"Juno," which won an Academy Award for best original screenplay, is a movie sure to delight feminists. The script answers "No" to the question posed in the title of Maureen Dowd's book, "Are Men Necessary?"
Juno is the name of a bratty 16-year-old girl (and I do mean "girl" because she's too immature to be called a woman). She finds herself in what the feminists call an unplanned pregnancy after initiating a loveless one-night incident with a classmate named Paulie.
After the sex, Juno ignores Paulie, treating him as a total irrelevancy. He has nothing to say about her predicament or her decision any more than any other classmate on the high school's cross country running team.
Juno's first response to her pregnancy is to head for the abortion clinic. She changes her mind after passing a pro-life activist carrying a sign and being told that the baby has "fingernails."
The existence of fingernails seems to be what motivated her to reject abortion. Even so, Juno never refers to what she is carrying as a baby; she always calls her unborn child an "it."
Juno makes her decisions solely on a whim. She doesn't permit her parents, or Paulie, or anyone else to have any input or advice about what she will do with the baby.
Meanwhile, this Academy Award-winning script is laced with dozens of obscenities and references to teenagers' sexually active lifestyle. We get the drift of what they are taught in school when we see a public school teacher putting a condom on a banana.
Juno decides to give her thing to a prosperous childless yuppie couple who can provide all the material things of life. From a newspaper ad, she finds the perfect parents: Vanessa and Mark.
Juno's baby seems destined to live in a happy home until Mark realizes that his wife has suddenly pushed him out of the loop of her affection and attention. The movie's message is that no man should have anything to say about a baby for whom he is financially responsible.
With the impending arrival of the birth date, Mark realizes Vanessa doesn't need or want him anymore. So he decides to move on.
All Juno's happy talk about placing her baby in a good home with loving parents is forgotten. Mark's departure breaks the adoption contract, and Juno could easily have found another two-parent home.
But that was not important to Juno. She gladly gives the baby to Vanessa where he will become one more statistic of a boy raised in a fatherless home.
The movie delicately portrays the birth of Juno's baby, but that's certainly not because feminists think delivering an illegitimate baby is preferable to killing him in utero. It's because a movie about a birth produces an adorable pictorial result, while pictures of an abortion are ugly, depressing, and ... well ... not good advertisements for feminism.
The theme of this movie isn't love, romance, or respect for life, but the triumph of feminist ideology, i.e., the irrelevancy of men, especially fathers. The men in the movie are likable, but marginalized; beyond their sperm and paychecks, they have no value worth considering, and can be thrown overboard by independent women and girls.
The movie portrays the adoption as a good outcome, but it is not. The baby will grow up without a real or even a surrogate father, and Paulie, the father, is not asked to approve the adoption or to sign the adoption papers.
Someday the child will ask why he does not have a father. The truthful answer is that feminism has made fatherlessness acceptable in our society.
Juno does whatever she wants regardless of the consequences. That's a sign of immaturity, not maturity.
Her parents warn her not to visit Mark in his home alone, and she does it anyway. She has no qualms about disobeying her parents and contributing to the destruction of Mark and Vanessa's marriage.
America is in bad shape if the financial success of this movie reflects today's high school culture: sexual activity without marriage, crude pictures on the walls, vulgar language, a girl smoking a pipe, unattractive clothes, uncombed hair, enjoyment of slasher movies and weird music, and marriage breakup.
In the end, Juno decides she could like Paulie after all. Paulie is supposed to just get over the fact that Juno gave away their baby to a single woman.
The movie reviews of "Juno" usually call it a comedy. The theater where I saw it was nearly full, but I didn't see or hear anybody laugh.
Toward the end, Juno asks if it is "possible for two people to stay happy forever." The movie's obvious answer is no; not Vanessa and Mark, not Juno's father who is married to a woman not Juno's mother, and not any reason to hope that Juno would ever stay married to a good husband.