So, while accepting that there is definitely something about Juno that encourages people to see crucial themes from their own subjective viewpoint, I’m going to ignore everyone else and decide what is objectively true, because I’m just that kind of patriarchal oppressor. The key scene, for me, is where Juno’s Christian stepmother Bren (Janney) roasts the ultrasound technician who dares to make a judgemental comment to Juno about ‘poisonous’ teenage mothers. Pro-life and pro-choice are not the issue here. The issue is that the pregnant teen can’t win. Dehumanised as bone-thick benefit scroungers if they choose to give birth, as amoral sluts if they don’t, its no surprise that people with obsessive agendas believe they have the right to project their neuroses on to people they don’t see as people, but ‘problems’. Juno MacGuff makes that most disrespected and unwanted of sub-species, the single teenage bearer of an ‘unwanted’ child, into a living, breathing, human being. No wonder we’re confused.
Because Juno obliterates almost every archetype established by even the most complex and satisfying of our previous teen movies. A Christian stepmother who is not a witch. A working-class father (Simmons) who is happy in his life and a naturally progressive and supportive father. A teen romantic lead (the wonderful Cera) who is both a geek and athletic, and neither emotionally crippled nor a total sap. A middle-class couple who are neither role models nor snobs. A best friend (the fabulous Thirlby) who is kinda bitchy but not a bitch, sexually active (heh – Juno would hate me for using that phrase) but not a slut, and not interested in whether she’s popular or not. A story where what you think you know about a character is constantly turned on its head, because people are rarely predictable. And, of course, the most rootin’est-tootin’est, classless and issue-free, ballsy yet vulnerable, fearless but scared of what any woman is scared of, teen character in movie history who also made the dumbest mistake that any 16-year-old girl could make. Juno bluntly refuses to accept that anything in this world is exactly as it seems, or that any character – and especially a pregnant teenage girl – is tied to any one viewpoint or form of behaviour.
The last thing Juno MacGuff is is a symbol of all teen mothers, not because teenage girls aren’t like her, but because nobody’s like her. She is an entirely singular character – as unlikely, in her authentic way, as Napoleon Dynamite (see here) or Rushmore’s Max Fischer (see here) – through which Cody gets to present a set of What Ifs about unplanned youth pregnancy. As Cody says on one of the documentary shorts on the Juno DVD, she didn’t talk like Juno MacGuff when she was 16. Juno is how we would all love to think we would deal with teenage with the knowledge – and sparkling wit – we have acquired since. Cody even calls Juno ‘my hero’, with a neat bit of unconscious double meaning.
Adults loved Juno as much as teens, and, for us, the characters who are poignantly real are Vanessa and Mark Loring (Garner and Bateman). Not only have we met them hundreds of times, but we see ourselves in them when we’re being honest with ourselves. Vanessa is the successful but not outstanding career woman whose biological clock has struck ‘BONG!!!’ like an H-bomb and, in preparation for the moment that she believes will give her life meaning, has already allowed herself to become the all-purpose party-pooping neurotic mom she never set out to be. Mark is the man-child who plays the role of her pussy-whipped child with enthusiasm because it provides him with the psychological get-out clause for the moment when his disappointment with life and resentment of adult commitment will finally force him to fully embrace his clichéd mid-life crisis while blaming ’er indoors. Their funny but ultimately very sad journey from fake perfect marriage to inevitable dissolution is the real cautionary tale about marrying substitutes for parents and children. Their arc is brilliantly written, as we are encouraged to fall in love with Mark, for his bluff sense of humour, childlike sensibilities, cool taste in music and film and comics, and ability to relate to Juno without being intimidated or nonplussed by her apparent refusal to take any situation seriously. And we hate Vanessa because she is the essence of our view of the neurotic, needy, controlling and humourless middle-class woman who makes everyone uncomfortable. But Vanessa’s need to be a mother is real, and her respect for what Juno is doing utterly genuine, while Mark is faking his way through arrested development to hide the fact that he is a passive-aggressive bully, reluctant to be a father because he is still living a fantasy of rock bands, bachelor pads and 16-year-old girlfriends who can’t see him for the fraud that he is. Mark is too deluded about his youthfulness and flattered by Juno’s attention to understand that her flirting is just the mix of the bored playing-at-adulthood that 16-year-olds do and a need for some comfort in the situation she is in. Bateman’s face when Juno simply says, ‘But you’re old!’ is a revelatory mirror for any guy who has fallen for a fantasy of being a boy again.
