer's body is
not funny, nor is it sexy. "The girls keep their
clothes on, nor is it scary. "It's all just special effects." So all encompassing was this idea that Megan Fox was just
this inherently sexual actor who in any film she was going to be in, was going to turn it into some
kind of softcore porn film that it kind of ended up
reflecting onto her co-stars including Amanda Seyfried, with one review saying,
"Real life Seyfried "is a luscious bit of blonde honeycomb "but in the world of Jennifer's body "she magically turns into a
geek with a simple application "of the sexy librarian costume
from the prop department." So for this next section
about gender marketing in Jennifer's body,
I'm gonna pass over to, I guess our like advertising
correspondent for this video, Shonalika, who is an amazing
video essayist on YouTube. I'm going to link their channel below. They very kindly agreed to
collaborate on this video. So yeah, they're gonna take you through some more messed up things that happened in the context of this movie. Marketing. - Thanks Rowan. Jennifer's body suffered from
a serious marketing problem. The posters, in particular this one, don't really convey
anything about the film other than that it has
sexy Megan Fox in it. The marketing suggested
that the film was devoid of much other than sex appeal and therefore it was mostly
men who want and expect that kind of content from
Megan Fox who went to see it. What they got was a drama
focused on a toxic relationship between two teenagers, with
five seconds of lesbianism one gratuitous shot of Jennifer and several not quite sex scenes ending with Jennifer
disembowelling several boys and eating their entrails. Now, personally, I love
that a bunch of horny men were slapped in the face like that. A women looking sexy on a poster shouldn't mean she has to do
anything sexy in the film. We certainly don't expect
the same of male actors. However, it didn't do the
film itself any favours. The audience were mad,
but should they have been? The advertising was misleading, sure. But the film wasn't devoid
of valuable content. As a matter of fact, it explored
far more interesting themes than just sexy Megan Fox. Toxic relationships, adolescent sexuality, trauma, and sexual abuse. So why couldn't the male
audience see past the gender of its main character and
appreciate those aspects of the film in the same
way that female viewers do for male characters all the time? The concept that men
and women can or should only engage with media
made specifically for them is of course, gender
essentialist nonsense. However, the notion remains
prevalent in our society and our subconscious. It informs how advertisers
tried to sell us products and how we respond to those products. The failure of Jennifer's body
at the box office is in part due to this idea that boys and
girls need different media. For example, boys don't enjoy love stories and girls don't like horror. The latter being a large
part of the reason presumably as to why they decided
not to market the film towards teenage girls. Roger Ebert's review of
the film describes it as Twilight for boys, which is a
massive mis-characterization. There are Twilight vibes in the film sure, but it's far from a gender swapped version for a male audience. If anything, it's still
Twilight for girls. Twilight for gay girls. And that is exactly what upset
the male audience so much. Deep down they knew it
wasn't Twilight for boys. That was the problem. It wasn't for them, but
let's not simplify the issue. It's bigger and deeper than that because the issues of
gender based marketing aren't split neatly down the middle. Men weren't upset because
it wasn't a boy movie. They were upset because
it was a girl movie. Let me explain. While there are some movies
marketed specifically at boys, Transformers, for example,
in media in general thanks to the patriarchy
males perspectives. Male perspectives are the default unless otherwise specified. The plot of a neutral
movie will be seen as suddenly focusing on a female perspective if its main character
happens to be a woman. A fantastic example of
somebody acknowledging and addressing this can
be found in the making of BoJack horseman. The show's creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg would come up with concepts
for background gags, for example, a business dog
slobbering on a business person. When realising these designs,
head designer Lisa Hanawalt would sometimes randomly make
characters, people of colour or women, a decision which initially made Bob-Waksberg uncomfortable. He reflects, "For the dog joke, "you have the thing
where the tongue slobbers "all over the business person. "But if you also have the thing where both "of them are ladies "the audience will think, why
are those characters female? "Is that part of the joke? "The underlying assumption
