More Juno

Chris Orr offers an interesting addendum to our Juno-and-abortion debate (mild spoilers below):

There is one point, though, that I meant to make but never got around to: If you're looking for conservative themes in Juno, arguably the clearest one is at best peripherally related to abortion. It's where the movie comes down, quite firmly I think, on the question of self-actualization vs. responsibility ...

One of Juno's sharpest elements is its treatment of the Lorings. When we first meet them, we are obviously intended to like hip, ironic, artistic Mark and to find reliable, earnest, domestic Vanessa annoying and/or pitiable. What's impressive is the way the film gradually reverses our early affections, but does so without ever really changing either character. Instead it merely shifts our perspective, showing that the guy you want to swap mix tapes and spend afternoons watching horror movies with is probably not the guy you want to be a father for your child. In Knocked Up, the former abruptly, quasi-magically becomes the latter, allowing viewers to have their cake and eat it, too. In Juno (and, I think, real life), one not infrequently has to choose between the fun guy (or gal) and the responsible one, and it's a choice Juno does not hesitate to make.

Comments

In Juno (and, I think, real life), one not infrequently has to choose between the fun guy (or gal) and the responsible one, and it's a choice Juno does not hesitate to make.

This is precisely what pisses me off about Juno, the utter refusal to traffic in the messiness and complexity of these issues and instead reduce everything to digestible (and ultimately tasty) chunks. There's never "the responsible guy" and "the fun guy" in real life. There's always complexity and difficulty, just like there is in the real life decision to have an abortion, and not in Juno's decision.

Posted by Freddie | January 11, 2008 6:17 PM

This is precisely what pisses me off about Juno, the utter refusal to traffic in the messiness and complexity of these issues and instead reduce everything to digestible (and ultimately tasty) chunks.

If I was looking to Juno to teach me life lessons, then maybe I'd feel the same way. But since I enjoy the movie more for the way it plays with narrative conventions, I think it works very well.

Posted by vanya_6724 | January 11, 2008 6:51 PM

This point is a little late but it seems to me that both Juno and Knocked Up are absolutely consonant with everything NARAL has to say. Both woman have unfettered access to abortion and both women make an uncoerced choice to bring their child to term.

If your are pro-choice, what is not to love?

Posted by Jim Downing | January 11, 2008 6:56 PM

Am I the only one who noticed that this is a movie about pregnancy, not abortion? Keep your politics off my 90 minutes of escapism and popcorn.

Posted by guineapigfury | January 11, 2008 8:10 PM

Freddie writes: "This is precisely what pisses me off about Juno, the utter refusal to traffic in the messiness and complexity of these issues and instead reduce everything to digestible (and ultimately tasty) chunks. There's never "the responsible guy" and "the fun guy" in real life. There's always complexity and difficulty, just like there is in the real life decision to have an abortion, and not in Juno's decision."

Or to get back to conservatives and their frigging "themes," they think Dumbya Bush is a "responsible guy." And he is, by one current estimate, responsible for the needless deaths of well over 150,000 people. So let me suggest to them exactly where they should store their themes.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | January 11, 2008 8:13 PM

Jim has it right, I think.

Posted by Bad | January 11, 2008 9:34 PM

Moe, wouldn't life be more interesting if you didn't always have to relate it back to W?

Posted by Shoshana | January 11, 2008 10:51 PM

Shoshana asks: "Moe, wouldn't life be more interesting if you didn't always have to relate it back to W?"

Since I don't always "relate it back to W" I consider your question to be a non sequitur, Shoshana. But apart from that I find life to be extremely interesting. How about you?

Also, do you still talk to Jerry Seinfeld and how are those puppies doing?

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | January 12, 2008 12:18 AM

If I was looking to Juno to teach me life lessons, then maybe I'd feel the same way. But since I enjoy the movie more for the way it plays with narrative conventions, I think it works very well.

That's a perfectly consistent reading, and it's not one I have a problem with. However, you and others are doing what you accuse me of, politicizing unnecessarily. I'm not making an explicitly political argument. I'm making a critical argument about the movie's quality. To me, the utter fantasy world application of the abortion plot device severely detracts from the movie. I have to point out that what you are all doing is a fairly common tactic, using politicization capriciously when it suits your purpose to denigrate arguments you don't agree with. Your arguments are just as political as mine; when people say "it's not political", it's always political. They are just asserting their argument is apolitical to leverage it without improving it.

As for the notion that this movie is perfectly in step with pro-choice mores, I disagree. Politically, sure, I suppose. But morally? The movie, like Knocked Up, presents abortion as no choice at all. That's not consonant with my moral opinion of abortion. There is judgment, here, and it's judgment I disagree with. The degree to which that is or isn't a political question is impossible to divine, really.

Posted by Freddie | January 12, 2008 12:31 AM

There is no remotely plausible reason for a 16-year-old to carry a baby to term, given the choice, other than moral conviction that abortion is wrong. There is no other way to construct the narrative. If you want to make a movie about a 16-year-old choosing to have a baby, you are going to have to show her deciding that abortion is morally wrong, one way or another.