The way Cody and Reitman turn our understanding of Mark and Vanessa on its head with two set pieces is superb. A scene where Mark is coldly mocking Vanessa’s need to decorate the baby’s room, and the pivotal moment where Juno and Vanessa bump into each other in the mall and Vanessa finally feels the baby kick, are moments so entirely adult and so far out of the normal remit of teen comedies they are beamed in from another world entirely.
Other great Juno things: The lo-fi indie-punk sound world featuring Kimya Dawson and her band Moldy Peaches, Belle And Sebastian and even Buddy Holly, where love songs completely disconnect from sex and embody a childlike view of perfect romantic and innocent love; a knowing aesthetic invented by Mo Tucker’s ‘I’m Sticking With You’, as performed by The Velvet Underground in direct opposition to their songs of heroin addiction and sado-masochistic sex, and also featured in Juno (the soundtrack album was an unlikely American No. 1).
The line-drawing animation in the opening credits, which firmly places the film in the same left-field graphic novel universe as Ghost World.
The way Reitman makes us follow Juno, tight to her shoulder from behind, as she always seems to be walking against a crowd.
The sheer genius of Paulie Bleeker emerging from his home, resplendent in his too-small, too-geeky athletics gear, to find Juno sitting in an armchair fake-smoking a pipe on his front lawn where she has arranged an impromptu living room including a tiger rug from someone’s discarded furniture.
The genius of Michael Cera, a man who exists to disprove the theory that you can’t trust a guy who eyes are too close together, and the slight worry that he is destined to be forever playing adorable man-children.
And, of course, Ellen Page. No matter how extraordinary Cody’s screenplay is – and especially as a debut screenwriter whose previous experience was writing a blog about her experiences as a former stripper – Juno could not have worked without Page’s intelligence, charisma and uncanny ability to tone down every emotion so that a potentially unbelievable and obnoxious character becomes utterly real and utterly admirable in every possible way. Page has taken the playing of a teenager to a whole new level in Juno, and every subsequent attempt is going to have to deal with Juno MacGuff looking over their shoulder, whispering, ‘Hey, yeah . . . I’m just calling to procure a hasty abortion.’
SUPERBAD
2007
Starring: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Seth Rogan, Bill Hader, Emma Stone, Martha MacIsaac
Dir.: Greg Mottola
Plot: Teen cinema’s funniest Bromantic comedy.
Key line: ‘I mean, just imagine that girls weren’t weirded out by our boners and stuff and just, like, wanted to see them. That’s the world I one day wanna live in.’
The story goes that Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan wrote the screenplay for Superbad between the ages of 13 and 15. I can’t help feeling slightly intimidated and disturbed that real boys talked to each other like this. But then, this is perhaps why Superbad is America’s most commercially successful teen comedy ever; perhaps teenage boys of today really do talk to each other about the intricacies of their taste in pornography before confessing how much they love each other. Man . .
. if things had been that open between boys when I was a nipper, how much less fucked up would I be?
Superbad is the high watermark of this thing we now call ‘Bromance’; movies that suggest that a man really can be deeply and sincerely in love with his best friend without it meaning he is a latent homosexual. Despite the Olympian smut, slapstick humour and overload of pure belly laughs, at its heart, Superbad is a teen break-up movie. But the unhappy couple are a loud, chubby boy with a Jew-fro and his odd skinny friend with the strangely angelic face and a shapeless hoodie.
