Kristin Calabrese as Mary, the eponymous killer, in I Was a Teenage Serial Killer
Alex Brannan champions the rebellious ethos and audacious feminism of two works by underground film icon Sarah Jacobson.
“We’re gonna f*ck sh*t up!” According to IndieWire, this was a phrase filmmaker Sarah Jacobson would repeat “with a big smile, to the dismay of some and the joy of many.” Evidently, her personality and her films shared an impulse to playfully rile a crowd.
Jacobson, dubbed by some the “Queen of Underground Cinema,” was a trailblazer of grassroots independent filmmaking in the 1990s. With the help of her mother Ruth Ellen Jacobson, Sarah Jacobson wholly embodied the DIY approach. She self-produced, self-promoted, and ultimately self-distributed her only feature film, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore. The film proved a festival darling in 1996, when it was selected for the Independent Feature Film Market, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and later Sundance, but it went untouched by distributors.
In the film, frank depictions of sex are juxtaposed to present a humorous and complex representation of female pleasure and displeasure. At the beginning of the film, Jane’s (Lisa Gerstein) awkward first sexual encounter is presented directly after an overly exaggerated (yet pointedly chaste) romantic ideal of a woman’s first time. Moved to swear off sex and men entirely, Jane spends the bulk of the film working to understand intimacy and her own desires.
The lo-fi production adds a patina of grit to the aesthetic, a slummy vibe to contrast Jane’s vibrant personality. Generically, elements of teen melodrama and romantic comedy are warped by Jacobson’s punk aspirations. The film is a satirical romp through the imbalanced, gendered expectations surrounding sex and intimacy, fueled by the characterization of Jane as a hopeful teen desperate to exercise her voice. Interestingly, most of Jacobson’s characters seem more than willing to lend an ear, and the film’s narrative structure is comprised of a series of conversations between Jane and the people in her life.
Though this, Jacobson lends credence to the notion that most people wish to do good, and that dialogue can be an act of compassion. She also infuses into this narrative feature aspects more familiar of the sex education film. In contradistinction to conservative, abstinence-promoting sex ed, Jacobson allows plenty of room for demonstrations of both the trials and joys of sexual expression. Jacobson presents glimpses of characters adherent to this other, more reserved version of education — including a “traditional values” advocate — but they are all filtered through camp performance. The ensemble of movie theater employee miscreants, meanwhile, are afforded the unabashed pathos of a melodrama. Jacobson implores us to care about characters who struggle through the warts of their personalities, while juxtaposing the presentation of seemingly proper and composed people as straw men for parody.
From left to right: Beth Allen, Marny Snyder Spoons, and Lisa Gerstein in Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore
In I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, the light touch of Mary Jane’s sex-positive feminism is replaced with a brash yell of revolt. The cover of Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man” provides a blunt soundtrack to the images of a murdered man. Jacobson is informing us: where we are headed, subtext is unnecessary. The song crossfading into “Eyes of a Dreamer” from Charles Manson’s failed album provides another tine on the provoking pitchfork of Jacobson’s instrument, which prods at the backside of a polite society not interested in dealing with questions of female autonomy.
Mary (Kristin Calabrese), Teenage Serial Killer’s eponymous figure, fed up with the sexism normative of her environs, begins a surprisingly casual killing spree. While the film flirts with sadism (Mary’s orgasmic response to asphyxiating a partner who refuses to wear a condom is presented as a punchline), Jacobson’s preoccupations seem to primarily be on how a female character in cinema can elbow her way into some agential wiggle room. The answer posed, with a simplicity that functions for humor, is to write the character as a gleeful murderer. And when homicide becomes a parody of the domestic sitcom, then she has no choice but to kill her way out of that hole, too.
I Was a Teenage Serial Killer takes Jacobson’s “f*ck sh*t up” mantra and turns it into macabre comedy premised on the literalization of the conceit: if sexism must die, then someone must kill it. The film is a provocative polemic, a salty counterpoint to the sweet conclusion of Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore.
According to the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), which provided 2K restorations of Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, there is only one 16mm film print of the feature in existence. Thanks to AGFA, Jacobson’s work has now been digitally preserved for posterity — a treat, given that her films have been criminally underseen.
Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and I Was a Teenage Serial Killer are screening at IU Cinema on November 8 at 7pm as part of the Underground Film Series.