1980s MTV, the meaning of style, and feminism

In my theory class we have just begun the unit on the relationship between representation and agency, and in my other class we just finished reading John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version, a novel that adapts the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to the postmodern condition of the 1980s. (See my blog post a couple weeks ago here for more about postmodern Scarlet Letters.) In it, one of the main characters — a teenage single mother named Verna – is a huge fan of Cyndi Lauper at the beginning of the novel, but by the novel’s end has switched her allegience to Madonna. Updike’s novel is set in the autumn of 1984 and spring of 1985 — the year Ronald Reagan was reelected on a platform of traditional family values and an end to government-run social programs… and also the year that Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and Madonna’s  “Like a Virgin” dominated the MTV and pop music charts. Music historians often consider both of these songs as together occupying the same moment of sexual liberation for women in popular culture, though arguably that moment of liberation began long before in the 1960s. At the very end of the novel by Updike, Verna decides she prefers Madonna over Lauper at the same time she decides to leave her child with her uncle Roger and find her own pathway to material success, like Madonna in “Material Girl,” which was released in January, 1985.

I’d like to compare and contrast these two music videos, because in contrast to Updike’s characterization of them in his novel, I think they have very divergent visions for sexual liberation. One seems to me to be an example of post-punk feminism and the other a co-optation of post-punk feminism. However, the fact that both appear in Updike’s novel as co-equals and that MTV and radio might very likely play them back-to-back illustrates how complicated the concepts “representation”  “ideology” “hegemony” and “feminism” actually are.

First, Cyndi Lauper’s ”Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which was first released at the end of the year 1983.

What is most blatant in this video is Lauper’s emphasis on her multicultural group of friends. In a sense, her song is similar to the mildly feminist lyrics in The Spice Girls 1996 hit “Wanna Be” that go, “If you want to be my lover, you have to get with my friends.” In my opinion, these lyrics are good advice for anyone, no matter what gender identity they claim to have. And likewise, in her video, Cyndi Lauper represents the ways personal agency comes from a positive community of friends. In addition, her post-punk  style of dress deconstructs traditional gender roles by mixing a ridiculously out-of-date prom dress with goofy sunglasses. For literary critics, this postmodern stylistic device of mixing and mashing is called pastiche, and theorist Dick Hebdige has famously analyzed the “meaning of style” in his book on punk rock, Subculture, to show how – through such pastiche — young people culturally subverted and resisted mainstream ideas about how they should behave.

Less than a year after Cyndi Lauper’s hit, in November of 1984, Madonna released “Like a Virgin,” which in my view co-opts a lot of the liberatory potential of Lauper’s hit in a way that rearticulates women’s identities as objects of sexual desire. For a YouTube clip of her MTV Awards performance in 1984 click here, and for the original music video, click here.

Many have argued that Madonna was one of the early pop stars to create an enduring and mainstream image of women enjoying sex. Indeed, during the MTV awards, she rolls on the floor, apparently with sexual abandon and pleasure. However, in my view, both her MTV performance and her original video are not feminist in the way that Lauper’s is. When compared to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” noticeably isolates the woman from any community. Her entire feeling of self worth is derived from being the object of male desire – a rather creepy sensibility that is totally contrary to every brand of feminism I’ve ever encountered.  In addition, Madonna’s postpunk style of dress also performs a postmodern pastiche that scandalously blends Catholic and sexual iconography, but in contrast to Lauper’s deconstruction of what it means to be sexy, Madonna’s transgressive style of dress agressively asserts and intensifies her sex appeal.

Ultimately, it would be an oversimplication to call one of these songs progressively feminist and the other reactionary. Clearly, both artists consciously and deliberately represented sexuality in a way that had political implications for how men and women relate to each other – encouraging both men and women to be open about sexuality rather than repressed. And therefore one could argue that both songs had an effect on women’s agency. Both offer transgressive and subversive representations of women, but both also emphasize pleasure-seeking over any substantial community building. Therefore, some feminists would react negatively to both videos, but in my view, it would be a mistake for feminists to eschew the importance of fun and pleasure in our daily lives, and so at the end of the day, I think both Lauper and Madonna’s representations have something to offer to the on-going, open-ended project of feminism. And that is why Updike’s character Roger is simultaneously disturbed, threatened, and sexually aroused by them.

In conclusion, I’d like to end this post with a more recent clip of what seems to me to be a strongly feminist song by singer Christina Aguilara and rapper Lil’ Kim — their 2003 hit, “Can’t Hold Us Down.”

