Juno vs. Knocked Up

“That’s not funny!” a voice hissed, and it was true, what was going on on-screen—Jennifer Garner’s character was trying to talk, through Juno MacGuff’s (the title character) pregnant belly, to her adoptive child—should not have been funny, but, nevertheless, two guys up front found it quite funny. Otherwise the room was silent; they realized the emotional gravity of the situation, as Jennifer Garner’s character clearly, so desperately wants to have a child, and she is so clearly ready for it, with only her biology blocking her from what should be her destiny, leaving her reliant on a pregnant high school junior.

Whenever I find something earnest, and someone else finds it amusing, with a hint of derision, I always feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable both because I feel as if my analysis of the situation is wrong, mistaken, and because my emotions are being derided as well, as if the stake I feel in the characters and their situation is wrong, as if the empathy I have for them is misdirected. Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in another’s skin, so by laughing at my empathy, they are laughing at me, in a way. Not that feeling uncomfortable is necessarily wrong or incorrect; I deserve laughing at in many occasions.

The types of movies that provoke these uncomfortable feelings tend to be more ambitious than other movies. For identifiable portions of the audience to be laughing while you are empathizing, it must be a movie that mixes both mockery and solemnity. That’s more ambitious for two reasons. First, technically, it means that the filmmaker (or artist in general, I guess, but this effect, of being uncomfortable because of the disharmony of your reactions and another’s, is best achieved with an audience) must be adroit enough to signal convincingly when and what is supposed to be funny, and, conversely, when and what is serious. Second, in terms of story, to be done well, the story must be complex enough to have nuance. It’s an old observation that humor is rooted in pain, and that’s more or less true. But, of course, some pain is distinctly not funny, which is why people will wonder when it’s too soon to joke about tragedies, or why people will speculate that 9/11 killed irony (well, at the time; that movement seems to have hit a snag). Which means that some pain is worth laughing at; other pain is worth honoring. Which is which? That produces that difficult issue for the audience, because they might disagree with the artist’s intentions, or the artist’s intentions might be ambiguous.

The conflict is between earnestness and irony, between putting your mind in someone else’s or laughing at appearances. The two approaches suggest something different in outlook towards the character in question, because the first implies something noble or worthwhile; the second implies that that character, or at least that moment of weakness, is not worthwhile (or at least only worthy of mockery). The trouble, then, is to get stuck on one mode or another, or to apply the wrong mode to a situation.

There’s been a recent spate of films that attempt to blend both humor and tragedy, to be tragicomic. Many of these revel in small quirks for humor but, in the end, shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of, “ain’t people cool?” Or not cool, but worthy. Noble. To name a few examples: “Garden State,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” Wes Anderson’s films, and of course “Juno” and “Knocked Up” which share more than being pregnancy films.

The problem is that many of these films treat their characters schizophrenically: there is the quirky, humorous part of them, and then that noble almost tragic part. “Little Miss Sunshine” probably suffers most from that fault. Aside from Steve Carrell’s character, who keeps a dignified humor throughout, the other characters often seem like chess pieces pushed along for specific purposes the director had in mind. In short, not like real people, by which I mean not that they’re unrealistic (one of my favorite novels is One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which a character has nineteen sons all with the same name, and that is relatively realistic in comparison to some of the other escapades), but that they’re not self-directed. Take for instance the climatic scene in the movie (spoiler!—skip to next paragraph if you care), in which the daughter, competing for the title of Little Miss Sunshine, dances to Rick James’ “Superfreak.” Obviously inappropriate, and it necessitates the rest of the members of the family dancing with her, in order to save her from embarrassment, which ends up uniting them. Now, the serious point that the director appears to be going for is that this is a satire of beauty pageants, which is a good point, if overdone, and, taken by itself, hilarious. The problem with this is that it makes little sense, considering the characters in the movie. Now, Olive, the daughter, has been prepared by her (dead, at the end of the movie) crass, rude grandfather. That gives the scene its initial comedic punch, because that is presumably what that cranky coot (I say this with the greatest affection—he’s hilarious) would do. Except it isn’t. The grandfather isn’t a stupid character. Surely he would know what happens in beauty pageants. So then why would he suggest a deliberately offensive dance? He knows how much the pageant means to Olive. For that matter, why would Olive, who had watched and participated in so many beauty pageants, go through with that dance? And what did she do in the qualifying? And so on. The final performance raises more questions than it answers, making it dramatically unsatisfying.

