Saturday, December 5, 2015

On Diablo

In June of 1978, the Chicago, Illinois suburb of Lemont was graced with the birth of Brook Busey. Passing through the Wyoming city of Cody, she listened repeatedly to the Arcadia song "El Diablo," and thus was born her pen name of Diablo Cody. Though Diablo had written regularly on blogs, in magazines, and a memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, published in 2005, 2007 would see the release of her Academy Award-winning breakout screenwriting debut, Juno.

Juno presents the story of a high school girl, the titular Juno, struggling with the decision of how to handle her sudden pregnancy. She experiences the consequences of classmates and friends knowing about her situation, seeks support from her parents and the not-yet-born child's father, Paulie, and searches for prospective parents after choosing to give up the child for adoption. Cody originally wrote the story as a screenwriting sample to shop around in anticipation of adapting her memoir for the screen and took inspiration for the various characters from her own life and from anecdotes of various adoptees and parents.

I have not personally seen Juno, but it apparently passes the Bechdel test very easily. There seem to be conflicting opinions on whether its presentation is feminist or anti-feminist, but Juno definitely makes choices and has agency, sometimes even without any input from the baby's father. A suggested weakness of the film as a whole is how easily Juno is able to handle the situation and bring it to a resolution acceptable to her, where she gains overwhelming support from friends, family, and peers, and easily finds adoptive parents to whom she feels comfortable giving the baby.

Works Cited:

  • http://web.archive.org/web/20080118072752/http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/09/film.diablo.cody.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20120125031138/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/juno.html
  • http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-12-09/news/0712070510_1_mason-novick-hollywood-film-festival-diablo-cody
  • http://www.ew.com/article/2007/11/05/juno-makes-ex-stripper-hollywood-lister
  • http://bechdeltest.com/view/9/juno/
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20120513235331/http://thebechdeltest.blogspot.com/2009/01/juno-pass.html

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