Superbad steals a basic structure from the winning formulas of American Graffiti (see here) and Dazed And Confused (see here) and blends it with the male quest to lose virginity that drives American Pie (see here). The action takes place over one day and night, and revolves around what the principals see as the last chance to party before the end of their high school years. Despite being nerdish outsiders, Seth (Hill) and Evan (Cera) have wangled an invite to the house party being thrown by the very cute Jules (Stone), who Seth would dearly love to cop off with. Evan’s equally adorable crush object Becca (MacIsaac) is also going to be there. But Seth is a self-loathing product of the rules of teen hierarchy whereby a fat kid can’t possibly hook up with a princess unless she is so drunk she doesn’t know what she’s doing. The problem of how to buy booze when you’re under-age is theoretically solved by über-nerd Fogell (Mintz-Plasse), who has got himself a fake ID. The problem is that, for reasons known only to himself, he has made himself 25 years old and renamed himself McLovin. Not Something McLovin. Just McLovin. The film then becomes a quest to get alcohol in the face of overwhelming odds, which splits the three of them up and casts them adrift in a drunk and violent adult world they are not equipped to deal with.
The backdrop to all this gunplay, getting run over, thuggish party hosts in Brazilian football shirts, drunk women without sanitary towels and insane comedy policemen is that Evan has successfully applied to Dartmouth College and is about to leave the academically challenged Seth behind. And what makes it worse is that Fogell has got into Dartmouth too and he and Evan are going to room together. Seth is consumed by jealousy and fear of a future without the crutch he has been leaning on throughout his high school years, hence his sexual panic.
The title comes from a James Brown record and the comedy is played out to a soundtrack packed with blaxploitation-era funk classics mixed with classic rock and underground hip hop. The juxtaposition with these three sloppily-dressed whiter-than-white geeks and their wiggerisms is perfect.
The sight gags are great, particularly Fogell/McLovin’s attempt to buy booze in the middle of a hold-up, Seth’s flashback to a boyhood obsession with drawing male genitalia and the most inept police chase in movie history. But all the biggest laughs come from dialogue about sex that breaks right through the puerile and into the surreal. Particular favourites are:
Seth: ‘Mama’s making a pubie salad! I need some Seth’s Own dressing . . . I’ll be the Iron Chef of pounding vadge!’
Seth again: ‘What, do you think Becca’s gonna be psyched that you brought a bottle of lube? Oh Evan! Thank you for bringing that lube for my pussy! I never would’ve been able to handle your fucking four-inch dick inside my pussy without that gigantic bottle of loooobe!’
Crazy cop Officer Michaels, played by Rogan himself: ‘This job isn’t how shows like CSI make it out to be. When I first joined the force, I assumed there was semen on everything, and there was some, like, huge semen database that had every bad guy’s semen in it. There isn’t. That doesn’t exist. I dream of a world where everything is covered in semen.’
And his partner Officer Slater, played by the Jim Carrey-esque Hader: ‘On my wedding night we had group sex. I wasn’t involved in it. But I could hear it through the wall.’
The only joke that jars is the bit where a woman dirty-dances with Seth at a party and leaves him with a menstrual blood stain on his trousers. This feels beamed in from all those misogynist frat-boy comedies that hide their fear of women behind sexist abuse. The big strength of Rogan, Goldberg and producer Judd Apatow’s best Bromances – Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin – is that honesty about buddy love doesn’t come at the expense of womankind. For a few unfortunate minutes they are remaking Porky’s here, and it doesn’t sit well with the basic decency at Superbad’s heart.
After 70 minutes of inspired stoopidity, Superbad changes tack entirely and becomes poignant. The boys get to the party, and in various states of drunkenness and anger with each other, couple up with their various objects of desire. And what they find is that the girls, unknown to them or us, are going through exactly the same insecurities and booze-related coping mechanisms.
Our two heroes have total disasters involving vomit and headbutts. It’s Fogell that’s getting along just fine until our doofus cops bust in. (‘We just cock-blocked McLovin! We’re supposed to be guiding his cock, not blocking it.’) We get the only moment ever where a policeman brutalises a teen and you want to cheer, and our dumbass cops even make time to set fire to a cop car, for no good reason except that every boy wants to do it.
Time for the audacious scene. Seth and Evan get into bed with each other – OK, two sleeping bags on the floor – and tell each other that they love each other, and hold each other. There is no Friends-style undercutting, where our boys suddenly realise what this looks like, and jump apart, coughing and faking deeper voices. In fact, the scene goes further as they wake up the next morning and react to each other in the way any of us might if we’d had drunken sex and weren’t sure how our bedmate felt about it in the cold light of day. A debate rages as to whether Seth and Evan had some kind of sex . . . but I prefer to think not. They love each other and the idea that that has to be consummated undercuts the entire point of the movie. Besides, the best kind of sexual tension is the unresolved kind.