“Hester’s Song” and postmodern Scarlet Letters

For the past couple of years, one of my side projects has been re-writes of Hawthorne’s  The Scarlet Letter — one of the most classic and often taught novels in American literary history. There are tons of re-writes, both high literary and pop cultural, and wikipedia has listed quite of few of them. Why so many re-writes of this one text? Perhaps the novel continues to have such resonance because young men and women continue to be subject to bizarre, contradictory peer pressures, and single mothers continue to be stigmatized. We don’t have to look far to find examples: the story that dominated the network news a month ago about a single woman having octuplets [here]… and then Anne Coulter’s recent book that accuses single mothers of being the source of all societal problems [here]…  and last year I blogged about recent movies about single mothers [here].

My favorite pop cultural version of The Scarlet Letter is the episode “Caged!” from the TV show Popular. On the more high-brow literary side, John Updike himself wrote not just one, but three novels that re-envision Hawthorne’s classic: Roger’s Version (as in Roger Chillingsworth’s version) is the best, but also S. and A Month of Sundays. And Susan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer prize for drama, wrote two: In the Blood and Fucking A, published together as The Red Letter Plays. Then there are those that incorporate Hawthorne’s novel indirectly: Bharati Mukherjee’s Holder of the World and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba are both terrific. One could, I suppose, call all of these “postmodern” texts (and Mukherjee and Condé “postcolonial” in addition) because of the way they take up a classic narrative and re-write it from a different perspective. (By the way, I’ve blogged about other postmodern re-writes here.)

Just a couple of days ago I read one such re-write for the first time, and it really hit me emotionally, so I want to talk about it in this blog: it’s called “Hester’s Song” by Toi Derricotte, and it comes from her book Natural Birth (1983) and was republished in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Toi Derricotte was an unwed mother, and that is one of the main themes of her book. Here is the poem:

Hester’s Song
My seventeen year old son asks me if I’ve read The Scarlet Letter

              i rode you piggyback
          through groundless sky,
          the stars white foam in my face.
          they wanted to drive you
          back to namelessness,
          were jealous of the thought of you
          convulsed wide open
          and made a cave.
          i prayed
          you, miracle,
          to root through my fingers,
          grow in the spot,
          be with me.
          at night i curled over you
          guarding my rage,
          i thought you might escape
          through the crown of my head
          like a chimney.

          i lay without husband
          and drank at the stream of light.
          (how wide god is, my child,
          a pillar, he wrenched me…
          now you are with me
          like prayer.)

               blue
          clot in the night,
          ocean–
          thick swimming,
          hold, i say, hold:
          you are the one gold
          ever to come of alchemy.

I love how this poem begins, with the image of the pregnant woman riding her unborn child piggyback into the heavens. The image is a reversal of the normal image — the rather standard image in popular culture of a child on the father’s shoulders, riding him piggyback. In addition, Derricotte’s image creates a sense of how the mother is oddly dependent on the child rather than the other way around.

Why does she begin this way? The answer to that question may be that she is writing this poem to her son. Derricotte has provided us with an imagined situation — her son, in high school, reading The Scarlet Letter, about an unwed single mother branded with a social stigma. Naturally, Derricotte and her son are tempted to make the analogy between their situation and the situation described in the novel. Derricotte thinks about the situation as a mother would. She cares less about the social stigma that Hawthorne focused on in his novel, and instead she worries that her son will feel bad about himself… will ask her, “Mom, did you regret getting pregnant with me?” It’s a scary question, and as Jane Juffer points out in her book Single Mother, it’s a question that countless images in popular culture provoke millions of unwed mothers and their children to ask… or to feel afraid to ask. And in answer to that question, she concludes “you are the one gold ever to come of alchemy.” The poem affirms the relationship between mother and child.

But it does not do so simply or vapidly. Like the plot of Hawthorne’s novel, the poem recognizes the hostile environment in which the mother and child find themselves, and it transforms the difficulties and challenges Hester faces into a source of strength — transforms the negative  into a positive. The poem evokes a negative, uncertain void with words such as groundless, namelessness, wide open, night, ocean. But Derricotte uses these words in order to remind her son that they are rooted together. Here again, a line like the first that reverses a standard image. Normally, we think of fingers rooting or searching through something, but in her line, “i prayed you, miracle, to root through my fingers,” she says the opposite. What we would expect the subject of the sentence to be (fingers), she makes the object, and in doing so, she flips our sense of experience and perception.