is that the default mode "for any character is male. "So to make the characters
female is an additional detail "on top of that. "In case I'm not being
a hundred percent clear, "this thinking is stupid and
wrong and self perpetuating, "unless you actively work against it. Thanks to the cis het white male default, we have horror movies
and we have girl movies. The two cannot naturally crossover in the same way that
whiteness, maleness and so on can naturally cross over
into just about anything. In other words, most men are
used to being pandered to and centred unless
clearly otherwise stated so they can then catalogue
that item as for girls and avoid it if they want to. Most men, especially cis het white ones, probably haven't watched
and would not be interested in watching a film aimed at teenage girls, even though they may be
interested in watching a film about mountain climbers, despite most men not being mountain climbers. We are asked to sympathise with characters who have different perspectives
to our own all the time, that's the whole point of stories. Yet gender remains the
differential that too many men seem unwilling to cross. So when men did watch Jennifer's body and it didn't centre their feelings, they judged it a failure when really the failure was their own - Queer readings. One of the key elements of
the marketing of the movie that I think really hammered
home the way that the marketers we're thinking about this
like assumed target audience was the kiss between Jennifer and Needy, which many people remember as
like the foundation upon which this movie was pushed to young
audiences of teenage boys. In reality the kiss lasts
for like a minute total in the whole film and it's neither like an
extended steamy sex scene or like an actual canonical confirmation of a queer relationship in the movie. Instead, it's a complicated
and charged moment in the relationship
between these two girls that plays on both the intensity of teenage female friendships and the sexual manipulation
methods of demon, Jennifer. Writer Diablo Cody thought of it as a way to show the relationship
was something more intense than just friendship. "At the time I just thought, "I want people to really
understand how badly "Needy wants Jennifer. "There's a sexual tension between them. "It's not just a friendship." But she's also talked about
how at the time of its release because of the way the kiss
was used in the marketing it would seem by a lot
of people who nowadays would look at Jennifer's body
as a really interesting movie to do a queer reading of,
as something that was purely put in to titillate male viewers. Something that was like
distinct in and of itself that didn't necessarily tie
into the rest of the movie. But I think I agree with
Cody's initial reasoning behind putting in the kiss. I personally think it doesn't
take a lot to dig into a queer reading of the
characters of Jennifer and Needy within the movie. But I think because of the
foregrounding of that kiss scene and the idea of it
being like promoted as a very sexual movie, it's easy to see how that could be lost because I think a lot
of that queer reading is not actually about sex at all but about this complicated
emotional relationship between the two girls. Their relationship is not
trying to be a kind of positive queer piece of
representation, it's really toxic. When Jennifer goes off to chip as a victim it's still wrapped up in
her obsession with Needy. Asking him to say, "I'm
better than Needy." She constantly makes these comments like "We can play boyfriend,
girlfriend, like we used to." And, "I always stay in your
bed during sleepovers." And, "I go both ways." But it's never clear whether
this is a genuine assertion of bisexuality or a
tongue in cheek reference for the audience. I think one of the reasons
why Jennifer's body has had such a kind of
Renaissance in queer viewership more recently is because we
kind of feel ready for it now. At the time, what we
might've been looking for was something that was less
complicated, less toxic, less, you know, dark. With a lot of elements of representation what will normally happen is
you have a marginalised group which is portrayed like
actively badly initially and then you get something
which is a little bit more like virtue signalling it's, you know, that character is probably
always gonna be really good and just and moral, because you're afraid of doing anything that would shine a bad light on them. And then you get to the
point where you have enough of this positive representation that you can start to be a
little bit more complicated in the way that you portray them. And Jennifer's body kind
of feels like a movie that was made too early. Like if it had come out now,
this complicated, messy, emotional relationship