The pair go to the mall. There is a gently funny scene – playing on the gay subtext – where Seth tries on trousers and asks Evan to pass judgement on how they look, posing away ludicrously and flagging up the delights of ‘male cameltoe’. They bump into Becca and Jules, and the four discuss and apologise for the drunken disasters of the previous night. Evan and Seth pair up with the girls, trying to appear casual about saying goodbye to each other. It’s here that it starts to hit you that every display of neediness you’ve seen has come from Seth, and that Evan has been trying to cut the cord and move away from Seth from the outset of the movie. He immediately turns his attention towards Becca, and it’s Seth who is looking back, his face a memorable mask of longing and fear. You do start to gather the evidence: the meat-and-two-veg drawing obsession; the constant insistence that he’s the most hetero man in the world; Seth carrying Evan out of the party like Richard Gere carrying Debra Winger in An Officer And A Gentleman. Seth and Jules disappear into the crowd at the mall as Curtis Mayfield sings the words ‘Love is strange’. Blub.
Which suggests that, even as a budding teenage writer, Seth Rogan was showing extraordinary amounts of vulnerability to his friend Evan. The poignancy is genuine, and Hill’s loss and terror sticks with you after the credits roll.
But, in the final analysis, comedies are judged by how much they make you laugh, rather than how honestly they shine a light on the pain of coming of age. And, for me, Superbad is, pound-for-pound, the funniest teen comedy of all.
TEETH
2007
Starring: Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Hale Appleman, Josh Pais, Lenny Von Dohlen
Dir.: Mitchell Lichtenstein
Plot: The Vagina Dentata Monologues.
Key line: ‘We found this imbedded in the penile stump.’
There is, apparently, a dark legend about female sexuality that dates back thousands of years. It concerns ‘Vagina Dentata’ . . . the presence of teeth inside female genitalia. Writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein takes this ancient terror of the womb and runs with it, all the way to the recent American phenomenon of abstinence groups, whereby children are encouraged, by the u
sual means of bullying-by-shame familiar to anyone who has been touched by the sickness that is organised religion, to promise not to have sex before marriage. Utilising an aesthetic that mingles the whimsical artfulness of current ‘indie’ film with the body horror of David Cronenberg and the ‘dark underbelly of the suburbs’ surrealism of David Lynch, Teeth is a modern feminist classic and a social satire to make you squirm. Especially if you’re a guy, obviously. Hell . . . if you’re a man crazy enough to watch this and Hard Candy (see here) in quick succession you’ll be going to your bed that night in a chastity belt and pants made of Kevlar.
Teeth clamps its jaws around Dawn O’Keefe (Weixler), a fresh-faced blonde clean teen who is local spokesperson for The Promise, an abstinence group who aim to stop all teens having healthy hormonal release and symbolise their agenda with – ha! – a red ring. She has a few immediate problems, though. Mom is sick. Everyone at school hates her, understandably, except perhaps her teachers who are so fucked up by conservative school boards and female sexuality that they cover up the photos of pussies in text books and can’t say the word ‘vulva’, and one apparently normal boy, Bill (Von Dohlen), who has the perfectly normal hots for Dawn, despite the fact that she draws pictures of wedding dresses during Sex Ed, and who has no problems whatsoever saying vulva in class.
Plus Dawn is getting unwanted gooey thoughts and feelings about Tobey (Appleman), a boy in The Promise group. And her mirror-image stepbrother Brad (Hensley) is a mutton-chopped, tattooed, misogynist sex punk waving his satanic music and kinky sex life right in poor Dawn’s face, even when she is doing chaste embroidery in her fluffy pink bedroom. He is also, when not fucking girls up the arse and trying to make them eat dog biscuits, madly in semi-incestuous love/lust with Dawn and is already missing the top of a finger from an inappropriate attempt to play house when the two were small children and their parents first got together. As I said, all this secret perversity amidst the blue skies and freshly sprinkled lawns of this suburban milieu is totally Lynchy. Dennis Hopper was presumably busy, so trouble in paradise is represented by two huge chimney stacks that loom over the town belching black smoke into the otherwise fragrant air.
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