../juno

Juno

At a glance...

what a frustrating movie. Frustrating because watching it now reminds me of how much of a stranglehold this had on me and everyone else in my grade when it came out. Frustrating because of how badly I feel the dialogue and aesthetic has aged. But mostly, frustrating because only now upon a rewatch in my 30s can I see how deeply infantilizing and conservative this movie really is. There is so much to dislike here. I can't speak for pregnant people as I cannot get pregnant, but I am reminded of a friend who once told me during her second pregnancy that going through the process was so challenging and scrutinizing that it radicalized her even more to believe that no one, nobody, should ever have to experience it unless they were 100% certain they knew exactly what it would entail and how much it would change their body and their life. And Juno conveniently never shows any of those critical elements of this life-changing process. Instead, it opts to simplify getting pregnant as getting fatter, larger, and more noticeable, which by the way any fat kid in high school could tell you about what that's like. At the same time, the abortion clinic protestor is simplified into one little naive Asian girl who is just earnestly trying to save lives outside a clinic that is staffed by people who are so dismissive and flippant about pregnancy that it borders on caricature.

It's all so convenient, isn't it? It truly reads like the perfect liberal ideal of what society ought to be like. Yes, of course, we are pro choice for all the poor sluts who make huge mistakes and just have no other choice but to become pregnant at an inconvenient time and therefore abort, yes that's obviously a woman's choice, but in the ideal world no one would ever get abortions, and if the protesters would just be a little less fanatical and mean about it all, wouldn't we all be for the better? It's the perfect manifestation of the liberal ideal that politeness and quiet, individualized suffering is the most virtuous thing we can have. Everything is flattened into the smallest, most chibi, most twee version of itself so that it can make sense for people to make unhinged quips and string along random words like an early Reddit post. Half this dialogue would fit perfectly on an Advice Animal meme.

And then as a consequence of this fateful first framing in the film, everything cascades into a heap of disappointing, unfinished, half-baked goo. Nobody talks to Juno like a fucking human being in this movie who has any agency! Even at the very end, her dad is comforting her after the birth and says, "next time you'll be here on your terms", as if the initial choice to keep the baby wasn't on her terms. But how could this be, if we are to believe that she chose to keep the kid, that she had a change of heart of her own free will, that the idea to abort was just as much of an external pressure as the idea of keeping the baby? Surely this cannot be!

But the thing is, the whole movie Juno dissociates from her body as she becomes more and more visibly pregnant. She becomes upset at Bleeker for taking someone else to Prom and feeling abandonded which is true! How did Michael Cera get any notoriety for this film when he is there for maybe 6% of it? He's not even the father and he is so absent, he has so little to do with anything in Juno's life beyond insemination and at the end, Juno apologies to him for getting upset.

It is honestly astounding to watch a movie where the manic pixie dream girl is the main character, gets impregnated, and still has seemingly no opportunity written for her to make any decisions about her life that are convincingly from her and about her. Even when she is being groomed, on screen, by Jason Bateman's character, there is 0 reckoning about that by her or anyone else in this movie. Nobody else knows that an adult, married man who was about to receive the baby from inside her body, just told her he was going to get a divorce and run away and thought that she would be excited because it would mean more fun hip hangout time with cute older man. It may seem like Juno is shaken up by this, but the thing she is most interested in afterwards is not the horrifying experience we all just witnessed her go through, but the sanctity and cohesion of Vanessa and Mark's marriage! She asks her dad to convince her that people can stay together forever, but what she needs to ask is why did this older man take advantage of me and try to get intimate with me, a pregnant 16 year old carrying ostensibly his baby.

By the end I regretfully have to believe the dad that none of this was on Juno's terms. And that sucks.

This is all why Allison Janney's character is the moral center here for me. She is the only character who sticks up for Juno when people are judging her, she talks back at the ultrasound tech, she is straight up with Juno about how weird and inappropriate it is to spend an hour with a married man while his wife is not home as a 16 year old girl, she is the character I am most convinced actually has Juno's best interests at heart (I love you JK Simmons but that last line from you was the final nail in the coffin for me).

At this point, I don't know if its possible for people to try to write movies for 16 year old girls and succeed. We don't even need to talk about Nicholas Winding-Refn's The Neon Demon (yes he said in an interview that he made Neon Demon because he felt it was time for him to make a movie for 16 year old girls), but Juno I had higher expectations (hopes?) for. But of course in our culture young girls are a demographic that we feel the most paternalistic to, their innocence and purity is used as both a bludgeon and a shield when convenient for conservative and reactionary ideas, while the actual needs of young girls are constantly ignored, belittled, and shamed, especially with respect to their sexuality. Of course the movie with the greatest impact in my lifetime depicting teen pregnancy was a fantasy, where pregnant girls are tough little soldiers that are trying desperately to selflessly make the best decision for everyone else, putting their own bodies on the line for wealthy suburbanites to maintain their quirky tomboyish charm.

Maybe the only redeeming or interesting thing about this movie is that Elliot Page's coming-out as a trans man has recontextualized this movie from the future. All of Juno's disassociation with her body, her failure to understand her own girl-ness, takes on a new meaning today. I can't say I have seen a lot of movies that have that kind of effect. But the foundation for this film is too weak to make those parts anything more than a passing note in an otherwise frustrating and upsetting film.

/2007/ /1.5 stars/ /it's hard being a white feminist/