Coming up babies: a critical investigation of Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress

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COMING UP BABIES: A CRITICAL INVESTIGATION OF KNOCKED UP, JUNO
AND WAITRESS

by

Ashley Nicole Lindstrom

_____________________________________________________________________________________

A Professional Project Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

May 2009

Copyright 2008 Ashley Nicole Lindstrom

ii
Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………...............................................................................iii

Maybe Baby: An Introduction……………………………….............................................1

Body and Soul: Critical Theory and the Pregnant Woman………………………………..4

Knocked Up………………………………..........................................................................6

Juno………………………………....................................................................................11

Waitress………………………………..............................................................................14

There Goes My Baby: Final Thoughts………………………………...............................16

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Abstract

2007 was a big year for accidental pregnancies carried to term in the movies.
Comedic films Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress all hinged on this particular event. But is
accidental pregnancy a laughing matter? The following professional project explores that
quandary utilizing the works of feminist theorists Susan Bordo and Mary Russo, critical
analysis, and my own authority of experience.
Each is an enjoyable film, but each has a very specific message about to whom
the pregnant body belongs and how it can be utilized for agency -- not all of those
messages are feminist ideals.

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Maybe Baby: An Introduction

As I lay back on the paper-covered examination table in the sparsest exam
room I’d ever seen, I thought about how much I hated the damn crispy gowns that
OB-GYNs -- and other doctors, of course -- make you wear; I wondered whose benefit
they were for. I went back and forth in my mind about whether I should take my socks
off or not before putting my feet in the stirrups. What could smell worse, the socks, or my
bare feet?
There was the warmth-factor to consider, too.
The doctor knocked on the door and entered the room. As she put on her gloves,
she asked me to remove my socks. Fine, have it your way. “Scoot forward,” she said, and
I did. “Scoot,” she ordered again. And again. Only when I felt I was about to fall off the
table -- like I was balancing in some sort of stirrup-assisted yoga position -- did the
doctor seem satisfied.
I never was a woman who dreaded the yearly gynecological check up -- buck up,
it’s for your health -- but this was not my yearly check up. Something was wrong with
me and I didn’t know what. I was tired, I was peeing all the time and my belly felt
strange.
. The doctor slid two fingers into my body and was pressing my abdomen with her
other hand. She looked up toward the ceiling as she did it, like she was trying to solve a
math problem in her head. Then, suddenly:
“Your uterus is swollen,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your uterus is swollen … It feels like you’re pregnant.”

2
“I’m on my period.”
“Could be spotting. Pregnancy would explain all your symptoms.”
“But I take the pill.”
The doctor shrugged and made a “crazier things have happened” face.
It was January of 2008 and I was 23. About a month-and-a-half before -- days
after sensibly splitting with my underachieving boyfriend of four years -- I began to see a
local artist and gallery owner I had long admired professionally.
When it came to sex, two forms of protection was my steadfast rule, but when
said artist confided one night that using a condom made him feel like I didn’t trust him --
yep, that old line -- I slid the rule under the rug. A week later, he had left the building.
As the doctor asked her assistant to set up a blood test at a facility in the medical
center the next day, I considered what I would do if her hunch was right. After a year of
watching and reading reviews of films such as Juno and Knocked Up -- comedies about
accidental pregnancies (and subsequent births) wrought by ill-advised unions -- I found
myself questioning the plausibility of my situation, of all things. I felt outside of myself,
sliding through the timeline of my life like one of Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, except I
didn’t know my fate. Would a smart girl like me really flub up like that? Would an
outspoken feminist really be having profound doubts about terminating this potential and
extremely unplanned pregnancy? Could she find that she wasn’t so sure when she
thought “life” -- or at least something special -- began? How much value did it have
compared to her own life? And what would she be willing to put her body through?
She didn’t have to put it through anything, fortunately. It seemed the doctor, too,
had flubbed up -- I was having a histamine reaction. Still, it was effectively the end of my

