Movies: Juno

Notes on Preggy Chic and the pro-life media machine:

1. It's been near impossible these past few years to walk past a newsstand without seeing a magazine headline dishing on so-and-so's new "bump;" words can be noxious enough, but a picture's worth a thousand. This month, I'm haunted by this:


Sure, there was this before it:


and this long before that:


but I would argue that frequency and intensity are increasing. There is now such a thing as the "Celebrity Bump Watch," and googling those terms will lead you to loads of slideshows thanks to the patrolers at People, CBS, Us Weekly, The Sun, iVillage, and—roll this one in your mouth for awhile—babyrazzi.com. It's clear that, as stated on iVillage, "The hottest trend this. . . season has been the baby bump."

2. Knocked Up is thinly veiled propaganda, and much more horrifying than it is funny. What's even more horrifying is that audiences did indeed laugh.

3. Critics are saying that Juno is either more realistic or more fair or more feminist-approved. Though it's clearly a better movie, it's still propaganda. If you were an intelligent sixteen year old girl with a future, would the concept of tiny fingernails inspire even a slight hesitation on your way to abortion? Didn't think so.

4. The Center for Disease Control (yes, I did say disease control, does that strike you as odd?) has reported that based on data gathered through 2006, the teen birth rate has risen for the first time in 14 years. Additionally, the non-marital birth rate has reached an all-time high, up 16% from 2002. Finally, and most importantly, the total fertility rate reached the highest it's been since 1971.

I'm actually using the term "propaganda" somewhat playfully; while I don't consider this. . . trend. . . (pun, for once, intended) quite a laughing matter, I'm no conspiracy theorist. I am not proposing that there are or were any top-secret meetings at which George W sat at the head of a board table, flanked by the minister of the female interior, a demographer, Judd Apatow, reps from the major Hollywood studios, and a sales exec from Bugaboo (purveyors of fine baby carriages ($759.99 for the "frog" model), whose website rivals that of BMW, purveyors of fine automobiles), to decide that abstinence-only sex education, when combined with a pro-repro media barrage, was the only way to reinvigorate the country's waning reproduction rate, thereby ensuring the production of future waves of consumers. I'm certain that the films are far more symptomatic of said "trend" than instigatory, although they are guaranteed to be entrenchatory. But here is a question for you: why aren't any of these besmitten, besotted, beset females on the pill? And even if they weren't, what stopped them from inhaling the now-available-directly-from-your-pharmacist Plan B ("morning after") tablets? Narrative devices, of course; no pregnancy means, in the case of Knocked Up, no love story, and in Juno, no single-mom adoption story (oops, spoiler; sorry. . . well, not really).

So what's my problem? The entrenchatory powers of film, of course. It's bad enough for the individual who spends his or her life wondering why love isn't what it ought to be (i.e., the way we see it portrayed again and again on screen); having false expectations for oneself generally leads only to disappointment, self-loathing, depression, and anxiety, and the pharmaceutical industry has got us covered on that front. I'm far more concerned about all the impressionable young women across the country, coveting Hollywood's bumps. It's one thing to covet JLo's six-carat, pink diamond ring; you're probably not going to ever get one, but you can buy an imitation on the internet for $24.99 without much affecting anyone. A bump, on the other hand, is totally procurable, and to get it only requires engaging in a fun and healthy activity you'd probably be engaging in anyway. The only difference is the consequence's duration. When the pink diamond becomes déclassé, you can toss it in the closet or trash or street and forget it ever happened. Doing this with a child is less highly recommended, and has been proven to lead to imprisonment for the parent, followed by imprisonment of the child, once it grows up into a young thug, as unwanted children tend to do (don't believe me? See Freakonomics.

So, is Juno a cute, generally well-written movie featuring the next best thing in female talent (under the name Ellen Page; I give her two years or less to blow up into the thing, just hopefully not naked, preggers, and on the cover of some pseudo-fashion rag)? Sure. But should she have stayed put once she got to that abortion clinic? Hell yeah.

Books: Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

This book, like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, has a way of reverse-hypothesizing and hand-picking vignettes to come to surprising conclusions, but doing so in such a blithe, reader-friendly tone that most readers don't notice, thereby propelling the book the top of the New York Times' Best Sellers List.

That sounds awfully vindictive, like I hated the darned thing, which isn't true at all. However, this, along with The Tipping Point, are probably the only two non-fiction books I've read in the past few years, and I find much to be lacking in this kind of populist intellectualism.

That sounds awfully snobbish, as if I'd rather be reading Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze and Michele Foucault, and while I did subject myself to reading all of those men's books in college and grad school, I hated every moment of it, and did my best to ensure that my academic writing was straightforward and conversational.

But like intelligent conversation (don't judge me by my blog!), without exclamation marks (again, don't judge me by my blog). I hated the way Levitt and Dubner hopped from vignette to vignette in pursuit of illustrating. . . what? Was there a thesis somewhere? Did I miss it? The only thing they seemed to intend to prove is that economics are fun and surprising. And it wasn't even that fun. Or surprising.

For example: one conclusion they come to is that the radical drop in crime in the mid-1990s was not due to an aging population, a change in the market for crack, or Mayor Giuliani, like so many people might assume. In fact, the drop directly correlates with the legalization of abortion an appropriate number of years ago to cause a sudden drop in the number of baby thugs coming to full young thug-hood. (Thug-dom being a direct consequence of being born to a parent (most often a single mother) who doesn't want you, and therefore does a bad job raising you). This is shocking, because abortion is shocking (I don't know why, but apparently it is), but it's also kind of a "duh" conclusion. Of course unwanted, poorly-parented, have-nothing children are going to become thugs.

A friend of mine who had also read this book said that he appreciated the way the authors concluded that economics are separate from moral judgements. This at first seemed like a good enough reason to write a book (i.e., who cares if abortion is not supported by the Catholic Church; it cuts down on crime). And yet, the more I thought about it, the more that, too, seemed a "duh" conclusion; after all, all sciences (of which economics is one) are (or at least ought to be) moral-free. So then, other than the fascinating cover art, in which a green apple is sliced open to reveal the juicy flesh of an orange inside, this book really wasn't all that special.