between these two girls might have been seen
for what it really was rather than an attempt at
drawing in male viewers. So that's how the movie was sold. Let's talk about what was
going on in the movie itself. What the movie is about,
because when we do, I think this whole thing
becomes a lot more awful. A metaphor for trauma. So I talked about this
in my blind manner video but it's no secret to say
that horror and metaphor are old friends. All the way back to bedtime stories and old myths meant to warn
of the world's dangers. We've used tales of supernatural
or fictionalised monsters to talk about real fears around us. And to me Jennifer's body at its heart is a story talking about
sexual abuse and trauma. It's a story of a teen girl
who ends up drunk and alone in a van with a group of strange men who take advantage of
her for their own power and satisfaction and who is
left traumatised by the ordeal. The movie replaces an
actual sexual assault scene with the scene of a ritualistic sacrifice kind of allowing the
two to blend together. In the van on the way to the ritual Jennifer herself assumes that
is what's going to happen asking, "Where are we going? "Are you guys rapists?" Then when they don't answer or deny it, she begins insisting. I'm a Virgin, I don't know how, you should find someone who does know how. She's going through these
desperate words of reasoning trying anything she can to get
them to stop, to let her go and it's so painful as an audience because we saw what was
going on before she did. We knew as she was getting in that van what was going to happen and watching this kind
of drunken haze turn to this horrified anticipation just adds to our sense of horror. It's got this kind of tone
of inevitability to it. The story that we know is based
as much in truth and reality as it is in this
exaggerated cultist horror. The ritual itself is a
disorienting tonal shift for the audience who have grown used to the quippy teen dialogue and
comedic elements of the movie so far. It's sudden, and with an edge
of what might've been humour as the boy starts singing but which is undermined
by the brutality of it. The song serves as a reminder
of how unaffected they are while plunging the knife into her body seeing it as a bonding
experience between boys. By replacing it with a
ritualistic blood sacrifice the movie manages to convey the horror of a sexual assault scene without fetishizing or even
showing an actual assault. So if the ritual itself
is a stand-in for assault, what of Jennifer's actions afterwards? Her immediate thought is to get to Needy leading to the scene in the kitchen where she decimates a rotisserie chicken and then vomits black tar
all over the linoleum. The scene is so painful
because so many of us, too many of us, have been the
person that a friend goes to after something awful like
this has happened to them. Feeling scared and helpless as
you watch your friend in pain like Needy does, watching
them figuratively and sometimes literally
spilling their guts to you. Even the moment when Needy goes
to the phone to call someone the cops maybe and Jennifer stops her. It all feels so
terrifyingly familiar to me and I imagine some of you too. There's this real understanding
from writer Diablo Cody, about the reaction of
girls in this situation in a way that feels organic and truthful rather than didactic. And then Jennifer leaves and
begins her killing spree. The rape revenge fantasy genre. The rape revenge fantasy is
an established genre of cinema that was popularised in the 1970s. It can overlap with other genres including like thriller,
crime, even comedy. Some of the most famous examples include I spit on your grave,
Kill Bill, Teeth, Revenge and there are also movies
that I wouldn't class as being in this genre specifically but have an element of
it in a wider story. Like the girl with the dragon
tattoo or mad max fury road. Here's how the storyline typically goes. Act one, a woman is raped,
tortured and left for dead. Act two, the woman survives
and takes an angry sense of strength to what it's done to her. And act three, the woman is empowered and takes revenge by killing
and sometimes torturing all of her rapists. Generally the idea is that it's the woman who has been raped herself
who is enacting revenge, not anyone who is around her. Although I think it's worth
noting that this genre, like many others, has
changed, developed, expanded in recent years. The most recent movie that I've seen, that kind of deals with this
is promising young woman that I actually really liked and I think it's an interesting indicator of the different ways
that this genre might go in the future. It's worth noting that
traditionally these movies are seen as kind of like empowered women movies but they are also most often
directed and written by men. Like all the movies in the
