Why Juno Sucks Balls, And Why That Matters
Every ten years or so, a bad movie gets good reviews. And I don't mean that
Bratz: The Movie scored a 21 on Metacritic when it deserved to get a -999, which would mean that by federal law everyone involved in its creation can be murdered without any legal repercussions whatsoever. No, I'm talking about movies like
Titanic, a lumbering behemoth of a film that managed to gross 40 trillion million dollars, mostly because 12-year old girls saw it over and over again, attempting to imprint Leonardo DiCaprio's youthful face so deeply onto their minds eyes' that every unconscious moment would be dominated by his mien, like Gregory's face spanning the world entire at the conclusion of
The Man Who Was Thursday.Juno is another such film, our generation's
Titanic, just like Paris Hilton is our generation's Marilyn Monore, or Gulf War II is our generation's Gulf War I. And like our American forefathers, when confronted with a Saddam Hussein, a Paris Hilton, or a Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman, it's our solemn duty to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. Or to write scathing blotrys that will cause the targets of their soul-crushing invective to realize their own stunning, insurmountable inadequacies and to then slit their own throats. Information Age and all that.
I'd like to begin by laying out a few facts.
As of my writing,
Juno has amassed 100% positive reviews of Rotten Tomatoes' "Cream of the Crop" critics, ostensibly a collection of the most prestigious movie reviewers in film criticism-dom. It also has a score of 8.4, which suggests that the reviews are not mildly salutory, but overwhelmingly positive. The Coen Brothers'
No Country for Old Men has a rating of 90%, and a score of 8.2.
No Country For Old Men is a searing, gorgeously composed meditation on the nature of evil, the inescapability of fate, and the inability of good men to overcome either. It is best thing the Coens have made since
Fargo, and is one of the great films of the year, if not the decade.
Juno is a twee vector for Diablo Cody's "wit" and "humor" masquerading as a dramedy about a teenage girl's pregnancy.
These are the facts.
I don't want to rage apoplectic about the failure of Rotten Tomatoes or of film criticism in general. Metacritic, another review compilation site, is considerably less sanguine about
Juno's quality. But
Juno's success is real--it's been nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Comedy and Best Screenplay, and is apparently a serious Oscar-contender. And I do think that
Juno's ascendance is indicative of larger trends at work in the world.
"We're drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn pronounced in The Atlantic a few months ago. Hirschorn was too indiscriminate in his condemnation, lumping
The Royal Tenenbaums and
Flight of the Conchords together with cultural obscenities like Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite. But he's onto something. He's right to be skeptical of the kind of aesthetic that satisfies itself with reference and nostalgia, with what the British would call twee, dainty affectations that signify nothing.
The cynical emptiness at the heart of movies like
Juno speaks to the triumph of a kind of fakery that's become endemic to a lot of artistic endeavors. Yes, all art is artifice, but the good stuff gets at the humanity, the hidden realities, of the situation. That's why in
Pulp Fiction (Tarantino is a writer who specializes in successful stylization and who I've seen compared to Diablo Cody more than once) two hitmen can have a conversation about hamburgers--because what they're talking about is genuinely sort of interesting (of course they can't call in a quarter-pounder in a country that uses the metric system!), and because we might imagine that hitmen who've committed countless crimes before would talk about empty frivolities on their way to another hit. Or take this exchange between Butch and his girlfriend:
BUTCH
I'm sorry, baby-love.
FABIAN
(crying)
You were gone so long, I started to
think dreadful thoughts.
BUTCH
I'm sorry I worried you, sweetie.
Everything's fine. Hey, how was
breakfast?
FABIAN
(waterworks drying a
little)
It was good --
BUTCH
-- did you get the blueberry
pancakes?
FABIAN
No, they didn't have blueberry
pancakes, I had to get buttermilk
-- are you sure you're okay?
BUTCH
Baby-love, from the moment I left
you, this has been without a doubt
the single weirdest day of my
entire life. Climb on an' I'll
tell ya about it.
Fabian does climb on. Butch STARTS her up.
FABIAN
Butch, whose motorcycle is this?
BUTCH
It's a chopper.
FABIAN
Whose chopper is this?
BUTCH
Zed's.
FABIAN
Who's Zed?
BUTCH
Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead.
The exchange is stylized, it's not realistic (how could it be, really, since it follows a scene in which Butch slices up a couple of redneck rapists with a samurai sword), but it still manages to engage with real situations and emotions, as Butch desperately tries to talk his flighty girlfriend into coming with him without asking too many questions. Tarantino's dialogue sparkles because he consciously juxtaposes the absurd with the mundane, and finds humanity and humor in both. That's where the comedy comes from, why pancakes are funny, and why Tarantino deserves credit as a stylish writer.
