The baby borrowers?

I really enjoyed the new hit movie, Juno. It’s kind of like Napoleon Dynamite (including all the anachronistic props and costumes) … except better. Basic storyline without giving away the ending: Juno is a high-school student, who gets pregnant and needs to figure out what's next. The storyline evolves in a not too surprising way, yet the movie is never predictable and the humour is ingenious. One thing I really loved about this movie is that it was NOTHING like a Degrassi episode (i.e., some over-simplified, politically correct attempt at social engineering).

The story was written by Diablo Cody (real name = Brooke Busey-Hunt), who is most famous for the autobiographical Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Diablo deserves a Rock 'n' Roll Preacher blog post of her own. Her genius is unmistakable, but she has a marked inability to take trauma at face value. Flippancy is a form of denial. Describing a year of stripping in a seedy Minneapolis club as "fun" and an "adventure" is flippant. Her Juno character is similarly flippant about the challenges of teen pregnancy ... at least for most of the story.

Flippancy aside, the only real downfall of Juno is one the screenplay shares with most of what comes out of Hollywood these days: the movie is all about the warm-up, not about the workout. Romantic comedies always tell the tale of how a couple meets, form mistaken impressions of each other, and finally discover they were always meant for each other. The end. But that's not the end. It's just the beginning. The real work begins when you decide you're going to be in a relationship with somebody.

Pregnancy is a 9-month warmup for a lifetime workout called parenting. By leaving the baby mostly out of the equation (even in the title of the film), Juno conveys the seriously mistaken notion that pregnancy and parenting can be easily separated. Real-life Hollywood is even more absurd: Jamie Lynn Spears, Nicole Richie, and a growing list of nubile celebs are making "baby bumps" the latest fashion accessory. Fashion accessories are bought, displayed, and discarded. The world is in trouble when we start looking at children as Gucci handbags.

Here's the bottom line: in pregnancy and parenting, it's all about the baby, not the baby-makers. Perhaps that's the point of NBC's new reality series, The Baby Borrowers, where teenage couples borrow infants, toddlers, etc. to find out what it's really like to be parents. It promises to be an entertaining and enlightening show. But let's remember it's ultimately still a show. In real life, we don't get to "borrow" babies (and return them).

A closing note of appreciation for my friends, Brad and Terri Wright, who've devoted their lives to helping people become great parents. This past year, they launched WRight Parenting to show us how to go beyond being pregnant to being parents who understand the importance of values like safety, consideration, and responsibility. I hope they get a TV show.