The effect, I think, of her poem on the reader is one of simultaneous intimacy and alienation.

what are you?

Many times over the past few years, I’ve had conversations with colleagues, students, friends, and family about why young people today shy away from labeling themselves “feminists.” Honestly, I can’t judge my students too harshly; I suspect that I was the same way when I was 19 years old, and consequently, for pedagogical reasons, I have gradually become more emphatic in labeling myself a feminist in the classroom. In other words, I label myself this way precisely because I know that many of my students are used to thinking of feminists in terms of TV stereotypes — e.g., the somewhat mousy woman with Tevas on her feet and an androgynous hairstyle on her head. Being myself a boyish looking man in jeans, oxford shirts, and brown leather shoes, I obviously don’t fit that stereotype.

When my colleagues and I discuss our students, as we so often are wont to do during lunch, we inevitably note what we believe to be a basic irony: most of the students agree with the fundamental positions of feminism, but hardly any of them want to be labeled a feminist. For instance, “liberal” feminism typically argues for equal rights and equal access to economic and political power — what Thomas Jefferson in 1776 and later Cady Stanton in 1848 referred to as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Who would disagree with that? Not even most “conservatives” today would assert that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, hold public office, pursue the career of their choice, or own property, even though women weren’t allowed to do any of those things not too long ago. And of course, beyond liberalism’s emphasis on “rights” — an emphasis in many ways connected to the right to own property that Stanton fought for — most of our students would also agree with modernist (e.g., the theorist Simone de Beauvoir) and postmodernist (e.g., the theorist Judith Butler) forms of feminism that question essentialist definitions of what it means to be a woman. In other words, if I say “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” in class, quoting the title of a well-known book, students are more likely to laugh than they are to nod their head. And some students would even go beyond the question of essentialism; they will go so far as to actively criticize the very structure of our society that encourages competition and mastery over cooperation and interdependency. And they would agree with all of this that I’ve just summarized and yet still shy away from the label. And as my collagues and I notice all of this apparent contradiction, we say to ourselves, “isn’t it ironic?”

But maybe we teachers are the ones missing the real irony. As I said before, I call myself a feminist in class more to make a pedagogical point than to label myself. When it comes to other labels, I too am wary of them. For instance, I run away from the word “liberal” as if it were a curse from the devil himself. I refuse to check “very liberal” on my FaceBook page or on any of the many surveys I get in the mail because it irritates me that the categories “socialist” or “communist” are not even on the list. In the surveys, I alway cross out “very liberal” and handwrite “socialist” even though I couldn’t tell you what — exactly — that means. If someone asks me, “what are you?” I am always tempted to waive the question aside or make some flippant joke. Sometimes, when I do call myself a socialist in public it is in part just to startle people out of their complacent assumption that nobody in America is one. Again, I do it to make a pedagogical point, and am not sure whether I would commit to that identity.

The label I am most willing to wear around my neck, and have worn around my neck even sometimes in the classroom, is pinko — an originally derogatory term invented in 1926 by Time Magazine to attack Americans sympathetic to communism and later used rhetorically to attack anyone in congress who might suggest we increase spending on public welfare, public education, public health care, or environmental protection. What I love about being a pinko is precisely the word’s inherent indeterminacy and irony. I can be both a liberal and a communist at the same time if I’m a pinko. It evokes an ambiguity and a sense of humor about my social position that for me are basic to my political position. (In other words, my political point of view DOES and DOES NOT – both at the same time – reflect my socio-economic circumstances and upbringing. As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” And that’s funny, not just because it subverts Descartes’ famous “I think therefore I am,” but also because it succinctly points to the strangeness of identity and thought.)

For me, the word “pinko” expresses an important distinction made by the author James Baldwin in an interview with Terry Gross. Because he felt debilitated by the many labels attatched to him — “young negro writer” or “gay activist” — he observed that the media made him feel more concerned with what he was instead of with who he was.

I also like labeling myself a pinko because of what it suggests about my feelings about my gender. I once remarked to my girlfriend that if I walked into a bar with one friend who was straight and one friend who was gay, everyone in the bar could guess the orientations of my friends, but nobody would guess mine.