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childhood and the beginning of my personal investment in the problematic humorous
depiction of the painful and confusing event of unintended pregnancy.
As part of a generation struggling to define its feminism, as Amanda Fortini
proposed in her New York magazine article “The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton
and the fourth wave,” and as a critic, one of my goals is to work with a feminism that
combines the third wave’s untethered pleasure possibilities (characterized by reclamation
and reappropriation of oppressive language, dress, etc.) with a dose of the more rigid
second wave’s righteous anger and devotion to sisterhood -- elements that still have
power and a place in the present.
Oh, fictional unplanned fetuses -- little prom queens of Cinema 2007 -- you didn’t
ask for all this attention. You didn’t apply to be sired by schlubby Seth Rogen in Knocked
Up; in your dark gestation, you didn’t perceive of a life spent baking pie after pie with
Waitress’s too-country-fied Keri Russell; you didn’t dream of being pushed through
teenage Ellen Page’s birth canal in Juno -- but you were, and we thank you. Had you not
tenaciously clung to the uterine wall -- had your movie moms (quite reasonably) decided
not to carry you to term -- we critics might be over you now, a year-plus after the fact.
We might not still be publicly sorting and hashing out shortcomings of the pro-choice and
pro-life party lines troubled by the films in which you live/exist as a part of your mother’s
body/evolve into a human-alien parasite. (Just kidding about that last one.)
Critics have argued about plausible and/or deserving futures for you fetuses, and
the treatment of your movie mums. In addition to addressing the films’ formal qualities,
almost every review of any value included an attempt to negotiate the films’ stories with
women’s issues. Slate.com’s Dana Stevens enjoyed the films even though the

4
reproductive politics left her uneasy. The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman thought the plots
should have included more incentive for the women to believably go through with their
pregnancies. Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek was a fan of all three and concluded that
these female characters -- like any non-fictional woman -- should not have to validate
their choices to anyone.
With feminist theory and my own “authority of experience” to guide me, I shall
here critically reassess the divisive and oft-reflected-upon films Juno, Knocked Up, and
Waitress. My intention is to engage in this dialogue of politics and plot and probability,
but, considering the generous gestation period between the films’ releases and my present
writing, I intend to reel in what is known about the films’ writers and directors in order to
provide a more (forgive me) stork’s eye perspective that will lead us to clearer -- and
perhaps altogether different -- reading of these films and how they function in the context
of feminism and reproductive rights.
Body and Soul: Critical Theory and the Pregnant Woman
Supremely helpful to my analysis of these films -- and the motives of their writers
-- is feminist philosopher Susan Bordo’s book, Unbearable Weight -- specifically the
chapter titled “Are Mothers Persons?” as well as Mary Russo’s essay “Female
Grotesques: Carnival and Theory.”
The former is an incisive dissection of where and how we locate the prominent
subject -- that is, the soul, life force, or “I” -- of a pregnant body. In other words, to
whom does a pregnant body belong: to the pregnant woman (let’s call her Susie), to the
fetus in Susie’s womb, or to the husband/lover/friend/boyfriend/stranger who inseminated
Susie? “Female Grotesques” is an overview of how pregnant and other “freak” female

5
bodies have and can be used to flip the accepted power dynamic -- if only for a few
minutes.
What I have kept in the left breast pocket of my brain as I re-viewed the films and
reconsidered the critical arguments made for and against them, is Bordo’s suggestion that
“although abortion rights are a prominent issue, both pro-choice and pro-life arguments
are locked into a rhetoric and strategies that fail to situate the struggle within the broader
context of reproductive control.” Both pro-choice and pro-life groups have limited
themselves by focusing so exclusively on when human life begins, rather than focus on
the woman. The effect of this shortsightedness is a polarization the two groups, and a
refusal to acknowledge the real-life complexities of being pregnant.
The impetus for Bordo’s theorizing springs from reality -- the implications made
by the treatment of the pregnant body especially in the American legal and medical
systems. These practices have resulted in “the construction of women as fetal incubators,
the bestowal of ‘super-subject’ status to the fetus, and the emergence of a father’s rights
ideology … reveal[ing] that feminist anger and frustration are far from anachronistic.”
Recalling incidents of brain-dead women kept on life support until their fetuses were
viable, to an episode where a pregnant woman (one week overdue) was publicly hassled
by a waiter because she ordered a serving of alcohol with a meal, Bordo wonders where a
woman’s right to choose goes after she decides to keep a pregnancy.
Generally, the Western legal system has compartmentalized humans much as
Descartes did: as bodies and subjects. Bordo elaborates that it is this subjecthood -- “the
‘inner’ self, the ‘I’” -- that actually humanizes a body. For an individual to be forced to
do something with her or his body is thereby to refute her or his personhood. This is, of

