Mother, May I?
“I’m a planet,” complains Ellen Page’s titular pregnant teenager in Juno, lamenting at once her huge belly and her outsider status. The film has certainly been a gravitational force, becoming No. 3 at the box office this week, sucking in Red Staters and hipsters alike, and inspiring comment in places as diverse as the right-wing WorldNetDaily website and Katha Pollitt’s column for progressive bible The Nation.
The satirical comedy itself indeed revolves around Juno, a sardonic and preternaturally self-possessed 16-year-old Midwestern high school junior. She initiates sex with the boy she likes. She takes three home pregnancy tests to make sure of her condition. Without telling her parents, she first plans to abort and then, also on her own, to put the baby up for adoption. In short, Juno pretty much controls all the
action. No one ever questions her
choices – and that’s how you know this movie is not just comedy but pure fiction.
After all, what’s funny at the movies is in real life a tragedy – at least according to some of the fuss over Jamie Lynn Spears. Britney’s little sister, the star of Nickelodeon’s perfect-teen comedy Zoey 101, recently announced her own, all too real, pregnancy at 16. I admit to wanting to ask both Juno and Jamie if they’ve ever heard of birth control, but then I’m an old fuddy-duddy who came of age in a time when even hick high schools like mine offered a basic, but adequate, sex-ed course – that is, one that actually mentioned contraception and how it works. (Juno does have a comical scene involving condom education. Maybe she was absent that day.)
For millennial teens, however, sex ed is all about the abstinence, so it’s no surprise that the faux Juno and the real Jamie apparently left that crucial element out of the equation. (Neither case is clear – Jamie Lynn hasn’t said, and the question never comes up in Juno.)
But Juno has the luxury of being highly unreal, and deliberately so. The story takes place in the present, yet there’s not a cellphone or MP3 player in sight. The much-lauded (and -reviled) “snappy dialogue” may be clever, but it rarely rings true. And the story itself is strangely sanitized. These aren’t criticisms; the film is meant to be surreal. Nevertheless, nearly all extremes are erased. Even the birth itself is glossed over. (That’s OK; I’ve seen enough icky, screaming childbirth scenes in movies and on TV to last a lifetime.) By finding the neutral comedic ground in this potentially explosive situation, the film ends up feeling oddly detached.
Juno has caused discomfort for both those who support a woman’s right to choose and those who don’t, not to mention folks who accept that teens will have sex vs. those who want them to wait until marriage. But it isn’t an issue film; it’s a weird comedy about an oddball girl in a jam, who decides her own way out of it in highly individual style. (After all, very few girls put their babies up for adoption, so Juno’s tale is a rarity right off the bat.) Predictably, it’s been lauded by anti-choicers as “the movie pro-aborts will hate,” and, indeed, it has been branded as reactionary – I suppose because Juno opts not to have an abortion. Pollitt laments that “a teen who saw this movie would definitely feel like a moral failure for choosing abortion” and argues that the film is saying Juno’s act is “both noble and cool, of a piece with loving indie rock and scorning cheerleaders.” I really don’t think that’s the case – and who says only cheerleader-haters get pregnant?
If the film is “saying” anything, it’s that choice is paramount, and all choices are equally worth considering, but only one can be made. And the arbiter, of course, should be the pregnant woman. Juno’s choices are universally respected. Talk about an ideal! Meanwhile, the real-life Jamie Lynn is subjected to nasty gossip, like the rumor that boyfriend and presumed baby daddy Casey Aldridge wants a paternity test, not to mention bogus CNN “reportage” about whether their sex was technically statutory rape. Pollitt, too, piles on when asserting that Spears is “having the baby because she wants to ‘do what’s right’” – strongly implying that the girl believes abortion is wrong. And maybe she does. But what Jamie Lynn actually said was she wants to “do what’s right for me.” And – while babies having babies will never be great – that, friends, is a whole different thing.
Published: 01/16/2008
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