Pregnancy test: the politics of the personal.

The critical controversy sparked last year by two box-office hits about pregnancy, Juno and Knocked Up, centers on how the films represent--or fail to represent--abortion as a considered option for their unexpectedly expectant female protagonists. Those defending the movies dismiss critics worried about "the A-word" status to which both films delimit abortion, accusing naysayers of demanding a political statement from "personal," "apolitical" stories, that are, after all, merely comedies. Although Cineaste appreciates the humor, clever dialog, and engaging performances, especially in Juno, we also worry not only about critical arguments that seem either willfully blind or shockingly naive about the mediating role of cinema in our culture, but also about the aversion to abortion as an important issue. While the majority of Americans are prochoice, for example, an increasing discomfort--whether spoken or unspoken--with the abortion option seems evident on the part of many filmmakers.

With the antichoice movement waging unrelenting attacks on abortion rights and winning the 2003 ban on the strategically termed "partial birth abortion," a label that has stuck thanks to the vigorous efforts of the Bush Administration, whose antiabortion agenda has placed us one Supreme Court Justice away from the possible reversal of Roe v. Wade, films that seem reluctant or even squeamish about the mere mention of abortion tend to reinforce and extend this cultural unease. The Religious New Right, it would seem, has successfully obtruded their opposition onto the larger public consciousness, where, outside of overtly feminist discourse, abortion mostly exists on a "Don't ask, don't tell" basis--with no acknowledgement of what it means when a woman loses the legal right to control her own body. Although Knocked Up director Judd Apatow and Juno's director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody have repeatedly asserted their prochoice positions, their films imply something larger at work.

When the sixteen-year-old Juno visits an abortion clinic, she encounters a self-involved, punked-out receptionist only a few years her senior--something not even remotely resembling most abortion clinics, where, increasingly, employees are putting their safety and even their lives on the line to support women and ensure that they will have sterile, safe procedures. While Juno's feisty line when she calls the clinic, saying, "I'd like to procure a hasty abortion," does play for laughs, for many viewers the clinic scene doesn't. While the scene involving the lone protestor Juno encounters outside the clinic, a classmate who moves fluidly from asserting that "God appreciates your miracle" to asking Juno about their math class, does play for laughs, her pivotal comment that changes Juno's mind--that the fetus already has fingernails--plays like antiabortion propaganda, providing all sorts of emotionally-charged details about early fetal development. Is it perhaps a bit disingenuous, then, given the current political climate, when director Reitman claims that he was drawn to Cody's screenplay because, "You never really see politics in any of the choices, any of the conversations, any of the moves"?

Equally disingenuous is the approach in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up. The incongruity of a beautiful blonde career woman trying to "make it work," after a one-night stand with a jobless but good-at-heart slacker, does play for laughs. The fact, however, that an aspiring TV journalist dismisses abortion after only a brief conversation with her mother, who supports the idea of "taking care" of the pregnancy but is shown as a somewhat negative character, strikes a deeply dishonest chord, as the film contorts its story in order to avoid literally even mentioning abortion. While it may be that the slacker's media-savvy friends make a knowing joke about the reluctance of the media at large to use the A-word, their quip that the thing they're referring to rhymes with "smushmortion" calls upon an image equally consistent with antiabortion propaganda. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the camouflage word is, nevertheless, revealing (why not any number of other invented words--"promortion," for instance?).

Apatow claims that he did film a very funny scene, allowing his actors to improvise (his preferred working method) on the subject of abortion, but it ended up on the cutting room floor, with Apatow kidding that it would have killed Jerry Falwell. Though it's unlikely that Apatow had Falwell in mind as an audience member, his comment nevertheless betrays a reluctance to offend sensibilities in a culture he perceives as offended by abortion. We have only to acknowledge the guarded praise for the films and their perceived antichoice stance by many conservative Christian groups.

Some might claim that Juno and Knocked Up attest to (and indirectly celebrate) the positive state that feminism has struggled to create-the stories would have been impossible to conceive in a world where abortion was not a legal and available option (though it seems rather more available to Juno than it actually is to a sixteen-year-old girl living in Minnesota). We, at Cineaste, are concerned that the films take this option so completely for granted that they manage to appear both profeminist and prochoice while also, if not antiabortion, then at least very uncomfortable with it. Though of different genres, Mike Leigh's Vera Drake (2004) and the recently released 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu (interviewed in this issue), remind us of a time when abortion was neither legal nor available but nevertheless pursued with unhappy or tragic consequences for the women involved--something we would hope that even comedy filmmakers would try to remember.

--The Editors