Just as many “gay” people perform some kind of “gayness” either consciously or unconsciously by adopting certain styles and mannerisms (and we’ve all seen such performances exaggerated on television), so do almost all “straight” people perform their “straightness.” The vast majority of straight people are completely unaware that they are acting just as much as any stage actor is acting when he or she performs the role of Romeo or Juliet, but they are. But although I’ve never once questioned my sexual orientation, I’ve also never felt comfortable with performing the mannerisms — what Hamlet calls the “suits and trappings” — of my sexual orientation. Many of my straight friends often seem to me to be overacting their parts, and so I’ve always felt more comfortable acting ambiguously. I do it intentionally, though not always consciously — and perhaps this is why I get hit on by gay men in bars. I confuse their “gaydar” just as much as I confuse others’ “straigh-dar.” And here in this blog, I will confess something I’ve never confessed before (except to my girlfriend): I’m proud of that. And I’m proud of the fact that gay and lesbian students have felt comfortable enough to be “out” in my classroom.

So, I too am suspicious of labels. I like being a pinko, the label that isn’t a label. And maybe for all of our students who are both feminist and not-feminist at the same time, we theorists, teachers, and bloggers ought to allow them to invent a new word — something that they can enjoy being.

And yet, what would they invent? Maybe I’m being a bit too hopeful here. After all, it’s not as if people can just invent things out of thin air, is it? As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (and later philosopher Jacques Derrida) wrote, people are bricoleurs — they invent new things out of the stuff that’s available to them. Maybe we still have a lot to learn from the past two hundred years of feminist theory (starting with Mary Wollstonecraft “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” published in 1792.) To illustrate my point here, let’s look at the recent presidential campaign. One could argue that Hilary Clinton’s success with millions of voters proves that we live in a post-feminist age even if she doesn’t win the primary. (On the other hand, India and Pakistan have had women presidents already, so why are we so slow?)

But something strange happened in my First-Year-Seminar this past spring that caused me to think again about feminism and identity. I had asked all my students to choose a current issue (e.g., immigration, health care, global trade policy, environmental regulation, etc.) and compare and contrast each political candidate’s position. This was before any of the voting had taken place, and my students wanted to learn this because the mainstream news generally had little say about actual issues. And so, the goal of the assignment was to focus on the issues and to get past the mainstream media’s emphasis on the candidates’ personalities and identities. For the most part, my students did a great job focusing on the details of policy rather than the rhetoric, but something happened during one of the presentations that was very interesting. For this presentation, the group used PowerPoint to insert images of each candidate’s face above a summary of each candidate’s position on the issue. When Hilary Clinton’s image appeared on the screen, a nervous giggle spread throughout the room.

     ”What’s so funny?” I asked . . . . More giggles . . . pause . . . .
     Finally one student answered, “she’s funny looking.”
     Other students nodded.
     I thought for a second. “Really? Any more funny looking than the other candidates?”

For me, their giggle was a symptom of something — something deeply ingrained in our culture, but what? In class, I didn’t know what to say. She didn’t seem especially funny looking to me, and I wondered why my students thought so. And then I wondered, even if she were funny looking, what would that mean? What are women supposed to look like when they become leaders of corporations or governments? Since we know that no leader has the luxury of simply “being herself,” what kind of person did our society expect her to be, and how much did Clinton feel the weight of those paradoxical expectations? (And doesn’t this remind you of Michel Foucault’s analysis of subjectivity and Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities”?) Despite the intention of the assignment to focus on the issues rather than on personalities, the problem of “identity” had remained oddly unavoidable.

When I came home and reflected on this incident further, I was reminded that the long feminist tradition is not just an identity or a label. Instead, we can think of it as an ethical commitment to be circumspective about one’s own assumptions, to face up to one’s own repressed anxieties, to attend to the effects that collective behavior (i.e., culture) can have on individuals, and most importantly, to question the justice of disparities (whether the disparities are blatant or subtle.) After all, what was it that produced such a strange, nervous giggle in my classroom?

“Choosing” to be a Single Mother

The topics for this week are “agency” and “representation,” and in our class we are exploring these two related topics by considering the issue of “single motherhood.” For this post, I’d like to discuss how recent movies have “represented” the “agency” of single mothers. Perhaps not since the movie Striptease (1996), starring Demi Moore as a woman struggling to make ends meet and fighting for custody of her child against her abusive, alcoholic, and criminal ex-husband, has Hollywood so strongly affirmed the rights of single mothers against social stigma and economic hardship. Many films, from North Country (2005) to The Perfect Holiday (2007) and TV series such as Gilmore Girls and Weeds are about the difficulty of working and raising children at the same time. But for the year 2007, Hollywood gave us not just one but three movies that explored the choices of an unwed woman who discovers herself to be pregnant: Knocked-Up, Waitress, and Juno.