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course, asked of pregnant women again and again. Whereas the father -- also often part of
the fetus’s “environment,” as Bordo puts it -- gets to keep his subjecthood intact.
Bordo is not attempting to trivialize fetal life, in fact, she feels that the move to do
so has “fed powerfully into the right-wing imagination of a possible world in which
women would be callously and casually scraping fetuses out of their bodies like leftovers
off a plate. This image -- so cruelly unrepresentative of most women’s experiences --
must be challenged, must be shown to be a projection of ‘evil mother’ stereotypes,’
reflective of deep cultural anxieties about women’s autonomy rather than the realities of
its exercise.”
If Bordo has been in my pocket, then Russo has been on my sleeve, helping to
provide a resistant reading to a set of films that do, at certain moments, seem
old-fashioned in their messages. “The figure of the female transgressor as a public
spectacle,” Russo writes, “is still powerfully resonant, and the possibilities of redeploying
this representation as a demystifying or utopian model have not been exhausted.”
Translation: Wrinkled women, pregnant women, overweight women command attention
-- that makes them powerful. The power to make us look, gawk even, can be used to
make a statement and also to emphasize that these are not freak bodies at all. Russo
regularly cites the French writer-doctor-Nazi propagandist Celine and his descriptions of
the maternal body which “invoke horror and contempt.”
Knocked Up
In 2005, a comedy writer in his late 30s best known for his work on the
all-too-short-lived television shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, hit it big in the
movies. The writer is named Judd Apatow and the film, which he also directed, is The

7
40-Year-Old Virgin. The success of the relatively low-budget picture -- it grossed just
over $109 million domestically according to Eonline.com -- opened the doors needed for
him to start work as writer-director on a second feature film, Knocked Up.
Apatow’s interest in comedy sparked at an early age, and by 17 he was living and
working in Hollywood, doing standup and eventually befriending the likes of Larry
Sanders, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler. (He even roomed with the latter for a period.)
He eventually became a writer for The Larry Sanders Show, and did an uncredited
rewrite on the Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy, where he met his wife (whom he frequently
casts), the actress Leslie Mann.
Though his television work -- particularly Freaks and Geeks, an hour-long drama
about teens in the early ’80s -- was reliant on personal experience, Knocked Up is
considered to be his most idiosyncratic work to date. Starring all three of the women in
his immediate family -- Mann and their young daughters Iris and Maude -- Apatow
described Knocked Up as a “valentine to [his] family” in a 2007 New York Times
Magazine profile.
In the film, a strikingly beautiful, upwardly mobile E! entertainment channel
correspondent, Alison (Katherine Heigl), shares a drunken night with Ben (Seth Rogen),
a young, unemployed, pot-smoking, illegal Canadian alien she meets at a Los Angeles
club. Back at Alison’s place -- a pool house she presumably rents from her sister (Mann)
and brother-in-law (Paul Rudd) -- Ben fumbles with a prophylactic. Lustfully impatient,
Alison moans, “just do it already,” which Ben interprets incorrectly and tosses the
condom aside. Presto prego.

8
The following morning at breakfast in a diner, Alison and Ben -- not having
realized what their nocturnal activities have caused -- discover that they have almost
nothing in common. Ben seems pleased to have scored with such a lovely and talented
woman, but Alison leaves, repulsed.
Cut to two months later: Alison becomes sick during an interview-taping (and
after), and acting on the suggestion of a coworker -- maybe she’s pregnant -- Alison, with
her sister, purchases far more pregnancy tests than needed. Each one turns up positive.
She contacts Ben for the first time in months -- by email, as he cannot afford a cellular
phone -- and plans a dinner, during which she divulges that she is in fact, knocked up.
When they breach the subject of protection and Ben admits that he did not use any based
on Alison’s “just do it,” the conversation devolves into a heated argument.
Nevertheless, Alison decides to go through with the pregnancy, and Ben, too, gets
on board. Indeed, so on board that he decides that the right thing to do -- for the baby -- is
to try to build a relationship and stay together. Alison tries to conceal the truth of her
condition at work; meanwhile Ben tries to coax his ragtag group of reefer-mad
roommates to busy themselves creating the website they have been planning to build (the
idea for which, unfortunately, has already been taken by “Mr. Skin” -- a site whose
content is mainly which movie stars one can see nude [or partially nude] in which films,
and at what exact point in their running time.). Alison is increasingly disenchanted with
Ben’s childish, irresponsible lifestyle and Ben is increasingly disenchanted with what
growing up seems to entail: namely abandoning full-time commitment to his band of
brothers. The two break up and make up, but as the film closes, just after the birth of their