Juno's dialogue isn't funny because it's phoney. Look at this exchange from early on in Juno:
ROLLO, the eccentric drugstore clerk, sneers at Juno from
behind the counter. He wears a polyester uniform vest.
ROLLO
Well, well. If it isn’t MacGuff the
Crime Dog! Back for another test?
JUNO
I think the last one was defective.
The plus sign looked more like a
division sign.
Rollo regards her with intense skepticism.
JUNO
I remain unconvinced.
Rollo pulls the bathroom key out of reach.
ROLLO
This is your third test today, Mama
Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt
about it!
An eavesdropping TOUGH GIRL wearing an oversized jacket and
lots of makeup gapes at Juno from the beauty aisle.
TOUGH GIRL
Three times? Oh girl, you are way
pregnant. It’s easy to tell. Is
your nipples real brown?
A pile of stolen COSMETICS falls out of the girl’s jacket and
clatters to the floor.
TOUGH GIRL
Balls!
Juno crosses and crosses her legs awkwardly, hopping. It’s
obvious she has to use the bathroom urgently.
ROLLO
Maybe you’re having twins. Maybe
your little boyfriend’s got mutant
sperms and he knocked you up twice!
JUNO
Silencio! I just drank my weight in
Sunny D. and I have to go, pronto.
Why is Rollo so antagonistic? There's no hint that he has any kind of prior relationship with Juno. Instead we're left to conclude that we're deep in the territory of Quirk-Land, a kind of twisted Fairy realm populated by impossibly verbose pixie girls and angry drugstore clerks and stepmoms with oh-so-random predilictions for cutting pictures of dogs out of magazines, where the rivers flow with Sunny Delight and the ubiquitous chords of cloying indie bands fill the air.
How else to explain Juno's familiarity with Soupy Sales (the only person I know who knows who Soupy Sales is is my 60-year old father), or with Thunderbirds? Who, indeed, is apparently such a wit that she has the presence of mind to make a Thunderbirds reference just as her water breaks? That moment, in fact, nicely encapsulates Juno's dual failures: a complete lack of authenticity coupled with a tin-ear for comedy; making references to mid 60s puppet shows is not inherently funny. Over and over again, Cody mistakes reference or inappropriate explictness (nipples! pregnancy! eggo preggo!) for comedy.
Juno judiciously avoids any engagement with reality. It carefully sidesteps any hint of the extreme strains her tiny body must be undergoing--Juno carries her child as lightly as, well, a fat suit. It dances around the social consequences of being pregnant and in high school. It teeters dangerously close to genuine drama with the strange, uncomfortable relationship between Jason Bateman and Juno, but then backs away at the last second. And yes, certainly, of course, it stays far far away from examining Juno's decision to carry the pregnancy in the first place-- the burden of that decision is passed off on a suitably lame (read Asian) pro-life protester and another round of "comedy" from the inappropriately explicit abortion clinic front desk clerk.
All that would be perfectly OK if
Juno's ambitions were purely comedic...but they're not, and anyway, the "comedy" is mostly contained in inane, artificial lines like, "Honest to Blog." Honest to Blog? Really? Not only does no one talk like that, no one
wants to talk like that. Anyone who did talk like that would be taken out and shot. And I would be glad that they had been shot. Whoever did the shooting would receive a medal of some kind, and a delicious roast ham.
So what does
Juno's ascendence mean for you and me? I hesitate to use the success of the latest flavor of the month to extrapolate broad social trends, but I do think movies like
Juno suggest the triumph of easy laughs and unearned bathos over genuine humor and hard-won emotion. It's all style over substance, a kind of carefully manufactured reality, carefully crafted to stimulate without demanding anything of the audience other than that they laugh and cry on cue, when the film says that it's being funny or moving without ever actually being either. In its fakery it's not entirely unlike, say, a certain screenwriter with a catchy pseudonym and a manufactured resume involving a trumped-up stripping career which just happened, purely by accident mind you, to be parlayed into a successful blog and an an adoring press junket.
There's a brief little moment in
Juno that threatens to blow the whole farce wide open, to expose the charade. It's gone before it really registers, but it surprised me, and stuck with me. As Juno calls the clinic to set up the abortion on her silly hamburger-shaped phone, she says, "What was that? I’m sorry, I’m on my hamburger phone and it’s kind of awkward to talk on. It’s really more of a novelty than a functional appliance."
That's about right.