The two questions that all three of these movies explicitly raise are (1) what choices are available to a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy, and (2) why choose to become a single mother. In addition, considering that we began this class with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), how might we re-read that classic novel in the context of twenty-first century feminist debates about single motherhood?

But before I start talking about the three movies, a little context. You may be too young to remember this, but back in the late 1980s, Vice President Dan Quayle famously railed against single mothers as a force of evil in American society, and a bit later, Bush and Clinton proceeded to pass laws — “reforms” — that made life more difficult for working single mothers. However, something has changed since then. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of single-parent families today is more than double what it was in 1970, and 32% of all births in 1998 were to unmarried women. As a result of this demographic shift, the representation of single mothers by popular media, politicians, and corporate advertising has also shifted from negative stigma to positive stigma as the business community (e.g., Wal-Mart) has begun to see single mothers not only as a large consumer niche but also as valued employees. Politicians likewise now see single mothers as a formidable constituency. However, although positive stigma is certainly better than negative, both popular representations and the legal system continue to favor heroic individuals and the nuclear family rather than the extended families and networks of support upon which most single parents — and many married parents — rely. These two different models of the family are precisely the topic of Jane Juffer’s book Single Mother. And although mainstream media appears more permissive about a woman’s sexual choices and about the possibility of raising a family without a father, the conservative Heritage Foundation last year published its “data” that single mothers and their children are less likely to succeed.

Back to the movies. I was trying to think of how to talk about all three, and here is what I came up with. All three of the movies this year are fairy-tale fantasies, and I don’t call them that to criticize or dismiss them. That’s what they are — self-consciously so — and that is what we enjoy about them. The logic behind all fairy-tale narratives is that they offer something like an escape-hatch that allows us to avoid dealing with the reality of difficult choices by indulging our fantasies. The question I want to ask is whether these narratological escape hatches merely side-step the dilemmas of single-motherhood, or whether they turn on themselves and force the audience to notice the difference between fantasy and reality, or whether the fantasy actually offers some kind of utopian ideal for how we might reform things. So, that’s my question . . . how to answer . . .

I’ll start with Knocked Up, since it came out first and since it is the most sexist of the three. (Even its own star Katherine Heigl has publicly said so.) Heigl plays Alison, a beautiful, charming, successful, ambitious journalist in the entertainment industry who finds herself pregnant after getting drunk and sleeping with the epitome of loserdom — an unattractive, unemployed, pot-smoking, illegal immigrant from Canada whose friends are creating a website devoted to when their favorite movie stars appear naked.

What’s “sexist” about this movie is how little time it spends on the difficult choices Alison can make. Inexplicably, Alison has not a single friend except for her sister with whom to discuss her options. The word “abortion” is never spoken, and only the joke “sounds like smashsmortion” made by one of Ben’s stoner friends draws attention to how her choices may be getting censored by a film industry fearful of the religious right. Instead, the movie shifts emphasis from the very serious issue of what to do about being pregnant to the far less serious issue of whether Alison and Ben can fall in love. This is, of course, not surprising since it is a “romantic comedy” and is supposed to celebrate the magic of romantic love against all odds, but in this case, the “romance” is perhaps even more absurdly improbable than the genre’s usual fair. There is no way Alison would fall in love with Ben, and who among the movie’s audience would want them to? The movie has tricked us. We walked into the theater thinking we were going to see a “chick flick” but instead we got a loser-geek-boy fantasy. It is this improbable romantic plot which is the “escape hatch” for the film makers, allowing them (and us) to avoid the difficult choices women face in the real world, but its absurdity turns on itself, exposing the plot’s artificiality and hence encouraging the audience to entertain themselves with other, more probable scenarios.

Waitress is about Jenna, played by Kerri Russel, who is a genius at making pies but is married to a controlling jerk of a husband who won’t even let her drive a car or manage the money she makes as a waitress. Both the nature of their marriage and the cutsie style of the movie remind us of the 1950s, except that Jenna’s gynecologist drives a Lexus. Since Jenna’s biggest challenge is her financial situation, she plans to win a pie contest and leave her husband, but like Alison in Knocked Up, she instead finds herself pregnant after one drunken evening with her husband.