I’m not saying that the beauty-pageant wouldn’t or couldn’t happen, merely that it is underexplained. It could’ve worked as a subject: after all, beauty pageants are a worthy object of ridicule (remember that girl with the incoherent answer last summer?), and the emotional investment Olive has is genuine. So the shifting perspective of irony and earnestness could have worked.

Pregnancy, and our reactions to it, is another worthy subject for this approach. A lot of funny shit happens during pregnancy, as both films prove. There’s potential gross-out humor and slapstick and sight gags and all that. That’s also not to mention the social commentary one could generate about it. And the end result is pretty worthy of empathy, of earnestness, seeing as we all went through it in some way.

The lead-up to birth in each film is treated with shifting humor-and-earnestness, and the birth itself is treated, in the end, as very serious. Both movies show birth in all its grossness. So both of them fit firmly into the paradigm, and the question is, how successful is each film?

Juno was more effective than Knocked Up.

The best example comes from the way each film handles abortion. It’s a tricky topic, because for there to be a pregnancy story rather than an abortion story, the woman must choose to carry the baby to term. Which raises the question of how you, the filmmaker, will justify the choice of pregnancy over abortion and what you think that means politically (both movies brought up some debate on that topic).

In Knocked Up, Katherine Hegl’s character has lunch with her mother, who suggests getting an abortion because it’s not a “real baby,” which is the kind of callous, insensitive line that spurred the audience to an “oh shit!” reaction. Katherine Hegl’s character apparently felt much the same way and the story goes on.

On the other hand, Juno spends quite a bit more time on the decision. First she discusses it with her best friend, who, in her flaky way, goes through the mechanics of the process and mentions that some other girls in their school have had abortions too. Neither character really gets in high spirits at that point, and Juno goes to the clinic, where she meets another girl from her class, an Asian, who is marching alone (I say this because I believe she’s the only Asian in the film, and it underscores the marcher’s isolation), who talk about various school things before the marcher tries desperately to convince Juno not to abort, before she shouts “They have fingernails,” which touches something in Juno, who replies, “Really?” Then Juno goes into the clinic, where she is put off by the receptionist, who, playing with a gameboy, obviously doesn’t care about her specifically. From there, a revealing close-up on fingernails, and Juno leaves and runs out, and, as she runs, the Asian marcher shouts at her, “God appreciates your decision!” For Juno, the decision is definitively made: she makes it because of a combination of her quirky personality, and because she feels more appreciated for her by the anti-abortion forces, something that is very important to her. Later, in the film, when Juno asks her dad about love, he gives an answer that affects her deeply, about how you’ll know the person you’re meant to be with when that person loves you for you, good days, bad days, good moods, bad moods, all that.

I’m pro-choice, and Juno made a choice. I know why she made a choice, and it satisfied me. Katherine Hegl’s character’s choice never quite felt like a choice. It felt like that Seinfeld episode, “Yadda yadda yadda”, where everything compromising is “yadda yadda yadda”-ed through, avoiding having to address the subject. Knocked Up felt like it inserted an easy stereotype in order to get on with the story, which definitely had its charms. It deployed a vicious irony too easily on the mother. I’m sure women like her exist, but they aren’t the only pro-choicers out there, and certainly not the only pro-choicers whom Katherine Hegl would have known or listened to. It evaded the subject rather than honoring it.

Notably, the effect of that move was not to make the audience uncomfortable, but to unite them. Stanford, where I saw the movie, is a pretty liberal place, and I bet the majority of the audience was personally pro-choice, and yet we enthusiastically united against that crass caricature. Does that say more about us or the movie? Probably the movie. We should have been challenged, as I was challenged when I saw Juno. Not to say Knocked Up is bad or anything—other than that, I loved the movie—but it definitely had its weaknesses.

Most of the reason that I’m interested in the nuances, the small details, of these strengths and weaknesses, is that, as a writer, I know that some thing’s existence are useless and ridiculous and deserve mockery (most recent example: airline carriers insist on using ‘deplane’ as a word), and other things are real and deserve empathy and expression. I hope I have the strength to avoid lazy irony, by mocking deserving subjects.