Why I Hate Juno

Last modified on 2009-01-17 18:02:28 GMT. 4 comments. Top.

It has been about two years since the release of Juno, but my disgust with the film has yet to subside.  Why bring this up now, you might ask?  Because the tendrils of Juno continue to wind themselves through American pop culture and film making, although, thankfully, not to the degree I had initially feared they would.  Allow me to articulate why, exactly, I hated Juno so very much.

Juno was, in some senses, the inevitable result of the indie-film revolution that began roughly twenty years ago.  The progression of the independent film (which I will herein refer to in a more aesthetic sense, not financial) from, say, Un Chien Andalou in 1929 to exploitation films (Child Bride, Reefer Madness, Hell Up in Harlem, The Last House on the Left, Nam’s Angels) and art films (Breathless, La Dolce Vita, A Clockwork Orange, Last Tango in Paris, Taxi Driver, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet) through the early 1990’s reflects, I think, an artistic mode of expression that was so new and revolutionary in every phase that the ideas it attempted to convey were never at the cutting-edge of philosophical and literary thought.  The emphasis, and as such, the exploration was not centered around new ideas but rather new ways of realizing or portraying those ideas.  The small-town dysfunction and, to a degree, the surrealism of 1986’s Blue Velvet is not thematically leaps and bounds ahead of the tragedy of Emmanuel Rath’s fall from schoolteacher to cabaret clown to emotional and physical wreck in 1930’s Der blaue Engel.  The primary distinction between the two films is in the means used to convey the theme.  Naturally, Blue Velvet is a very different film because of advances in technology, but at a baser level the films are very similar.

What seemed to happen at some point in the early-to-mid 1990’s was inevitable — film caught up with the ideas it was attempting to realize.  There were no bounds save imagination.  Thus, there were only three directions a film could take from that point forward.  First, utilize this creative freedom to better grapple with the ideas we have.  Push the boundaries, explore new ways of considering our relationships with self, other, and the world, expand the realms of human experience to things which had previously been unexamined.  Second, attempt to perfect what already exists.  Take what we have and make it better.  Leave the boundaries where they are, but take the lessons learned from the experiences within them to perfect what was groundbreaking into what will be classic.  Third, do absolutely nothing.  In the absence of ideas to catch up to, abandon ideas entirely in favor of marketing demographics.  Create something that is definitively out-of-the-mainstream entirely for the sake of being so and to no greater end.  Crash (1996), Mulholland Drive, The Dark Knight, Requiem for a Dream, and Pan’s Labyrinth fall into the first category.  No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, The Savages, The Squid and the Whale, The Visitor, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Good Night and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, and Lost in Translation are securely in the second category.  Juno falls neatly into the third.

To preface my criticism of Juno, let me first quote author Tobias Wolff.  “I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is ‘depressing’ because of its subject matter.  What depresses me are stories that don’t seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; ‘witty’ stories, in which every problem is an occasion for a joke, ‘upbeat’ stories that flog you with transcendence.  Please.  We’re grown-ups now, we get to stay in the kitchen when the other grown-ups talk.  Far from being depressed, my own reaction to stories like these is exhilaration, both at the honesty and the art.  The art gives shape to what the honesty discovers, and allows us to face what in truth we were already afraid of anyway.  It lets us know we’re not alone.”

While Juno is framed around the difficult subject matter of teen pregnancy, the avenue by which it approaches that subject is decidedly of the “witty” variety — a decision that relegates the film to the ninth circle of frivolity.  I suppose this is not altogether surprising, having been written by a woman who actually chose to be called Diablo Cody.  This choice very succinctly describes, insofar as I can tell, the nature of the writer and, resultingly, the nature of the writing.  Cody chooses her words carefully.  Unfortunately for her, me, and everybody else, choosing your words carefully is not in any way the same thing as choosing them well.  Take, for example, this line from Cody’s autobiographical work, Candy Girl.  “I racked up telephone bills that unfurled like the Magna Carta and hit the floor in tandem with my jaw.”  Now, I am as familiar as anyone with simile, but this sentence exemplifies the distinction between choosing words carefully and choosing them well.  Nothing can unfurl like the Magna Carta because the Magna Carta is written on a single piece of paper which is nowhere near long enough to unfurl in any way, whatsoever.  We are then left with another important distinction — that between perception and truth.  Anyone who doesn’t know that the Magna Carta is very short could certainly imagine what Cody was driving at in that sentence.  The distinction, however, between the good writer and the great, the difference between the expendable and the irreplacable, is equal parts intellect, love, and hard work.  You will never find Joyce or Hemingway or Ovid or Neruda refer to something that isn’t true.  Attention to detail is paramount to quality, and to be anything but accurate, to say, for example, that something is as pink as a bananna, is inexcusable.  Even if banannas ceased to exist, even if anyone who ever happened to read that clause did not realize that banannas were not pink, the statement itself would be false, would be empty, would be meaningless, and, as such, completely without worth.  Choosing words well is the centerpiece of value because without it meaning is lost, and it is there that Cody, regardless of the story being told, utterly collapses.

