I’m back home in Massachusetts for the summer , dreaming neon as I wait to get back to the city and my now-comfortable routine… A routine that requires bagel joints to stay open past 5pm or at least exist.
My mum (who bases her votes on the military experience of a given candidate) likes to blare right-winged radio loud enough to remind herself of why she sometimes strays to the left with her votes on issues like civil liberties. This, combined with the the fact that I’m stuck in a fellow suburb that can’t be pronounced correctly on the first try, means that I’m currently hearing the whole “pregnancy pact” story from Gloucester at least twenty minutes every hour.
Didn’t you hear? Diablo Cody personally knocked up over a dozen teenagers.
That’s right. There’s been no end to the banter on talk radio, blogs, and those coffee shops you go up intending to get a quick egg and toast order but slowly walk out of when you realize its clientèle consists entirely of 80+ year-old men. The conclusion is unanimous: the supposed pregnancy pact fulfilled by over a half-dozen teenagers in Gloucester, MA is a result of their enjoying the Cody-penned teen pregnancy comedy, Juno. It’s funny to hear the same folks that praised Jason Reitman’s indie hit for its implicit pro-life message bashing it just as fervently as a brainwasher of innocent children’s minds.
I could give the usual counter-argument to this ridiculous assumption that media affects our children’s actions: parents should be watching these films with their kids or sheltering them, parents are responsible for monitoring their kids’ behaviors, etc. etc…. But really, I don’t see the point in this case because personally I found nothing offensive in the movie in question.
This brings me to real topic of this post, the top five reasons Diablo Cody didn’t get your child pregnant:
- Juno in no ways “glamorizes pregnancy.” While the protagonist herself is hip beyond imagination (she has a hamburger phone!), it’s clear that she goes through an extremely emotional ordeal in choosing to go through with her pregnancy. There are no glamorous shots of her holding her child, no instances where she seems happy about the fact that she is pregnant itself, and certainly no high-fives from friends who made a pact that they’d get pregnant together so that they could by matching strollers in school colors.
- Juno doesn’t keep or even interact with her baby. The adult woman with a home and a secure job is shown as the ideal parent in the end.
- Even adult parenthood isn’t glamorized. The relationship between Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman is torn apart because even with all of their financial resources they weren’t ready to handle raising a child together.
- The pregnancy in the film is unplanned. Michael Cera wasn’t looking for an heir.
- As a female, Cody doesn’t have sperm.
4 Comments
June 21, 2008 at 12:47 am
[...] My channel wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
June 21, 2008 at 5:59 pm
yeah, i def. agree with this acrticle about Juno not promoting pregnancy…baby borrowers is a new show on NBC that does exactly the same thing…they show how hard it is to be a parent.
June 22, 2008 at 3:10 am
Simone… I agree we should be showing teens the difficulties of raising a child… However, I’m not sure we should condone *lending* our children to teenagers, either… Although I don’t know the safety precautions “Baby Borrowers” is taking, my first instinct is to hit the participating parents over the head with a shoe.
June 25, 2008 at 6:09 pm
MM, your post is great, and I’m going to cut excerpts from it for my blog, which you probably won’t like (www.jillstanek.com), but I do want to take issue with your statement, “It’s funny to hear the same folks that praised Jason Reitman’s indie hit for its implicit pro-life message bashing it just as fervently as a brainwasher of innocent children’s minds.”
No, it’s not us behind the Gloucester-Juno connection attempt. It’s the Left; it’s the media. Read my post this morning, which totally agrees with you, although not as well said.