What the writer-director and actors all claim is “special” about this movie in the “special features” of the DVD is that it actually shows us a married woman who is depressed about being pregnant. (This is apparently the movie’s “truth value.”) As with Knocked Up, we are wondering why the movie can’t even say the word abortion, considering that Jenna clearly does not want to have a baby, but this is a romantic comedy, so the plot has to move on. And so it does; she soon begins a love-affair with her married gynecologist, and the fairy-tale style of the movie teases us with the possibility that he could be the knight on the white horse. But no. After she gives birth and leaves her husband, she then discovers that her sympathetic and aging boss has given her a check for an enormous sum of money right before he slipped into a coma — all of this happening on one day.

The sudden appearance of this money is the deus ex machina of the fairy-tale, the escape hatch for the movie, since it enables Jenna to buy the café where she works, become a self-sufficient single mother, and live happily ever after in more brightly colored clothes. The check stands in for the financial assistance that the vast majority of single mothers do not ever receive though perhaps justly deserve considering the important affective labor they perform. And here, the check symbolizes the “exchange value” of Jenna’s affective labor, since the reason her boss gives it to her is because Jenna has a special, ineffable quality (so he says), a quality symbolized by her pies which always seem to embody her mood. In other words, she makes the old guy happy because of this special, un-namable quality, and hence, it’s hard for the audience not to understand this quality in terms of Kerri Russel’s good looks and impending motherhood.

Finally, Juno, which ought to win the Academy Award for best screenplay, is about a 16-year old girl, named after the Greek goddess of mothers, who gets pregnant after experimenting with her lovably geeky friend. Unlike the other two movies, Juno actually plans to go to a clinic and have the abortion. Inexplicably, she goes to the clinic alone, and so, without the moral support of her friend, she has a moral panic attack and decides instead to find a “cool couple” who can adopt it. She finds the perfect, beautiful and financially well-off couple. And both to Juno and to the audience for most of the movie, the husband seems cool — an ex-indie-rocker — whereas the wife seems to epitomize the uncool, bourgois woman. But the movie has deliberately deceived us. Suddenly, when Juno is eight months pregnant, the husband confesses he wants to leave his wife, almost makes a play for Juno, and lo and behold, his man-boy nature is revealed. A distraught Juno finds solidarity with the wife, leaving her the note “if you’re still in, I’m still in.” And so, in a twenty-first century plot-twist, Juno gives her baby to a woman who has become (over the course of the 9 months of the story) a single mother.

What is the escape hatch in Juno? There are two. The obvious one is that the single mother is the almost impossibly perfect woman — wealthy, smart, beautiful, and terrific with children. She’s played by Jennifer Garner, an apt casting choice, because she is, after all, a superhero (in Elektra and Daredevil), and we in the audience naturally feel comfortable with a superhero single mother, especially one who seems also to have a social life (unlike Alison in Knocked Up) and has a demonstrated a genuine love and talent for raising children. The less obvious escape hatch is not so much narratological as it is stylistic — Juno’s improbable wit. Many have criticized the movie for being unrealistic in that regard, but criticizing Juno for being unrealistically witty for a 16-year old is like criticizing Shakespeare’s characters for being unrealistically eloquent, and Juno’s wit is what we love about the movie. It is also the escape-hatch that allow us to avoid the dilemmas. For instance, when the lawyer offers to explain to Juno her legal rights as the biological mother, Juno brushes her off with the line, “Can’t we just kick this old school?” And then she adds, like Moses . . .  . Now, does anyone really want our society to go back to the time of Moses? Unlike the escape hatches for Knocked Up and Waitress, those in Juno do not turn on themselves to reveal their absurdity. Instead, we leave the theater giddy and happy and wanting to see the film again. We don’t care that this movie is anything but realistic.

In terms of the politics of single motherhood, Waitress and Juno are obviously progressive (despite complaints from the pro-choice position) and Knocked Up obviously conservative. But beyond the all too obvious politics of these movies, there is the fairy-tale escape hatch that offers us something not only more fun but also more dynamic and full of possibility. In terms of questions about “agency” and “representation,” movies are complex and — in my view — can not be pinned down by terms such as “conservative” or “progressive.” Instead, we notice how the fairy-tale excape hatches do two contradtictory things at the same time: avoid reality and critique reality.