(1)  Personality

     One of the main themes of the movie Juno is Personality.  

 

     In this movie, Juno stands out as someone who is trying to find herself.  While she is best friends with a popular cheerleader (Leah), she is someone who knows that the popular, cheerleader type is not her.  To set herself apart, she does not wear the matching outfits, make-up, etc. that the other girls wear, but instead dons mismatched clothes, wears no makeup,  "horn-rimmed glasses and vegan footwear" (Drake, et. al.,2007).  She even goes one-step further and frequently gnaws on a pipe! Yet, while she is striving to find an identity for herself, she is not so sure she wants to be that different.  When one of the jocks teases her for looking different, she defends her look as being what every boy secretly wants, “The funny thing is that Steve Rendazo secretly wants me. Jocks like him always want freaky girls” (Drake, et. al.,2007).  

 

     When Juno finds out she is pregnant, this adds another layer to her confusion as to who she is. While looking at a picture of a distraught girl in the ad, she mimics that pose in front of a mirror to see if she is “that” girl.  However, she realizes she doesn’t know who she is.  Is she a child, she doesn’t think so, but she also knows she does know have the skills to be an adult either.  This is reinforced when her father says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when” and Juno replies, “I have no idea what kind of girl I am” (Drake, et al. 2007).  Juno’s father also senses that she is in a period of identity crisis/confusion and  cannot handle the pregnancy by herself, so when she tells him of her plan to meet the adoptive parents he says,  “Juno, I want to come with you to meet these adoption people. You're just a kid.” (Drake, et. al.,2007).  Although Juno is evolving and growing, she is still caught in a world of confusion by “Dealing with stuff way beyond my maturity level.” (Drake, et. al.,2007).  This point is emphasized when Juno is dancing with Mark in his basement (just as two teenagers might do) and he asks her (with some surprise ), “You’ve never been to a dance, have you?” to which she responds (defensively) “Only squares and nerds go to dances” , which prompts Mark to ask “What are you?” to which she answers “I don’t know” (Drake. et al. 2007). 

 

     Juno seems to be in the fifth stage of Erik Erickson’s psychosocial crises, where “personality development occurs as one successfully resolves a series of turning points, or psychosocial crises”, the identity versus role confusion stage (Snowman, McCown & Biehler 2012 p. 28).  Juno also seems to follow James Marcia’s extension on Erikson’s theory about “identity status”, where he believes there are “four styles or processes “for handling the psychosocial task of establishing an identity.’” (Waterman & Archer 1990 p. 354 qtd. in Snowman, McCown & Biehler 2012 p. 31).  She seems to be in the moratorium phase as she has given some thought to her identity, but has not achieved answer.   She rejects society’s norms and is dissatisfied with school (Snowman, J., McCown, R., Biehler, R., 2012, p. 33).

 

(2) Moral Development

     Morality is another main theme of the movie Juno.

 

     Juno, a teenager, is faced with making a moral decisions when she finds out she is pregnant.  Does she tell the father of the baby or not?  Does she tell her parents or not?  And, the biggest moral decision of all, does she have the baby and keep it, does she have the baby and give it up for adoption, or does she have an abortion?

When Juno first tells her friend Leah that she is pregnant, right away, Leah automatically assumes that Juno will be getting an abortion. The conversation between Juno and her friend Leah seems so very matter–of-fact, like it is the logical solution. According to the Pazol, et al. (2011) “Adolescents aged 15--19 years accounted for 16.5% of all abortions in 2007 and had an abortion rate of 14.5 abortions per 1,000 adolescents aged 15--19 years” . This type of conversation between Juno and her friend Leah is more the norm than the exception for teens. 

 

     When Juno arrives at the clinic for an abortion, she suddenly feels conflicted she runs into a classmate who is standing outside the clinic with an anti-abortion sign, and tells Juno that fetuses have a heartbeat and have fingernails “Juno! Your baby probably has a beating heart, you know. It can feel pain. And it has fingernails” (Drake, et. al.,2007). **See Video 2 on the "VIDEOS" page.**

 

     Before this conversation, Juno hadn’t thought of the fetus as a living entity.  Now, as she looks around the clinic and sees everyone’s fingernails, she begins to feel guilty.  To her, the fingernails were the trigger as they are something that can be seen, heard, felt and touched.  She becomes unsure of whether is right to end the pregnancy or to continue to carry the baby to term.    Juno’s realization that that she has to make a choice, a moral choice, based what ought she do.  This is an example of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. 

 

     As the movie progresses, Juno seems to move back and forth between Kohlberg’s Level 2 Conventional Morality, Stage 3, good boy-nice girl orientation, where the “right action is one that will impress others” (in the case of Juno, doing what the other teens she knows do, have an abortion) to Level 3 Post-Conventional Morality Stage 6 (where she makes an ethical decision).  It is during her brief time in this stage when she “weighed all the factors and then try[ed] to make the most appropriate decision in a [the] given situation” (Snowman, J., McCown, R., Biehler, R., 2012, p. 59).    