9
child, their connection still seems tenuous -- hopeful, but liable to fall apart at any
moment.
The gents of Knocked Up aren’t bad folk, per se; they merely embody the outlook
writer-director-producer Paul Feig has said Apatow shares with the late George Bernard
Shaw: “All men mean well.” Or, in life and in his movies, Apatow gives people the
benefit of the doubt that they are just acting on their best instincts. Co-chief film critic
A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote in his review of the film that Knocked Up is
illustrative of “the culture of sexual entitlement and compulsive consumption that
encourages men to remain boys for whom women serve as bedmates and babysitters.
Resistance requires the kind of quixotic heroism Steve Carell showed in The-40-Year-Old
Virgin or a life-changing accident, like Alison’s serendipitous pregnancy.”
The question viewers must face is: Should a fictional pregnant woman be the
vehicle for a man’s self-discovery? Particularly one whom we’re not sure has adequate
reason to carry the pregnancy to term to begin with? Clearly, this is not the greatest moral
conundrum to test the film world (I’ll simply write “snuff” to illustrate the extreme) –
however, has Apatow not, on some level, denied the subjecthood of his fictional female
character by merely using her as a vessel for the fetus which will ultimately cause his
main male character, Ben, to change?
Hoberman argued in the Village Voice that the whole thing would be far less
murky and insulting had Apatow merely provided us with plausible rationale -- he
suggested Alison be a “lapsed Catholic.” In metropolitan, secular LA, an abortion does
not necessarily hold the stigma or consequences it might in the other two films, as I will
discuss further out. However, I think Bordo may not jump on the character of Alison,

10
underdeveloped and under-motivated as she may be. It is made clear that there is the
vaguest of shadow of a doubt in Alison’s mind. (Or, as Zacharek wrote in her Salon.com
review: “… neither [the film] nor the Supreme Court can dictate what a woman’s choice
should be.”) Despite the urging of her mother to “take care of it,” Alison makes a
decision she can live with -- or at least a decision Apatow thinks she can or should live
with. Bordo views “pregnancy and abortion as experientially profound events.” However,
she also finds that it is “women … who have an ‘authority of experience’ men lack …
giving [women] a privileged critical location from which to speak.”
Although Apatow took notes from his wife in constructing the female characters
of the film, star Heigl nevertheless famously referred to the film as “a little sexist” in
Vanity Fair. Like The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, Knocked Up is a filthy-mouthed film whose
script often utilizes words for female body parts as insults (in its defense, I’m afraid that
is a true reflection of how some young people speak) and very directly privileges the
personhood of Ben and the fetus over Alison’s. “Tell me you don’t want him to get an
A-word,” (emphasis mine) one of Ben’s friends spits out during a living room-set
conversation, as if Ben himself were having the pregnancy terminated. Ben continues to
engage in his drug habit even though he, too, is a part of the fetus’s environment while it
is made quite apparent that Alison will have to forego her vices for the health of the
baby for the term of the pregnancy. The two decide to stay together “for the baby” -- the
super-subject. Sonograms punctuate the film, effectively “increase[ing] empathy for the
fetus,” as Bordo describes their function.
Apatow foregoes the opportunity to normalize the experience of and (desire for)
intercourse with a pregnant body, choosing instead to highlight the awkwardness and

