logo

What is going on in Hollywood?
Juno and other pro-life films
By Terry Mattingly

Every year or so, a Cinderella movie leaps into the ultimate Hollywood A-list—the Academy Award nominees for best picture.

The sleeper this time around was Juno, the sweet but edgy story of Juno MacGuff, a geeky teen who gets pregnant after a sort-of-bored sexual encounter with a friend. The movie also drew Oscar nominations for Canadian Ellen Page, 20, as best actress, for director Jason Reitman, 30, and former stripper turned screenwriter Diablo Cody, 29.

Now it’s time for the winner-take-all round of campaigning, which often includes behind-the-scenes maneuvers in the tradition of Niccolo Machiavelli. Do not be surprised if rival studios try to hurt Juno by circulating shocking rumors that many religious conservatives who oppose abortion have praised this movie.

It helps that the rumors are true.

Take former Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, for example. He has listed Juno among recent hits—including Knocked Up and Waitress—that suggest American popular culture is “awaking to the reality of life in the womb.”

While these films come from the heart of the “bawdy mainstream,” they include images and themes that will surprise traditionalists, argued Santorum, in an essay written as a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

“Ultrasound images awakened characters and audiences to the humanity of the unborn. Having a baby, even in the most challenging circumstances, became the compelling ‘choice,’” noted Santorum, a devout Catholic and author of the book It Takes a Family, written during his unsuccessful 2006 bid to stay in the U.S. Senate.

“Adoption was held up as a positive alternative to abortion. And, unlike the news media’s portrayal of pro-lifers, protesters outside abortion clinics were authentically depicted as warm and concerned. This stood in contrast to the indifference of the staff within.”

In a pivotal scene, Juno calls the “Women Now” clinic—a parent’s signature is not required—and bluntly tells the switchboard operator she needs to “procure a hasty abortion.” But when she approaches the facility, Juno discovers that a high school friend is staging a solo protest outside.

This scene is played for nervous laughs, with the Oriental girl chanting, “All babies want to get borned!” But when she realizes that Juno is headed inside, the friend urgently adds, “Your baby has a beating heart! Your baby can feel pain! Your baby has fingernails!”

This last line sticks and, in the waiting room, Juno is haunted by the sound of the other patients around her tapping, clicking and chewing their fingernails. As she flees the clinic, her friend calls out, “God appreciates your miracle!” The pregnant teen chooses—with strong support from her loving father and stepmother—to endure the public ordeal of her pregnancy, surrender the baby through adoption and then move on with her life.

The key is that Juno is about people struggling to make real decisions in the real world, according to screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi of Act One, a group that trains Christians to work in the Hollywood mainstream. This isn’t a connect-the-dots sermon targeting true believers. The movie doesn’t preach, because it wasn’t created by preachers.

But Juno can be called “pro-life, in the way that just about every Gen-X movie about pregnancy is pro-life,” wrote the former Catholic nun, at her “Church of the Masses” website. “I would say Juno is a cultural message movie without being a political one. Certainly, that will be an inscrutable nuance in contemporary Christendom in which almost everything is politics.

“The movie is also anti-divorce in the way that just about every Gen-X movie about family is anti-divorce. And people with faith are here too, in a decent and gritty way that shows mere secularism to be selfish and shallow.”

The bottom line, said Santorum, is that a mainstream movie like Juno has a chance to connect with mainstream audiences. Secular critics have, so far, even responded with “thumbs up” reviews.

The most hopeful possibility, he added, is that these movies symbolize a kind of power shift as one Hollywood generation is exposed to the hopes and fears of the next.

“They are … chronicles from the children of our divorce- and abortion-oriented culture,” Santorum added. “There is lived experience, emotional understanding, hard-earned authenticity at the heart of these scripts. And pain.”

Terry Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.

 

The Great Debaters spotlights
United Methodist black college
By Fran Coode Walsh

The Great Debaters is a fictionalized account of the remarkably successful 1935 debate team at Wiley College, a small United Methodist-related, historically black school in Marshall, Texas. The film is nominated for a Golden Globe Award for best motion picture drama.

The story focuses on four young debaters and their mentor, Melvin Tolson, who taught at Wiley and coached the champion debate team. Denzel Washington directed the film and also stars as Tolson, a poet and author.

“It was the first time they got an opportunity to get a college education,” the actor says regarding the significance of black colleges. “I think these professors and the founding fathers of these schools understood that importance. They knew that it gave these young people more options.… We were in the middle of the Depression, so your options were education, or sharecropping or unemployment.”

Washington is a well-known member of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles. He is listed second on Beliefnet’s “Most Powerful Christians in Hollywood” list. He also lent his voice to “The Bible Experience,” an audio Bible featuring some of the country’s top African-American stars.

When asked by Beliefnet about the role of prayer in his life, Washington replied, “Even this film [The Great Debaters]—every major decision I made, I made through prayer, about who I was picking to be in it, what it was I was trying to say, praying that the film was saying the right thing and that it would reach the right people. It’s every aspect of it. It’s how I start every day, and it’s how I end every day.”

Oprah Winfrey, whose Harpo Films produced the movie, calls both the church school and Tolson visionaries. “Here is this little college ... in the rural South in the 1930s, where you had to be there to even begin to understand what it was like to be a person of color, in a land that thought you were invisible and thought that your work really didn’t matter,” Winfrey has said.

“And here was this little college with a professor who understood beyond the place and beyond the time how powerful a mind and minds combined together could be. And he created this debate team, and ... believed that the color of your skin wasn’t what was significant, but what was really the content of your mind and your character and your beliefs.”

Young actors Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett and Denzel Whitaker play Wiley students who, in a fictionalized account, go on to defeat Harvard University’s debate team in the film’s climax. In reality, the 1935 Wiley team, the first African-American school to debate on a “white” college campus, bested the University of Southern California for an unexpected victory. Filmmakers opted to use Harvard because they felt the school was more symbolic of an educational bastion.

Wiley is one of 11 historically black, United Methodist-related institutions of higher education and is financially supported by the denomination’s Black College Fund.

Wiley president Haywood L. Strickland is grateful the movie is bringing attention to the unique contributions of black colleges.

“They’re just as important today as they were 50 years ago,” says Strickland. “There’s still a need in this country for an alternative education to public education. There’s still a need for a small college which offers a nurturing, caring, close relationship with the students. There’s still a reason for a professor … to be able to say to that student, ‘You can be the very best that you want to be,’ and ensure that that student gets that grounding, foundation, to spur that student toward that achievement.”

Washington agreed. He donated $1 million to the school’s recently resurrected debate program.

Fran Coode Walsh is supervising producer of UMTV, a unit of United Methodist Communications based in Nashville, Tenn. John Gordon contributed to this report.



Click here to send your response plus the title of this article to us at Good News.

Good News | 308 East Main St. | P.O. Box 150 | Wilmore, KY 40390 | 859-858-4661 | 1-800-487-7784
info@goodnewsmag.org | About Us | ©2007 Good News magazine