genre that I just referenced, only two of them revenge and
then promising young woman were written or directed by a woman. And to be clear, I'm not saying that men can't write and direct these movies. Like let's be real, they're gonna do what
they want either way. But I think Jennifer's Body is
a really interesting example of what happens when you
allow a woman to play around and toy with this genre. But as we pointed out
earlier, a kind of campy but complicated movie about the way a girl deals with trauma was not
necessarily how this movie was marketed to the masses, which is why it's so interesting
to me that Jennifer's Body has had that kind of
post me too renaissance in the modern era. The me too era Renaissance. Honestly, I think that if Diablo Cody had written Jennifer's body
in 2019 rather than 2009 people would be saying that
it was like too obvious. It was too on the nose. Like really, you're
actually gonna write a movie about a girl who is pseudo sacrificed for the advancement of
men's artistic careers. It just feels so obviously parallel to these kind of abusive
producers and directors and casting couches that
we've heard so much about from the me too movement in Hollywood. Successful men taking
advantage of young actresses in order to further their own careers. But here's the thing to remember. Cody, didn't write this in 2019 and she didn't have some
kind of crystal ball to look into the future of,
you know, the reckoning to come because this problem didn't start in 2019 and it isn't relegated to
the elite of Hollywood. And I think the whole thing
takes on this extra layer of tragedy when you hear
Megan Fox talk about her own experiences prior
to the me too movement. In an interview with
entertainment tonight, she said, "I was sort of in front
of the me too movement "before the me too movement happened. "I was speaking out and saying, "Hey these things are happening
to me and they're not okay. "And everyone was like,
fuck you, we don't care. "You deserve it because of how you talk, "because of how you look, how you dress "because of the jokes you make." Fox has described Jennifer's body as "My favourite project that I've ever done. "Just magical at that moment in my life, "it was a perfect fit." And it's not hard to imagine why, because of what she was going
through with Michael Bay at the time. Breaking down the perfect victim. So to me, Jennifer's Body
feels quite different to a lot of other movies
within this particular genre and I think the reason
why is the way it deals with Jennifer herself, she
isn't this empowered badass made tough and world wise by her trauma, but nor is she this innocent
girl who did everything right and was targeted by a stroke
of bad luck and injustice. Cody specifically doesn't
moralise the choices of victims in their trauma. Instead, she asks us to feel
the injustice of the suffering of a character who is inherently flawed like the men who have done this to her are terrible people unequivocally, but Jennifer's kind of an asshole herself and the movie weaves in these elements of the suffering that
Jennifer leaves behind. We see the funeral of one of her victims and his mum breaking
down at his grave side. Jennifer is possessed by
a demon when she tells him "I need you frightened,
I need you hopeless." But it's a phrase that seems to be just an exaggerated version of her prior careless
attitude towards other people. Jennifer is like a
classic example of a girl who ticks all the boxes of the she was asking for it,
fear mongering and lies. She participates in risk taking behaviour, she's hyper-sexual and flirty and she's not particularly book smart. Cody doesn't want to give
us an easy girl to root for. Instead, she wants to hold up
a mirror to the expectations that we place on girls like her. Jennifer is in many
ways utterly unlikable, kind of in that paradoxical
way you often get with girls who are both socially popular but sort of hated by
everyone at the same time. Jennifer isn't a feminist role model and Jennifer's body isn't
interested in giving you a neatly wrapped story
of female empowerment. It isn't trying to give
you an easy life lesson. After the ritual, which is
honestly just a harrowing scene. Jennifer's also removed
from like an easy male gaze. She spends a large chunk
of the movie looking tired, sick, or depressed. She isn't a heroine in an iconic
skin type revenge uniform. She gets angry and lashes
out after her trauma but it only serves to remind us that she was mean to her friend,
even before she became a demon. Jennifer was never a good person but we're encouraged to understand that when it comes to what happened
to her, that doesn't matter. There's no suggestion in the
movie that she deserved it or had it coming or needed
to be put in her place. It's just a disturbing