11
“horror” of the maternal body, “transgressing its own limits,” as Russo puts it. In one
scene, Alison is very obviously enjoying late-trimester intercourse, all the while Ben’s
thoughts are on the fetus -- could he be injuring it? He feels a kick; it sends him over the
edge. This is doubtless a familiar experience, but has it not been done this way on film
before? Must Alison, in a perfectly natural state, be made to feel like an unruly spectacle?
And if she must be, why can she not be allowed to use it to her advantage?
Juno
“God,” Juno scribe Diablo Cody is once quoted as saying to Entertainment
Weekly, “I would slit my wrists to meet Judd Apatow.” She wrote a yet-to-be-produced
screenplay, Girly Style, as a direct female response to the Apatow-produced buddy
comedy Superbad.
Cody -- now 30 -- was born Brook Busey. Despite having won an Academy
Award for best original screenplay for Juno, and writing for the Steven Spielberg-
produced dramedy television series United States of Tara (presently airing on Showtime),
talk-show hosts and entertainment writers seem more interested in discussing her former
vocation: stripping. The Catholic-educated Cody documented her foray into sex work on
her blog, Pussy Ranch, which a talent agent eventually stumbled upon. She convinced her
to write a memoir of her experiences, which would be published as Candy Girl: A Year in
the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. In the event that Candy Girl would be adapted for film,
Cody wrote a separate, sample screenplay: Juno.
Lately, Cody specializes in writing scripts for young women actors, and since her
transition from Minneapolis to Los Angeles has befriended two other screenwriters, Dana
Fox and Lorene Scafaria. According to an Entertainment Weekly profile, the three plan to

12
eventually “start a production company with a strong emphasis on projects that don’t
involve beautiful actresses acting dumb and, whoops!, falling down the stairs into the
arms of Mr. Right.”
Juno opens with the somewhat androgynous, oversized-flannel-shirt-wearing
titular character (Ellen Page) slugging Sunny Delight in preparation to take yet another
over-the-counter pregnancy test at a mom-n-pop drug store. Approximately two months
before, the 16-year-old Juno MacGuff bedded her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael
Cera) on a chair. It was her idea, we find out later, and intelligent as both of those
characters seem to be, neither gets caught up with protection. Upon confirming the
pregnancy, Juno informs Paulie that she’s going to “nip it in the bud” and uses her
hamburger-shaped phone to call a clinic called “Women Now” to “procure a hasty
abortion.” But a combination of elements cause her to flee the clinic. Was it the water
stained magazines, the crude receptionist, or her hyper-sensitivity to a room-full of
scratching fingernails just after she learns her fetus probably already has them? She
alternates plans, and tries -- successfully -- to locate adoptive parents for “the thing.” The
Lorings, whom she finds in the PennySaver, seem to be the perfect yuppie couple. They
agree to fund her pregnancy and Juno agrees to a closed adoption. Meanwhile, Juno
virtually ignores Paulie both as a tactic of protecting him -- his mother would go batty if
she became cognizant of her high-school-aged son’s actions -- and because she is
interested in Mark Loring (Jason Bateman), a former rocker who now composes music
for commercials and vaguely returns her interest. Eventually Mark discloses to Juno that
he is leaving his wife, who is desperate to be a mother, and Juno experiences a crisis:

13
From a broken home herself, she wonders, can families really stay together? Is there
really a place for the fetus she’s bothered to carry thus far?
Ultimately, Juno decides that one fully loving parent -- like her father -- is good
enough, and allows the baby to be adopted by Vanessa Loring (Jennifer Garner). Also,
based on the sage words of her father, she decides that she is in love and will for the
present commit to Paulie, who “thinks the sun shines out her ass” regardless of her
physical state.
I can understand why New York Times co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis
lumped Juno in with Knocked Up as a “male wish-fulfillment fantasy”: the story of a
woman taking control and making arrangements for a fetus that she is only one-half
responsible for might be construed as a heterosexual male fantasy -- he doesn’t pay
physically or socially, as she does, for their mutual recklessness. However, isn’t this kind
of control over one’s body -- the reproductive rights -- feminists should stand for?
Doesn’t Juno have a “privileged location from which to speak”? Paulie does not try to
assert any sort of fathers-rights agenda over Juno -- he is supportive of her initial plan, to
abort, and then of her change of plans, to find adoptive parents. He is “off the hook” as a
factor in the fetus’s environment, but only because Juno doesn’t want him around. I doubt
that it is every pubescent boy’s fantasy to knock up his best friend and then lose her for
nine months. If anything, one of Juno’s pros -- besides being screwballishly funny and
well-acted -- is that it portrays the maternal body as desirable. “When I see you, the
baby kicks really hard,” Juno says to Paulie’s delight -- not disgust -- just before they
share a righteous make-out session.