Juno is a film composed of a wildly vast array of very carefully chosen words, but none of those words were chosen well.  I cannot imagine, if I were to live a hundred thousand lives, hearing a convenience store clerk say the following:  “That ain’t no etch-a-sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be un-did, homeskillet.”  In point of fact, I can’t imagine hearing anyone say that.  Of course, the response is automatic:  “People in films don’t speak like real people.  That would be boring.”  Yes, it would.  That is where the art in filmwriting comes to its creative zenith.  The trick, the real magic of film is getting people to seem to speak like real people without actually doing it.  Replacing every single line of dialogue with outrageous witicisms provides absolutely nothing of value.  If the characters on the screen don’t appear to speak like real people do, or at least how we imagine they should, they cease, immediately, to be believable, relavant, or available to us.  The idea that, in order for us to believe a young female protagonist is witty and intelligent, or that she uses her wit to guard herself against some deeper insecurity, she has to utterly cloak herself in a collage of everything a 30-something attempting to relive their youth can grab at the local American Apparel is outrageous and absurd.  Some illustrative quotations:

“Oh, and she inexplicably mails me a cactus every Valentine’s Day. And I’m like, ‘Thanks a heap coyote ugly. This cactus-gram stings even worse than your abandonment.’”

“I’m not crying, I’m just allergic to fine home furnishing.”

“Can I use the facilities? Because being pregnant makes me pee like Seabiscuit!”

“No, this is not a food baby all right? I’ve taken like three pregnancy tests, and I’m forshizz up the spout.”

“I don’t want to give my baby to a couple who describes themselves as ‘wholesome.’ I was looking for, maybe, a thirty-something graphic designer with a cool Asian girlfriend who kicks ass on the bass guitar, but I don’t know, I don’t wanna get too particular.”

The last is, I think, the most demonstrative of the real nature of Juno.  The titular Juno is looking for the same thing Cody is, it would seem.  Appearances.  Cody wants Juno to scream of cultural relevance, connection to the youth, and the in-vogue ‘hipster’ mystique.  What is that?  Is it a film, or a marketing ploy?  Can you imagine what the couple Juno envisions are like as people?  She describes a visual, an ideal in the least important of ways.  A marketing ploy.  Jason Bateman’s character is eventually condemned for being afraid to grow up and deal with responsibility, but this is an afterthought at best.  Juno has her baby, everyone is happy, Bateman’s character is never spoken of again, and things at the close are exactly as they were at the beginning.  What, then, can one take from Juno?  It doesn’t matter what happens, as long as you speak in an uninterrupted string of pop culture references and puns nothing can have any impact on your life?  And why?  There is only one answer, and it is the most obvious.  Juno is, in no way, a film which attempts to deal with problems.  It does not, in any sense, portray anything human.  There is no real conflict, no growth, no fear, no anguish.  Convictions are not so much as rattled, conventions are not so much as glanced at.  Juno is a film made for exclusively one thing: to make money.  Cody and her cast piled up so much meaningless schlock to convince themselves and everyone else of their own relevance and cleverness and, from thence, new contracts!  As a cash machine, at least, Juno is a resounding success.  In all other respects it is an absolute failure.

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Baltimore anymore.

Last modified on 2009-01-14 03:35:01 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

The New York Times has a piece up about another famous Ed: Ed Burns, creator of “The Wire” and its predecessor “The Corner”. “The Wire” is possibly my favorite series of all time, combining spectacular writing, a number of knock-your-socks-off performances from relative unknowns like Michael K. Williams and Dominic West, and a biting and gritty sense of reality. It seems that with The Wire’s conclusion after their fifth season, Burns and company are casting their bloody spotlight somewhere else: Iraq. The upcoming “Generation Kill”, if Burns’ previous work is anything to go by, should be spectacular. After the spate of preachy cinematic failures on this subject, a dose of basic storytelling could do wonders for all these PR issues they seem to be having over there.