I can’t pretend that I had the highest hopes for Jason Reitman’s new movie Juno. Its aesthetic looked a little too Wes Anderson for my tastes; I’ve had more than my fill of Anderson, and won’t even touch stylistic carpetbaggers like Napoleon Dynamite. I saw Juno because I could watch Michael Cera play video games for 92 minutes and would still laugh myself to the brink of asphixia. Throw in Cera’s Arrested Development co-star Jason Bateman, as well as The Office’s Dwight Schrute (sorry, I can’t bring myself to learn his real and presumably less funny name), and I’m there with the proverbial bells on.
Juno confirmed many of my worries. From its cartoonish, quasi-rotoscoped opening credits to the Kinks song on the soundtrack to the indulgent final scene, the movie owes a great debt if not an apology to Wes Anderson. The wisecracking, allusion-laden dialogue is often hilarious, but leans more toward the Gilmore Girls than Judd Apatow end of the spectrum, by which I mean the viewer isn’t always convinced. Other than that, though, Juno was mostly pleasant surprises. (A spoiler for the noir-savvy: Seeing Bateman in his Juno role is nearly as jarring as seeing Jimmy Stewart in After the Thin Man.) Nevertheless, I’m unpleasantly surprised to find its most unambiguous message being ignored, or given a disappointingly cursory treatment, by some critics and commentators.
For Slate’s Ann Hulbert, for instance, the movie is all about declawing the family-values debate by having something for everyone, though the something is as often a question as an answer:
Her take on the roster of family values issues is as heterodox as her image. Consider her sendup of the term sexually active, a trope of the sex-ed wars. Liberal advocates of honest, open sexual communication with teens embrace the epithet as though it were part and parcel of puberty. Abstinence promoters invoke it as the plague to be avoided at all costs. For Juno, it’s ridiculous, an Orwellian phrase that in no way speaks to her actual experience (sex, once, in a chair)—as is surely true, when you stop and think about it, for the majority of high-school juniors who aren’t virgins.
The real flashpoint issue in the film, of course, could have been abortion. Here Cody’s politics (presumably pro-choice) are at odds with her plot needs (a birth) and, who knows, maybe commercial dictates, too, if studios worry about antagonizing the evangelical audience. It’s a tension the screenplay finesses deftly, undercutting both pro-life and pro-choice purism. . . .
With Juno as with Knocked Up, there has been an oddly protesting-too-much character to these reassurances that there’s nothing anti-abortion in the details. (Pay attention to the film’s repeated reminders that babies at X stage of pregnancy already have fingernails. And that Juno’s stepmother runs a nail salon. What’s it all mean?) I can’t help wondering whether Hulbert’s assertion that screenwriter Diablo Cody’s politics are “presumably pro-choice” has anything to do with her comment, earlier in her essay, that Cody is a former stripper, which is misleading. She’s in fact a well-educated Midwestern writer who took up stripping for a while and also blogged about it. There are enough contradictions in that history to make Cody’s politics, as well as her intentions, anybody’s guess.
But it’s a mistake to think that teen pregnancy or abortion are Juno’s biggest questions. The “unambiguous message” I mentioned earlier is that adulthood is, to some extent, a state of mind, not an age. Diablo Cody’s genius is to take something that we’ve come to regard as an unthinkable, insurmountable tragedy—a pregnant teen! the stuff of Lifetime movies!—and to wonder if maybe we don’t feel that way because we’re not really behaving like grown-ups ourselves. Juno handles her situation with more intelligence, aplomb, and, above all, imagination than just about anyone else in her orbit. The unthinkable is the difficult but also the historically and statistically mundane, and she seems to understand this. A. O. Scott gets it, too, but before you know it he’s back to condescending to the littluns:
Juno also shares with Knocked Up an underlying theme, a message that is not anti-abortion but rather pro-adulthood. It follows its heroine—and by the end she has earned that title—on a twisty path toward responsibility and greater self-understanding.
This is the course followed by most coming-of-age stories, though not many are so daring in their treatment of teenage pregnancy, which this film flirts with presenting not just as bearable but attractive. Kids, please! Heed the cautionary whale. But in the meantime, have a good time at Juno. Bring your parents, too.
Like Scott, I don’t want to say, “Three cheers for teen pregnancy!” I want to look at the movie allegorically, as a reminder that we’re adults as soon as we decide to be. That’s why one of the best lines in the movie is one of the least memorable, the least scripted, and it’s Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) to her would-be rock star husband Mark (Jason Bateman): “Your t-shirt is stupid. Grow up.”
François Blumen...