Posted by Brendan | January 12, 2008 3:07 AM

Also, aren't pro-choice mores by definition limited to the political? Isn't that the whole point, to leave the moral and whatever other considerations up to individual women?

Posted by Brendan | January 12, 2008 3:15 AM

Of course there are other ways to construct the narrative: people are a lot more complicated than this pro/anti debate. Some women/girls want to have babies, or even just don't think they would like abortions, or whatever.

Posted by Bad | January 12, 2008 10:38 AM

I agree with Bad. I think the film's emphasis on self-actualization --particularly the ability to make personal choices and sustain individual convictions-- is in support of a woman's right to choose. The decision should be in the hands of the individual and not the government. I thought that the film had an overall uplifting message that wasn't necessarily, "Hooray! No innocent babies were killed!" I came away with a renewed faith in the individual that I feel mainly resulted from the strength of the female characters (esp. Juno, Vanessa, and Juno's stepmother).

Posted by Allison | January 12, 2008 1:39 PM

There is no remotely plausible reason for a 16-year-old to carry a baby to term, given the choice, other than moral conviction that abortion is wrong.

Correction:

There is no remotely plausible reason for a 16-year-old in Juno's situation to carry a baby to term.

For people who are in poverty and who have no realistic way out (or at least are not aware of one), whose prospects for a career are virtually nil, and whose prospects of a long-term relationship are not much better, and who have relatives around now to help with childcare who may not be around by the time they turn 25, having a baby now may seem perfectly reasonable.

Posted by Glaivester | January 12, 2008 5:44 PM

Actually, Brendan, now that I think about it, I can think of other reasons than morality why a 16-year-old might want to have the baby, once you realize that a 16-year-old may not be making rational decisions (and assuming that her parents might be indulgent to her whims). Perhaps she thinks she loves the father and wants to have his baby. Perhaps she is enamored of the idea of being a mother.

On the other hand, if she is deciding to give the baby up for adoption in such a way that she will likely lose contact with him/her (so that the effect to her life is essentially the same as abortion but with several extra months of pregnancy) you are probably right.

Posted by Glaivester | January 12, 2008 6:01 PM

I think the reason why very few of these pregnancy movies end in abortion is obvious.

If the movie is centered around an accidental pregnancy (as opposed to having the pregnancy be one of many events in the movie) it is very difficult to make the movie compelling if the pregnancy ends in abortion unless the movie is about abortion (and the politics that surrounds it); that is, unless the movie is explicitly political in intent (either it takes one side or the other in the pro-choice/pro-life debate or doesn't take a side but serves a pretext to present the different arguments for and against abortion).

This is because just carrying a baby to term and giving birth has a lot of life-changing implications that can create conflict. Then there can be additional issues on whether or not to give the baby up for adoption. Beyond this, if the decision is made to keep the baby, then there are all the changes that have to be made to accommodate one's life to parenthood.

In contrast, abortion doesn't really alter a person's life that much. They just go on living as they did before. This may make abortion convenient, but it also means that it is less dramatically interesting. The only real consequences of any dramatic interest that one can make are either that the woman feels terribly guilty or else how much she suffers from society stigmatizing abortion (e.g. she becomes sterile due to a botched abortion because all of the legitimate abortionists were driven out of town). Neither of these is very appealing if one is not trying to make make an explicitly political film.

Therefore, the focus is almost certainly going to be either on the woman's decision and how she makes it or on what obstacles she must overcome in order to get an abortion. Again, it is difficult to make the movie about either of these if one does not want to be explicitly political. If the focus is on the decision, there has to be some good, non-morality-of-abortion reason why the woman might want to keep the child in order for the decision to take enough time to make a movie out of it. If the focus is on how difficult it is for the woman to get an abortion, the movie almost certainly turns into a commentary on social stigma and abortion unavailability, unless the obstacles are not abortion-specific (say the woman's car breaks down and she has to hitchhike or otherwise find transport to the clinic), in which case the movie is not about the pregnancy or abortion anymore and it is simply the MacGuffin driving the plot (Harold and Kumar's Sisters Go to the Abortion Clinic).

In general, if you don't want to make an explicitly political movie, there are a lot more directions in which you can go with a pregnancy brought to term than with a pregnancy terminated by abortion.

Posted by Glaivester | January 12, 2008 6:45 PM

I think numerous lives would have been improved if Glaivester had aborted the previous three posts.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | January 13, 2008 3:15 AM

Correction:

There is no remotely plausible reason for a 16-year-old in Juno's situation to carry a baby to term.

Yes, that's right. I should have been more careful. My point was just that the movie isn't particularly political because there was really no other way to tell the story it wanted to tell. If anything, it goes out of its way not to make Juno some kind of moral exemplar for making the choice she does.

Probably silly to comment on such an old post...

Posted by Brendan | January 14, 2008 11:10 AM