Apocalypse Jenny
(Spoilers)
Jenny Long is the hardest Apocalypse 1999 character for me to write. Half of the book is written from her perspective, so it clearly wasn’t impossible, but she made me self-conscious and uncomfortable in ways the other characters didn’t. Partly, it’s an identity thing: Jenny is a cis, white straight girl, and I knew that if I didn’t come out before the story did, people would read her as autobiographical. If I wanted to write a memoir, I would have written one. The point of this project was to write in a voice other than my own.
This is what I told myself, anyway. Now, with a little bit of distance, I think I had a hard time writing Jenny because she is extremely autobiographical, and not in a flattering way. Jenny holds the parts of me that I find most embarrassing; my shyness, my crybaby sensitivity, my desperate need for love or approval and all the ways I’ve sold myself out to get it. Jenny comes from the rawest and loneliest parts of me. She forces me to remember what it was like to have no defense mechanisms and no tough outer shell around the parts of me that can be hurt. To write her, I have to make myself defenseless again.
Jenny is vulnerability, which everyone has and no-one likes having. Every Apocalypse character is a young person, but Jenny embodies the actual feeling of being young, at least as I remember it: Being unsure of what you want, or who you are, or whether anyone will ever love you, and willing to do just about anything to receive some kind of proof that you are a worthwhile human being.
Sasha Geffen is right that demon possession often stands in for transmasculinity, but that doesn’t preclude the other, more obvious reading of these stories: They’re cautionary tales about adolescent female sexuality. A girl who starts masturbating and talking about sex is a demon, an evil thing that used to be a person, because our culture dreads female sexual autonomy. In Apocalypse 1999, Nick begins to suspect Jenny of being possessed right after she loses her virginity, and Jenny begins to suspect Nick because of moodiness and self-destructiveness that could just as easily be dysphoria. Both of their identities — trans man, sexually active woman — are portrayed as demonic by the dominant culture, and instead of supporting each other, they become willing to see each other in the worst possible light. It’s what happens at the end of a friendship.
Virginity, and its loss, also inevitably summons up the Final Girl, the “strong” female character who is the only member of her friend group to survive a horror movie. Buffy Summers was created to invert the horror trope of the cute blonde girl who gets killed off by the monsters in the first act. She’s the “Chosen One,” the lone girl who is not weak or disposable. (Buffy herself objects to this, of course, but I won’t spoil it.) In The Craft, Robyn Tunney’s Sarah proves herself a “natural witch” by maintaining loyalty to a white man even after he tries to rape her, and being willing to deny her power to the unruly Black and queer and disabled witches who were once her friends. Final Girls are traditionally virgins; the slasher movie becomes a sort of purity test, in which the girl who does the best job of repressing her sexuality is the one deemed worthy of survival.
There’s something sinister — demonic, even — in the idea that feminine virtue depends on letting everyone else get slaughtered. It’s a reminder that white, straight, cis womanhood traditionally maintains its proximity to power by permitting or aiding in the subjugation of everyone else. All of Jenny’s friends and compatriots in Apocalypse 1999 are people that the dominant culture deems disposable: They’re trans, they’re queer, they’re disabled, they’re “unlikable” women and/or women who have been sexually assaulted. Jenny is initially willing to leave those people behind for Dave and the heterosexual normalcy and power that he provides. Dave’s recurring promise to Jenny is that she is “special,” better than anybody else, more deserving of life or joy than they are. Together, she and Dave live out one of horror’s most problematic genres, the zombie movie — everyone she sees is “dead,” a walking corpse, the soulless vehicle of a demon. No-one is fully human, except for Jenny and her boyfriend, which means she should be able to hurt or kill them without caring.
Jenny understands, on some level, that this scenario is cruel, and that there’s nothing liberating about hurting people. She senses, as do we, that there has to be some other way of surviving; some way to embody female power without taking power away from anyone else. The greatest Final Girl, to me, is Sidney Prescott of the Scream series, not just because she has sex and lives — exploring your sexuality, or making mistakes while exploring it, doesn’t have to mean that your life is over — but because her arc is about using her own trauma to help other people. She starts as a high-school girl with an abusive boyfriend and ends as a woman who works at a domestic-abuse hotline. The body counts are high, in the Scream movies, but Sidney is never alone in the final scene. Her survival is always shared with as many people as she can save.
Jenny Long’s saving grace, I think, is that she understands being treated like you don’t matter. Buffy Summers started as a cheerleader, and every boy in Scream had a crush on Sidney, but Jenny Long is a a soft, awkward, badly dressed, socially ill-at-ease person, someone who looks more or less anonymous, and who spends her weekends reading Star Trek: The Next Generation paperbacks and joining letter-writing campaigns to save MST3K. In her own odd way, she’s occupying a traditionally male role: The Nerd, like Casey in The Faculty, someone who is by no means a sex symbol or a badass, but who we’re meant to like more for being “relatable.” Jenny can resist the allure of being picked and favored by the men on top of the world, because she remembers what the world looks like from the bottom. Whether or not we relate to her, she can relate to us, which is what saves her.
I relate to Jenny, more than I’d like to admit, which might explain why her playlist is one of my favorites. Fittingly, her playlist has a lot of Girl Power on it — albeit a very specific ‘90s version of Girl Power wherein femininity was conveyed almost entirely by acoustic guitars. Jenny has definitely gone to at least one Lilith Fair, in her lifetime, and she is without doubt the proud owner of Jewel’s 1998 poetry collection A Night Without Armor, but her playlist also doesn’t have any notorious domestic abusers or KoRn on it, so who won that culture war, really?
There are great things about Jenny Long, and they are rooted in the very defenselessness that made me so uncomfortable. Jenny deeply, truly loves the people she loves. She has no guard to put up, no ironic distance or learned cynicism to shield her from disappointment, and precisely because of that, she can throw herself into caring about someone with her whole being. Jenny is receptive, impressionable; she feels everything, and often, she feels too much. Yet that receptiveness creates a space where compassion can grow. Jenny is soft. She’s easily wounded. Yet in a world defined by coldness and callousness, where people compete to be the cleverest bully, there is something tremendous and heroic in Jenny’s soft heart — in letting yourself be hurt or scared or disappointed, if you have to be, because keeping yourself undefended makes you more open to everyone else.
The artists on Jenny’s playlist were often mocked in the ‘90s — for being soft, feminine, soppy, hysterical, not real punk, not real rock— yet artist-to-artist and song-to-song, it’s a murderer’s row of women we revere today. Liz Phair, Aimee Mann, Tori Amos, Fiona fucking Apple: What they all have in common is being underestimated, dismissed because they were women or because people mistook a soft tone of voice for having nothing to say. That’s what Sidney and Buffy and Final Girls have in common, too, and even terrifying, out-of-control Regan: All of them are capable of more than you’d assume at first meeting. Inside every one of those girls, defenseless as they seem, there’s something you do not expect.
This week, proceeds from Apocalypse 1999 will be donated to Trans Media Watch, based out of London and dedicated to creating “a Britain in which the portrayal of trans people and their lives in the media is fair, respectful and accurate.” The organization was selected by sensitivity reader Inigo Purcell.
We’re wrapping up Apocalypse month this week. We hope you’ll join us at the grand finale, a Zoom watch party for The Faculty, hosted by Sady Doyle and Maddox Pennington. RSVP here.