Tuesday, December 25, 2007

The "Juno Generation," Part II

Here is an AP story on Diablo Cody, the much talked-about screenwriter of Juno. The article explains that the film comes from personal experience, that Juno is a fairly autobiographical character, and the teen pregnancy plot comes from a high school acquaintance.

This is effective evidence supporting one position that I have about Juno - that it's a film about a late-wave Generation X teen-ager veiled in the slang and accoutrements of the young people of today. A comedy about teen pregnancy involving a hip teenager who namedrops Iggy Pop and whose goal is to play in an indie band seems much more suited for 1994 or so. That happens to be the year that the 29-year-old Brook Busey-Hunt (aka Diablo Cody) was 16 years old. This is like a Baby Boomer penning a script in 1986 about a deeply moralistic and politically concerned teen-ager raising the social consciousness of her classmates and getting them to participate in a world peace march. I seem to vaguely recall some plots like that floating around the culture of the time.

That doesn't make it a bad movie. It does make it a memoir.

3 comments:

Pinko Punko said...

Kind of the Buffy syndrome, or maybe Gilmore Girls- nobody wants to write hipster dialog for today's kids because of the notion I think that nobody wants to write for Paris Hilton, they would rather write for how they viewed themselves in high school/college.

K. Bowen said...

I think Cody has a fabulous ear for the lingo. Maybe a little too fabulous for the first 20 minutes or so. It's just that I think the concept is very a dozen years ago. Linklater was smart making Dazed and Confused as an actual period piece. But I suspect that that is a more difficult sell - it's probably assumed that it's easier to connect with today's teen-agers if you make it "one of them." Even if it isn't really.

Anonymous said...

Bingo.