injustice as it would have been if it had happened to anyone else. Megan Fox, Michael Bay and the letter. So all of this leads us to the letter from the start of this video. The letter was in response to an interview that Megan Fox gave after the
filming of Transformers two, during the press tour for Jennifer's body. In this interview she
talks about Michael Bay in that super open, outrageous, I'll say anything that comes into my mind, uncensored kind of public persona that she was putting out at the time. She said, "He's like Napoleon "and he wants to create
this insane infamous "madman reputation. "He wants to be like Hitler
on his sets, and he is "So he's a nightmare to work for "but when you get him away from set "and he's not in director mode, "I kind of really enjoy his personality "because he's so awkward,
so hopelessly awkward. "He has no social skills at all "and it's endearing to watch him. "He's vulnerable and fragile in real life. "And then on set, he's a tyrant. "Shia and I almost die when
we make a Transformers movie. "He has you do some really insane things "that insurance would never let you do." So that, as you can imagine,
didn't go down well. Soon afterwards a letter was released on Michael Bay's website that was over a thousand words long and apparently from some people
who had worked in the crew on the Transformers movies. I read some of it at the
beginning of this video but I'm just gonna read some more. You can find it online if you
want to read the whole thing. "We know this quite intimately "because we've seen the tedious experience "of working with the
dumb as a rock, Megan Fox "on both Transformers movies. "Megan really is a thankless
classless graceless "and shall we say unfriendly bitch. "It's sad how fame can twist people "and even sadder that
young girls look up to her. "If only they knew who
they're really looking up to "but fame is fleeting. "We being behind the
scenes, see them come and go "hopefully Michael will have
Megatron squish her character "in the first 10 minutes
of transformers three. "We can tell you that
would make the crew happy." The letter trashed Fox while praising Bay. Although it claims to have been written by around three members of the crew. The fact it was published on Bay's website and at least two inside
sources have come forward to claim Bay's direct involvement
in the following years seems to suggest he at
least signed off on it, if not actively took part in its writing. The letter itself
quickly went viral online and Fox was branded difficult to work with which was basically a death sentence for actresses in Hollywood. Bay himself then responded
to both the initial interview and the letter on his blog in
a carefully diplomatic way. "I don't condone the crew letter to Megan "and I don't condone
Megan's outlandish quotes "but her crazy quips, a
part of her crazy charm. "The fact of the matter, I
still love working with her." But despite this soon afterwards, Fox was fired from the
next Transformers movie and Bay was giving quotes to the press, which were talking a lot about the power that he had over actors. "Nick cage wasn't a big
actor when I cast him, "nor was Ben Affleck before
I put him in Armageddon. "Shia LaBeouf wasn't a big movie star "before he did Transformers
and then he exploded "not to mention Will
Smith and Martin Lawrence "from Bad Boys. "Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox "until I found her and
put her in Transformers. "I like to think that I've had some luck "in building actors'
careers with my films." He's talking about
building up actors' careers but it definitely feels
like there's an implication that he can tear them down as well. According to Michael Bay, it was actually Steven Spielberg who made the decision to fire Megan Fox and it has been years
since this feud happened. But I think one of the
really difficult things about this whole situation
is that there's so much that we just don't know for sure. Interviews with CoStar Shia LaBeouf about Fox's time on set suggests there may have been more going on than first meets the eye. "Megan developed this spice girl strength "this woman empowerment stuff
that made her feel awkward "about her involvement with Michael "who some people think is
a very lascivious filmmaker "the way he films women. "And she had a hard time accepting it. "When Mike would ask her
to do specific things "there was no time for fluffy
talk, we're on the run. "And the one thing Mike lacks is tact." That role in Bad Boys two
that we talked about earlier, the one where Megan Fox
was 15 and wearing heels and a stars and stripes
bikini under a waterfall. Yeah, it turns out Michael
Bay was a little more than slightly involved. As Fox explained, "He approved my outfit "and they said, you know, Michael she's 15 "so you can't sit her at the bar "and she can't have a drink in her hand. "So his solution to that
