As noted in take 1, David Reinhard devotes his sunday column this week to Juno. Predictably, Reinhard praises the film for its ???life-affirming text and subtext??? (wow, the text and subtext deliver the same message, must be powerful). For those outside of Oregon, Reinhard is The Oregonian's designated columnist from the right. More particularly, he's a Republican loyalist and conservative Christian.
Reinhard's interpretation largely rests on his reading of Juno's encounter with classmate Su-Chin (Valerie Tian) outside the ???Women Now??? clinic. Su-Chin's exclamation, ???Your baby has fingernails!??? is taken by Reinhard as a moment that alerts ???Juno to the humanity of the unborn child she carries.??? And, as a result, she decides to have the baby rather than an abortion.
This is, of course, one way of reading the sequence of events in the film's first act. However, it is not a point so tightly made that one would jump to a ???pro-life??? interpretation of the text unless one was looking for it (subtext is, of course, notoriously more slippery, so fair enough on that score. Ha! I joke, but with love).
Screenwriter Diablo Cody, for example, claims that Juno's decision not to have an abortion was merely necessary for the advancement of the plot. Cody states that her interest was to tell a story about a pregnant teenager, and in order to do that credibly, she needed to, first, address the question of abortion, and then get beyond it.
I would point out that Juno seems primarily motivated by her determination that she isn't ready to raise a child. Once she reaches that conclusion, then an abortion seems like one viable option, and not one that she ever rejects on principle. Her ultimate decision is the other reasonable option: adoption.
Why does she opt for this alternative? As Reinhard notes in his column, we, and she, may not fully know. The women's clinic she goes to does not seem all that warm and welcoming, and, yes, her brain seems to have been scrambled by the declaration about fingernails, but are these words given any real moral weight in the film or by Juno? Reinhard certainly thinks they are, but they can also be looked at as an obscure, and questionable, bit of trivia that simply weirds Juno out. I think that there's room for Reinhard's interpretation, but I don't think that it stands as the only possible reading of Juno's rejection of the abortion option (and, indeed, I have to wonder to what extent Reinhard looked into Diablo Cody's biography and politics before writing his piece).
As certain as Reinhard is about Juno's anti-abortion/pro-life ???text and subtext???, he worries about the film's lack of a clear ???moral universe.??? He describes the film's morality in terms of the slogan ???random acts of kindness and senseless beauty,??? a phrase that leaves him sad for its apparent picture of an irrationally good world. The key passage from the column is here:
Oh, the characters generally do the right, life-affirming thing in the end. But I'm not sure they -- or anyone else in "Juno" -- could tell you why. There are no moral or ethical structures to guide them. There's no overarching belief system. The characters are at the mercy of their feelings. Those feelings can prompt you to do the right thing -- not having an abortion, giving your child to a childless couple, not raising a child if you're a teenager -- but they can just as easily lead you in less life-affirming and responsible directions. And those feelings can change moment to moment even if you're not a teenage girl.
So, clearly for Reinhard, morality, the right decisions, can only come from a higher power. But for the existence of an explicit moral authority, humans will just as easily do bad as good.
The word ???feelings??? is important here. Reinhard seems to see people as prisoners to their emotions and impulses, and those emotions and impulses are often base and unpredictable. We need to control them, and the only way we can be expected to do that is if we accept a set of rules for right conduct and living that come from on high. Otherwise ???good??? becomes a matter of chance.
Of course, human beings are not simply prisoners of their emotions and impulses, at least not all the time. We develop relationships and a sense of obligation to other people. We often do react to situations such as the one at the center of Juno with base feelings of panic, fear, despair, desperation, etc., but we rarely rest on those feelings. In most cases, and I would argue in the film, our rational brains enter the picture. We reflect. We confide in our friends, families, doctors, and counselors. We solicit advice.
Maybe Juno's decision isn't the product of random kindness and senseless beauty. Maybe she arrives at her decision because she comes from a supportive, comfortable home, and has close friends who also love her (and I would add that her step mom, Allison Janney's Bren, is overtly depicted as a Christian church goer, albeit a Unitarian one, which no doubt hardly counts to Reinhard). Maybe these things give her the strength to weigh her options and come to a decision that is right for her.
As much as Reinhard is dismayed by what he sees as a chaotic moral universe, I am left unsettled by his lack of faith in people. However, this lack of faith clearly explains why he wishes that Juno were weighed down by a script with an explicit moral message, and, more generally, why he desires to legislate away individual choice and freedom, particularly when it comes to what people do with their bodies.
It needs to be pointed out that as much as Reinhard is taken with Ellen Page's Juno, he, ultimately, cares more about what decision she makes regarding her pregnancy than he does about her. Doing what's right by herself, however thoughtful, however right even by Reinhard's standards, is not good enough. She needs to have the correct reason for her choice, which would seem to be because God or the Bible says so. It is short step from this statement to authoritarianism or fascism. What Reinhard seems to fear more than anything is freedom, and primarily because he fears what people, and one imagines he, himself, will do if empowered to make their own decisions about how to live. He has no trust in individual rationality and decency or human sociality.
If Reinhard wants a film where individual and collective choices are undergirded by a clear moral structure, I would recommend that he see Lars and the Real Girl (2007). Here you have people gathering together in a church basement to discuss how to support one of their own in a time of emotional crisis, and concluding that the right thing to do, the Christian thing to do, is to embrace Lars' (Ryan Gosling) ???girlfriend??? as a member of the community. However, I suspect that there is no room for anthropomorphized ???sex dolls??? in Reinhard's clear moral universe.
Both Juno and Lars and the Real Girl are about human relationships, not imposed moralities. Religion is one way in which we articulate our obligations to each other, but it is not the only way. Nor, I would argue, is it actually the cause of the good we do. If it were, there would presumably be fewer lapses, and convenient interpretations of doctrine, among believers of all kinds.
As Juno shows, people choosing to do right by each other is what makes the world a good place. This is why the question of whether Juno has an abortion or not is beside the point, despite the attention this issue has received. What matters is that we're there for those who need us, and here that includes Su-Chin as much as it does Juno's parents, her BFF Leah (Olivia Thirlby), and her "part-time lover and full time friend," Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). If Reinhard can't live with that, then no wonder he finds himself conflicted by his love of the film.
Originally posted on:
Short-Circuit Signs