 

(3)  Gender Roles-Feminism

     Twenty to thirty years ago if a female got pregnant ( at any age) she was  looked down upon and told by male counterparts she needed to go hide until the baby was born, then give it up for adoption or have an abortion.. The stereotype was that boys should have sex and girls shouldn’t.  The movie Juno shows that it is possible to be both feminine and empowered at the same time.  It shows times have changed and females no longer need to hide; they can stand up and make their own choices

 

     Juno is a sixteen-year-old female who initiated having sex with Paulie “I’m real sorry I had sex with you.  I know it wasn’t your idea “(Drake, et. al.,2007).  Paulie is not even considered Juno’s boyfriend, just someone with whom she decided to have casual sex.  The female initiation of casual sex is the first sign of the changing gender roles and feminism.  Juno remains in control the whole way.  She decides when to tell Paulie she is pregnant, she makes the decision of when to tell her parents, of whether or not to have an abortion, who the adoptive parents will be, etc.  Even at the end of the movie, Juno decides to give a note to Vanessa (the soon to be divorced prospective adoptive mother) stating that she still wants her to be the baby’s mother. Juno is letting Vanessa know that she understands Vanessa will be a single parent, but family is not about a mother and father, but about love.  The ending sends a powerful feminist view that females are capable of doing things just as well on their own, as seen by Juno being able to choose adoption and Vanessa being a single mother.

 

     Jessica Willis talks about how females can be powerful, decisive and in control while still being feminine in her paper, “Sexual Subjectivity: A Semiotic Analysis of Girlhood, Sex and Sexuality in the Film Juno”. In that paper she states, “While situating sexual desire, biological possibilities, and social responses to girls’ engagement in sexual intercourse at the center of its plot, Juno depicts the transgressive sexual agency of a young girl without substantially disrupting longstanding discourses of femininity. Through an analysis of the semiotics of girlhood within the film, I argue that the girl figure in this representation signifies an amalgam of two traditionally dichotomized concepts of “femininity.” Juno serves as a particularly intriguing example of the ways in which adolescent female sexuality is conceptualized within western culture during the early part of the 21st century” (Willis 2008).

 

     Juno’s thinking is influenced by Vygotsky’s cognitive development theory as her “thinking [is] influenced by social forces and historical cultural forces” (Snowman, J., McCown, R., Biehler, R., 2012, p. 49).  She has learned that she has the right to make her own decision as to what she wants to do about her pregnancy and all the decisions that go with it.  

 

     Vygotsky’s influence can also be seen in the story Juno tells of how she got her name. “He [Mac-her father] named me after Zeus's wife. I mean, Zeus had other lays, but I'm pretty sure Juno was his only wife. She was supposed to be really beautiful but really mean. Like Diana Ross” (Drake, et al 2007). The Online Etymology Dictionary (2013) states the name Juno means “Roman goddess of women and marriage, mid-14c., perhaps literally "the young one" (perhaps as goddess of the new moon), from an Italic root akin to Latin iunior "younger," iuvenis "young." (see young)” .  While Antonia Marius’ of Ancient Worlds: The Roman Word tells us the etymology could also be “derived from Uni, and thus cannot have the Proto-Indo-European link to *yeu-. It is likely that one of these goddesses inspired the other, but whether Juno comes from Uni, or vice versa, remains disputed. Uni possibly meant "alone, unique, unit, union,"    Usually when the Roman goddess Juno is pictured she is pictured in garb that represent a strong warrior.  All of these references point back to the character Juno who is strong (although young-just sixteen, unique, alone yet still part of a unit (she had her family, her friend Leah, and Bleeker).

 

(4) Family

     The theme of family is played out though several different arenas.  

 

     There is Juno and her biological mother, who left Juno and her father when Juno was young to go live in a commune.  Juno’s mother has remarried and has other children, but only finds the time to send Juno a cactus each year on Valentine’s Day.  Juno shows her resentment at this when she states, "Thanks a heap, Coyote Ugly. This cactus-gram stings even worse than your abandonment" (Drake, et. al., 2007).  Juno needs and wants her mother, but she is not available, and the cactus is the stinging reminder of the hurt her mother caused by all but abandoning her..

 

     Then there is her father, Mac, and her stepmother, Bren.  Both are hard-working, lower middle class, people, who try to be there for Juno, but inevitably come up short most of the time.  Yet, when Juno need them most they are always there for her.  Bren stands up and tries to protect Juno when she is at the doctor’s getting an ultrasound when, after a heated exchange at Juno’s pregnancy at such a young age, she tells the technician “Well, I'm a nail technician and I think we both ought to just stick to what we know” (Drake, et al 2007). **See Video 5 on the "VIDEOS" page.** Her father also stands behind her when she makes the decision to carry the baby and put it up for adoption. He even accompanies her to Vanessa and Mark Loring’s (the prospective parents she found in the Pennysaver) house to meet them.  

 

     Vanessa and Mark Loring initially represent the seemingly ideal, perfect family, one that Juno, herself, wishes she had. The Lorings represent an upper middle class family who live in a nice home and are from a nice neighborhood.  Yet, what Juno initially doesn’t realize is that what she has in her own immediate family is way more a family than what the Lorings are.  As the movie progresses, it is easy to see that the Lorings are a not a family, but just two people who are married and share a living space.

 

     Juno comes to realize that family does not mean having both your biological mother and father, or even having both a non-biological mother and father.  Family is the people that love and support you through thick and thin. This new realization goes hand in hand with Piaget’s theory of intellectual development and the tendency of adaption, “The process of creating a goof fit or match between one’s conception of reality (one’ schemes) and the real life experiences one encounters” (Snowman, J., McCown, R., Biehler, R., 2012, p. 37).  Juno has accommodated her existing scheme of family “to fit her new experience” (p. 37).