JUNO (JASON REITMAN, 2007): A PRACTICAL CASE STUDY OF TEENS, FILM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

摘要

Jason Reitman's Juno (2007), the story of how a teenager handles her pregnancy, is the kind of film that leaves no one indifferent. Released at a time of conflicting discourses on sexual education, Reitman's film addressed the confusion experienced by teenagers as they came of age in a context where patterns of masculine and feminine behaviour were rapidly changing. In this essay I argue that Juno offers a complex understanding of the disorientation suffered by adolescents during the 1990s - a time when anti-sex discourses coexisted with an increasingly sexualized youth culture. This said, my intention is to move towards the film in a roundabout way by focusing, first, on why so many, supposed ‘cultural criticisms’ of films turn out to be so superficial. In this introductory section, the argument will be made for an approach in film analyses that takes full account of cinema as a visual medium. After exposing my critical stance, I shall draw nearer to the film itself by examining various of the overlapping contexts that, together, created a conducive space for its success - namely, the political scene; changing attitudes towards sex and gender; and most importantly, cinema's aesthetic dimension and the impact of genre conventions in the film-viewing experience. Once the complex diagram of differing (and sometimes contradictory) forces at work in Juno has been mapped out, my aim is to link these conjunctures to a detailed analysis of a key scene in the film as a means of demonstrating how the combination of film studies and Cultural Studies can operate as a method that eschews too easy, ideologically oriented, assumptions.View full textDownload full textKeywordsCultural Studies, film studies, adolescence, teenpic, youth culture, sex educationRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.591496