Juno Causes Teen Pregnancy

Ivan Reitman directed Ghostbusters and Stripes and produced Heavy Metal, so I’d like to believe that his progeny would be on the side of all that is awesome. His son Jason Reitman adapted Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking for the screen. I thought he did a great job and I loved the book and love Christopher Buckley’s writing. Doing an adaptation of a good book that readers enjoy is no mean feat. So I’m sure Jason Reitman’s movie Juno is well done. But I haven’t seen it for a few reasons.

I first became aware of Diablo Cody, who is credited with having written Juno, when a bunch of my writer friends started complaining about how they believe Diablo Cody, at best, co-wrote the film and, at worst, allowed her youngish sexually-adventurous hip chick chic to be utilized as a pseudo-feminist face for one of the Reitmans. I’d never heard of her before, so I was surprised by how many people I knew, from really different areas, who all believed this. I always remember Diablo Cody as Cody Diablo because Diablo just sounds like a last name to me and Cody sounds like a first one to me. I guess she kept some kind of a blog about stripping in between office jobs and some of the writers I know base their opinion on the level of maturity in her writing there. I haven’t read the blog and don’t really know. Whoever wrote Juno, it looks like it has some snappy well-delivered dialog, judging only from the trailers. I’m not a fan of the female mascot PR methodology, but I’ll give Diablo Cody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did write the film.

Here is where we come to problem number two. I dislike it when companies use a fake female spokesperson and have her pretend to run the company or some such, just so they can get some feminist points or chick support. I dislike it the same way I do when large corporations will back some supposedly indie project and send out phony press releases about what a bootstrap operation said project is. Basically, I think that a certain strata of American culture has figured out how to co-opt their own opposition. So Juno looks like a hip little film, with a spunky portrayal of how intelligent teenage girls approach the world. As played by Ellen Page, even in the trailers, the title character Juno looks like the sort of girl any teenage girl would want to be. Only the storyline of Juno has a teenage girl getting pregnant, deciding not to get an abortion, and giving her baby up for closed adoption to a woman in the middle of a divorce. This is pro-life without even the benefit of family values. Are the baby boomers really that scared that social security is going to go bust if younger generations don’t start breeding immediately?

I’m pro-choice, but I’ve never had an abortion. I realize that there is some powerful biology there and you don’t necessarily 100% know what you would do, until you are dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. So I’m not saying it is wrong for a teenage girl to bring her baby to term and then give it up via the out-dated closed adoption method where she can never meet her offspring, even if the child wants to meet her. I do, however, know that every single woman I know, who has had an abortion and saw Juno, came out of the movie feeling terrible about having had an abortion. So, if the film was not intended as pro-life propaganda being disseminated from within the castle walls of hipsterdom, then it was a poorly done movie, because that was surely the impact it had on its audience. If it was intended to cause more unplanned pregnancies to be brought to term, then good job, guys.

Witness the recent much-publicized pregnancy pact in Massachusetts. Whether or not the fourfold increase in pregnancies at Gloucester High was the result of something which could be described with so sinister a term as “pact”, the fact remains that teen pregnancy appears to be on the rise in some surprising places. My mother mentioned this teen pregnancy story to me when it first broke and my first thought was that this was another example of co-option of cool to promote a counterintuitive agenda. Sometimes certain cultural patterns look obvious to me, but I’m not sure if others will share my view. Well, turns out high schools are now referring to this as “The Juno Effect” and this apparently annoys actor Jason Bateman, who played the prospective adoptive father.

You can be damn sure that, if kids were stealing cars after playing Grand Theft Auto, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started killing themselves after listening to Ozzy Osbourne, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started swearing after listening to Eminem, connections would be drawn. So, now that the shoe is on the other ideological foot, connections can damn well be drawn here too. Juno causes teen pregnancy. The film only cost $6.5 million to make and has grossed over $100 million, so maybe they can use some of those profits to help out all the unwed mothers they have inspired.

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Posted by Amelia G on June 29, 2008. Filed under Blue Blood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry