Diablo Cody's "Juno"

Diablo Cody (a pen name; Cody's birth name is Brook Busey) is a leading example of a feminist voice penetrating the film world, and in turn, the representation of women in film, through the screenwriting process. Throughout her screenwriting career, Cody has exclusively written films and television shows about women's experiences; a sampling of her projects includes Showtime's The United States of Tara, about a suburban mother with multiple personality disorder, and the 2009 black comedy film Jennifer's Body, about a demon-possessed female serial killer who preys on teenage boys.

However, Cody undeniably came to fame for her 2007 comedy-drama film Juno, about a teenage girl's experiences with pregnancy. The film amassed huge success, becoming the highest-grossing film ever for its distributor, Fox Searchlight, and winning Cody the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.



The film is extremely successful as a case study for film analyst Josephine Donovan's concept of "gynocriticism" (Humm 95). Film theorist Maggie Humm, who heavily uses gynocriticism while analyzing the films of Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris in the piece "Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film," relays Donovan's definition of the term as "a way of assessing works of art specifically in relation to the interests and desires of women... it involves a separate female way of thinking, and a recognition that women's experience has been effectively silenced by a masculine culture" (Humm 95).

From a gynocritical lens, it is clear that Cody wrote the film as a direct subversion of the typical portrayal of the young female experience. She portrays her main character, Juno, as intelligent and mature, a deep thinker who wasn't pressured to have sex with her boyfriend, but instead convinced him to have sex. Previously, a character like Juno was almost unheard of in film, especially in a coming-of-age film where the female protagonist gets pregnant. Rarely ever are young women depicted as wanting sex without being "pressured" or, as many feminist bloggers like to call it, "slut-shamed." Yet Juno is unashamed of her sexuality. She unapologetically thinks about sex: during one scene of the film, Juno imagines what her love interest Paulie Bleeker's penis looks like inside of his track shorts; a thought that most girls have, yet which is a completely non-existent thought for young women in film. Juno has sex with Paulie because, well, she wants to. And though many viewers of the film wrongly interpreted that Juno's sexual encounter with Paulie was her first time having sex, Cody vehemently denied this in a 2009 interview with BUST magazine, saying, "Who said it was [Juno's] first time? Way to jump to conclusions. It was [Paulie's] first time, not hers."

The film's topic, teen pregnancy, obviously garnered attention due to the heated discourse surrounding pro-life and pro-choice options for young pregnant women. Though Juno chooses to carry her baby to full term before giving him up for closed adoption, the film is obviously told from a pro-choice perspective. This is particularly displayed when Juno is shown going up to an abortion clinic and beginning to make an appointment for an abortion before changing her mind. Cody even writes Juno as considering all options; Juno listens as a pro-life heckler outside the clinic tells Juno that unborn fetuses have fingernails, replies, "Really? Hmm," and walks into the clinic anyway. Because Juno is shown as weighing two sides of a decision, and inevitably making an educated choice, Cody's film is clearly showing abortion as a choice that should be left up to women to think about and decide on. Again, unlike most teen films and almost all film and television depictions of abortion, which depict female protagonists who have had an abortion as emotionally traumatized, Cody chooses to subvert the norm by depicting Juno as not at all traumatized by abortion. She sees it simply for what it is, an option, and she chooses not to have one simply because it doesn't seem to be the right choice for her personally.

Furthermore, the storyline surrounding the adoption process of Juno's child subverts normalized ideas about the nuclear family and who society sees fit to raise children. When Juno decides to give her child up for adoption, she chooses a husband and a wife who are young, friendly, upwardly mobile, and most of all, "cool" - the husband listens to Sonic Youth records with Juno and shares her interest in old-school punk rock. Juno also chooses them because the husband and wife seem very happy together, and the wife, a successful businesswoman who cannot have children of her own, wants a child so badly. However, later in the film, the husband and wife get a divorce, as the husband reveals he does not really want a child as much as his wife does. Juno is upset by their divorce, as she has become so used to the idea of her child being raised by these two people. Eventually, though, Juno comes around and gives her baby up for adoption to the wife, who she knows will love the child. Cody's decision to include this storyline directly speaks to the idea of the nuclear family - a wife, a husband, 2.5 children - as the only type of family "fit" to have children as oppressive and outdated. Juno gave her child to a woman who does not have a husband, but is successful, educated, and most of all, loving. By doing this, Cody validates families that are perceived as outside the norm, and furthermore, makes the statement that a woman can have both a successful career and a family, regardless of whether or not she has a husband.



There is no doubt in my mind that Diablo Cody's screenplay is what made Juno a feminist film. Told by someone unfamiliar with a woman's experience, the film would have been a completely different story and would lack the autonomy and agency that Cody gives her main character. Most importantly, the film would not have the same message. At the film's end, after Juno gives birth to her child and he is taken away, she cries, only to be told by her father that, "One day, you'll be here under different circumstances." Her father's statement is a powerful one; he is telling his daughter that life moves on, and though she has had a baby when she wasn't prepared to raise one, one day she will have a baby that she is prepared to raise. By writing this, Cody is validating women's lives as more than just baby makers. She is saying that life does not end with teen pregnancy. It does not make you a bad person, and it does not mean you will never be loved or never have children in the future. Cody's message is positive and hopeful. Analyzing Juno through gynocriticism makes it clear that Cody has successfully used her auteur-ship as screenwriter to spread an empowering, very feminist message through film.