problem was to then have me "dancing underneath a
waterfall, getting soaking wet. "At 15 I was in 10th grade. "So that's sort of a microcosm
of how Bay's mind works." I think it's worth noting
that since then Fox has said that she was never,
"assaulted or preyed upon "in what I felt was a
sexual manner by Bay. "These specific instances
were inconsequential "in a long and arduous journey
along which I have endured "some genuinely harrowing experiences "in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry. "There are many names that
deserve to be going viral "in cancel culture right now,
but they are safely stored "in the fragmented recesses of my heart." But to my mind, whether
or not Fox now labels this as an assault or not, the
idea of hiring a 15 year old for a racy shoot like that,
surely just isn't acceptable. It feels like this really
messed up cycle of Hollywood that she was essentially
secured in her role as a sex symbol, by the same man who has the power to
potentially blacklist her Bay and Fox, at least publicly,
seem to have reconciled, with her taking on a lead role
in his Ninja turtles reboot some years later. Since the initial incident both of them have talked
about this publicly, but it seems like as the years pass, Fox gets less and less adamant that what happened to her was unfair. Whether this is because
of a genuine feeling or because the idea that
anything but total capitulation would just prolong the
backlash, we'll never know. In the past, she said things like, "I got myself in this whole
mess, but it doesn't matter. "I know that the things they said about me "in the crew letter were not true, "but Bay's not happy with
some of the things I've said "about him. "I was waiting for someone to defend me, "to say that's not
accurate, but nobody did. "I think it's because I'm a girl. "They left me out there to
be bludgeoned to death." Then later, "The negative
press forced me to be "very introspective and go "you are not totally
right in this situation. "I reached out to him and we
had a very genuine exchange. "From that point forward it was good." But even as her public
statements seem to absolve Bay of any blame, she still talks
quite openly about the effects that that time had on her,
saying as recently as 2019, "I think I had a genuine
psychological breakdown. "I didn't want to be seen. "I didn't want to have to
take a photo, do a magazine, "walk a carpet. "I didn't want to be seen in public at all "because the fear and the belief
and the absolute certainty "that I was going to be mocked or spat at "or someone was going to yell at me "or people would stone me or
savage me for just being out. "So I went through a very
dark moment at that time." And something tells me that Michael Bay, suffering as he might have
been from the words of one 20 something year old actress, did not go through anything
like that in the aftermath. Before I get onto my concluding remarks, if you've had any thoughts about anything that we've talked about in this video then don't forget that the
after show is going to be live on Stereo tomorrow at 7:00 PM, UK time just click the link in the description. I would really love to
hear what you have to say whether you agree, disagree
or have any more thoughts. Conclusion. Ultimately I think that Jennifer's Body is this brilliant, fun romp of a film that had some incredibly talented women behind and in front of the camera but that was completely let down by the external
circumstances surrounding it. But I think its legacy can
really tell us something. To me it's this sort of crystallisation, this artefact, this story
that is not a one-off. We still have an overwhelming
majority of film critics, for example, telling the
public whether a film is rotten or not, whether
it's even worth seeing who are just overwhelmingly white men these people who apparently
decide what a film should be and how each film measures up to that. I think it's no coincidence that films that a target
audience of teenage girls generally agree to be close to perfection are all rated as rotten by these men. The princess diaries, Ella
Enchanted, Cinderella story, She's the man or Wild Child. These movies are all like beloved. They are clearly doing
what they're meant to for their target audience but maybe that's a rant for another video. I just want to add quickly at the end here I'm pretty sure this video
is going to get demonetized based on what we have
been discussing here today so if you would like to
help support me make videos like this one, I'm gonna
leave a link to my Patreon which actually now has
some new tears and goals and stuff like that in the description and also links to my social media so you can find me all over the internet and until I see you next time, bye.