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Certainly Cody’s script has contrivances that would lead to the eventual delivery
of a baby -- as individuals much cleverer than myself have pointed out, abortion rarely
makes for good comedy -- however, unlike Hoberman, who jested that Juno should have
used the baby as part of a welfare scam to make money for her rock band, I find her
decision satisfying (as does Zacharek). Not only is going along with the pregnancy a part
of her journey into adulthood, it is perfectly in character for a young woman who
frequently does difficult, outlandish things for the benefit of herself and others -- like
moving an entire garage-sale living-room set onto Bleeker’s front lawn -- and is prepared
to face the consequences.
Waitress
Of the three writers discussed here, Adrienne Shelly is the furthest from holding
household-name status. Actor, director and screenwriter Shelly wrote Waitress -- a film
she would go on to direct -- during the final trimester of her own pregnancy with her
daughter, Sophie. She had already written and directed two feature-length films, and was
known for her acting work for director Hal Hartley in his films Trust and The
Unbelievable Truth. According to a piece in The New York Times, “Ms. Shelly had
strong feelings about the objectification of women on camera and a belief that she and
other women belonged behind the camera as well.”
At the young age of 40, the effervescent Shelly was murdered in her New York
office. Waitress had been accepted by the Sundance Film Festival, but notification had
not yet been sent out. To watch the film -- in which she stars as a charming, wide-eyed
waitress -- with the knowledge of her end, is bittersweet, to say the least. You want her to

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still be in the world. Immediately after her death, her husband, Andy Ostroy, established
a foundation in her honor that would give funding to women directors.
A film about a dazzling young baker, Jenna (Keri Russell), who works at a quaint,
Southern pie shop, Waitress is the most traditionally “feminine” of the three films at
hand. Shelly makes no apologies for her character’s love and talent for traditional
“women’s work,” shooting the creation of Jenna’s uncannily named pies -- Lonely
Chicago Pie, I-Hate-My-Husband-Pie -- with pornographic interest. Jenna’s hate-able
husband is Earl (Jeremy Sisto), an immature deadbeat who garnishes what little wages
she earns at the diner and generally isolates her from the world.
As in Knocked Up, one night of liquid courage lands Jenna up the stick (“Why do
I get drunk? I do stupid things when I’m drunk. Like sleep with my husband.”). Though
her girlfriends, co-waitresses at the diner, suggest she consider her “alternatives,” Jenna
insists that she “respects this child’s right to thrive,” and begins to stash away tips to fund
her escape from Earl. (Critics such as Ty Burr of The Boston Globe chose to focus on the
glory of this sisterhood -- as Shelly does -- rather than give the matter of choice due
investigation.) There only seems to be one OB-GYN in the small town, the married and
handsome Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), and he and Jenna commence an affair that lasts
the length of her pregnancy. Meanwhile, Earl makes her promise not to love the baby
more than him, and foils her escape plan by discovering the money she’s saved. (It’s for
the baby, for a crib, Jenna lies.)
Jenna spends most of the movie resenting the fetus growing in her womb --
resenting the captivity it represents -- or feeling sorry for it. But upon delivery, she
magically loves the child and finds the strength to end her affair and her marriage. She