Stefan -I was just debating
Adam Shprintzen
I think that Francois
I think that Francois definitely summed up our conversation fairly well, though I will also add this regarding the abortion clinic scene that was clearly attempting to satirize Planned Parenthood. The nature of that scene left me quite uncomfortable as well, and not just for the laissez-faire way in which it treated the abortion option, but also in the way in which the clinic was depicted--unprofessional, kind of dirty and just generally disorganized--best exemplified by the quasi-goth girl at the front counter whose level of interest, care and empathy was somewhere between non-existent and callous. And perhaps in some places (like small town Minnesota where the film takes place) this is more the reality, but generally speaking it seems as if Planned Parenthood is run quite professionally, and even visually speaking isn't the dark, disturbing place it was presented on screen. I wonder how a 16 year old with little sexual experience or sense of reproductive health would feel about the services their local PP offers after coming out of that movie. Also, another point that irked the three of us is the fact that the movie never treats precisely how she becomes pregnant. Did they use a condom and it broke? Or were they really just kind of stupid and used nothing...if so it makes Juno and the kid from Arrested Development far less sympathetic characters.
But in the end it seems as if the ultimate message of the film is that as long as a baby is with a mom in a nice house (the way in which the Jennifer Garner character is portrayed is a bit limiting as well...as someone who is "meant" to be a mommy, but why? Because she is upwardly mobile?), in a nice neighborhood, all's well that end's well. Yet I still couldn't shake my inner dialogue from wondering why the abortion issue was treated so flippantly.
Leah
I haven't yet seen the movie, but...
I've actually been wondering about Knocked Up and Juno along the same lines. I have not and do not want to see Knocked Up because I can't get past the fact that an upper middle class educated adult woman is so stupid as to not know how to properly use birth control. If you're having sex with strangers, birth control needs to be part of the equation. I know, I need to get over it, but I'm not, so I'm not seeing the movie. I can't laugh at the rest of it when the premise throws me off as much as it does. Surprisingly I do want to see Juno, because it seems from the previews at least, that this film handles the material better. Or maybe the real reason is that I can more easily imagine and accept a 16 year old not using birth control and having unprotected sex than an adult.
Never mind the issues I have with these films not looking at abortion as a viable option, where is the birth control?? And it can't just be because of the abstinence-only movement - that doesn't explain Knocked Up.
(and yes, I do realize that responsible couples do get pregnant when using birth control because they aren't consistent or don't use it properly, etc etc etc.)
Adam Shprintzen
Well, Knocked Up actually at
Well, Knocked Up actually at least has an explanation for how it happens (they are drunk, she thinks he has a condom on...and he's kind of a stoner so...). A somewhat "wacky" plot device, yes, but at least it offers an explanation.
Avigail
Once Upon A Chair
From the perspective of a healthcare professional, the idea that adulthood just "happens" when one decides it does is doubtful. Developmentally, adolescence/young adulthood is characterized by an "I'm invincible!" mindset. Granted, the glaring stupidity in sexual behavior that I see in my ER daily is in part attributable to ignorance and/or shame-based conditioning, but it emanates primarily from the young, "can't happen to me!" crowd.
Rebecca
Abortion as Personal not Political
What is awesome about Juno is that it doesn't take a political stance on abortion. Rather, it treats it as a personal issue. The film mocks both camps in the abortion debate (pro-choicers are blase, pro-lifers are dumb and naive). When Juno decides to have the baby, it's because she can't bring herself to get an abortion, not because she thinks no one should have one. And because it's exactly what one would NOT expect her to do -- the character likes to be unconventional, after all. It's really almost a form of teenage rebellion for her when you think about it.
Adam Shprintzen
That is definitely a fair
That is definitely a fair enough point Rebecca (re: the film being Juno's story), and yet it would also be difficult to ignore the larger contextual questions and issues raised in the movie. The fact that Juno chooses to have the baby in and of itself does not a political statement make; again, I think that the scene in the clinic is what left me with the largest discomfort from the movie. It was just such an overboard, silly representation that it could only seem irresponsible to me. Yes, obviously it is a movie...but there are certainly larger questions to be asked of the implications of the issues and images presented on the screen.
Helen Jupiter
My Interpretation...
...of the clinic scene was simply that we were seeing everything through Juno's eyes while she was essentially in the midst of an anxiety attack. I got the impression that it was entirely character-oriented, and we were supposed to be feeling what she was feeling, nothing more. It's interesting how we all had such different reactions to the scene.
The dialogue in the first few scenes nearly killed me, but I thought the movie self-corrected after that, for the most part anyway. All in all I thought they avoided some obvious pitfalls nicely, and treated an old subject with some sweet, new quirks.
That said, I'm glad I was watching a screener, and didn't have to cough up $10 to see it.
François Blumen...
Rebecca: "What is awesome
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