16
serendipitously inherits the pie shop and lives happily-ever-after with her girlfriends and
daughter, Lulu.
Stevens and Scott both referred to Waitress as a “feminist fairy tale,” and it does
have that righteous-sisterhood vibe of the second wave oozing from its crust. And Scott,
in his New York Times review, made a valid point that Waitress is one of the few films in
which a woman is not punished for infidelity. Awesome.
Jenna’s choice to deliver in Waitress is perhaps the most befuddling of the three
films. There are many elements that could come to play in her decision to keep the
pregnancy -- Southern moral codes, inability to pay for a pregnancy-terminating
procedure, the absence of privacy in such a small town. And yet none of these reasons are
put into play. That she flip-flops and ends up happy for a daughter in the end seems some
kind of vacant promise -- have your baby and you’ll change your mind.
On the upside, Jenna is the sole female lead in these three films to have the
conviction to drop the partner with whom she is unequally yoked. However, Shelly --
who seems to be as inept at writing males as Apatow is at writing females -- has to
contrive a lot of asshole-ish characteristics for Earl in order to get Jenna there. At least
here is another film -- a “test produced by a woman” -- wherein the pregnant body is not
a horror but something to be desired, a feat Shelly managed without objectifying her
leading lady.
There Goes My Baby: Final Thoughts
Among the other positive characteristics already pointed out about these films, is
the fact that none of them depicts their main female characters as callous bitches
“casually scraping fetuses out of their bodies like leftovers off a plate,” nor are they

17
women who are immediately comfortable with the thought of motherhood. I most enjoy
Juno, not only because it jibes best with the politics of the thinkers I’ve incorporated
here, but because it is a film that loves and humanizes all of its characters. Even Mark
Loring -- who could have been written as a mere soulless, baby/wife-abandoning jerk --
has dimension and rationale, and the subtle attraction between himself and Juno is treated
with a delicacy that makes it so much more interesting and relatable than the near
pedophilic, soap-operatic subplot it could have been.
Visually, Juno cribs from the stylized, ironic oeuvre of young directors such as
Wes Anderson -- without the same high level of alienation. The film’s director, Jason
Reitman, privileged style over substance in his premiere feature film, Thank You For
Smoking, but Cody’s script balances his penchant for smooth pictures with pathos.
Knocked Up and Waitress are heartwarming and funny movies -- I recommend
them both -- but, paradoxically, Juno, probably the most gimmicky of the three films,
struck me as the truest reflection of my own experience and this moment in time. Juno is
the sole character who honestly grapples with an abortion as an altogether rational option
onscreen -- only she is shown inside a clinic. Because she looks the alternative in the
face, she reads as the singular non-victim of the three -- the woman with the most real
choice before and after she decides to carry to term. She chooses against the procedure
not because she plans to demote her level of personhood (she refers to the unborn baby as
“the thing” and “sea monkey” throughout the film, and continues to drink horrifyingly
unhealthy blue slushies), but because she recognizes that it might be meaningful to
someone else. Though not pleasant all the time, the pregnant body is a source of pleasure

18
and power for Juno -- as a pregnant woman, she receives more attention while
simultaneously boosting her outsider cred (“I’m a legend,” she says).
Fifteen years after the publication of Unbearable Weight, Juno recognizes --
promotes even -- the growing latitude of acknowledged thought in the pro-choice and
pro-life movements. Last year an Indiana Planned Parenthood started offering adoption
services to its clients, illustrating its understanding that a woman’s choice is more than a
two-way street. Both groups protested Yale art student Aliza Shvarts’s highly publicized
thesis project that would have allegedly comprised blood from self-induced miscarriages
-- because that kind of trivialization doesn’t represent, on the whole, what either group
wants. (Maybe Shvarts’s genius was to expose the shared ground.) Juno is not pro-life or
pro-choice, it’s pro-woman.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract 2007 was a big year for accidental pregnancies carried to term in the movies. Comedic films Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress all hinged on this particular event. But is accidental pregnancy a laughing matter? The following professional project explores that quandary utilizing the works of feminist theorists Susan Bordo and Mary Russo, critical analysis, and my own authority of experience. -- Each is an enjoyable film, but each has a very specific message about to whom the pregnant body belongs and how it can be utilized for agency -- not all of those messages are feminist ideals.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Lindstrom, Ashley Nicole (author)

Core Title Coming up babies: a critical investigation of Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 05/12/2009

Defense Date 05/12/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag accidental pregnancy films,feminist theory,film criticism,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Page, Ellis Tim (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha M. (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email alindstr@alum.trinity.edu,alindstr@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2240

Unique identifier UC1281959

Identifier etd-Lindstrom-2863 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-235479 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2240 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Lindstrom-2863.pdf

Dmrecord 235479

Document Type Project

Rights Lindstrom, Ashley Nicole

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu