Today my brother and I, who both hate everything as a matter of reasonable caution, were discussing the surprising fact that we both generally enjoy the work of Diablo Cody, the screenwriter of Juno, Young Adult, Jennifer’s Body and Tully, among other things. Cody is a divisive figure because she hit the mainstream scene in such a splash of aggressively hipsterish hype with Juno, but in my opinion the film is a perfectly fine story told with verve, and generally speaking if you make a splash like that with your writing you can’t be all wrong. Most people write and no one notices. If you’re being noticed, you’re doing something right.
Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from Juno. For example, you can learn the very important lesson that you should never try too hard.
Homeskillet?
If you don’t remember Juno or have never seen it, it’s the story of a teenage girl who discovers she’s pregnant and goes about an unorthodox process of figuring out what to do about it. When it came out it was often touted as either a work of quirky genius that ‘got’ kids today, or a film that existed in a strange alternate universe where kids listened to odd indie music and spoke almost exclusively in weird slang.
The lesson you can learn from the script for Juno is to not try too hard. The early going for Juno is where Cody ladles on the weird verbal affectations to the point of comedy—I mean, I get that she’s establishing tone and character and style, but are you seeing this shit, which is the first exchange of dialog in the film:
ROLLO: Well, well. If it isn’t MacGuff the Crime Dog! Back for another test?
JUNO: I think the last one was defective. The plus sign looked more like a division sign. I remain unconvinced.
ROLLO: This is your third test today, Mama Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt about it!
TOUGH GIRL: Three times? Oh girl, you are way pregnant. It’s easy to tell. Is your nipples real brown?
ROLLO: Maybe you’re having twins. Maybe your little boyfriend’s got mutant sperms and he knocked you up twice!
JUNO: Silencio! I just drank my weight in Sunny D. and I have to go, pronto.
ROLLO: Well, you know where the lavatory is. You pay for that pee stick when you’re done! Don’t think it’s yours just because you’ve marked it with your urine!
JUNO: Jesus, I didn’t say it was.
ROLLO: Well, it’s not. You’re not a lion in a pride! These kids, acting like lions with their unplanned pregnancies and their Sunny Delights.
JUNO: Oh, and this too.
ROLLO: So what’s the prognosis, Fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus?
JUNO: I don’t know. It’s not… seasoned yet. Wait. Huh. Yeah, there’s that pink plus sign again. God, it’s unholy.
ROLLO: That ain’t no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet.
I think we can all agree that no one in the history of the universe, much less a 16-year old girl and a 30-something gas station attendant, has ever spoken in this manner, or used the word homeskillet in that manner.
Cody’s laying it on thick in order to get her characters’ quirkiness and verbal acuity across. She wants us to know that Juno exists in a hyper-verbal world, is smart, and fierce. All very well, but she’s working too hard here, making Juno so quirky and so odd that’s it’s almost impossible to watch.
The film calms down quickly after this. There’s still plenty of quirk, of course, and plenty of invented slang—and that’s fine. It never reaches these levels of overheated quirk, however, and finds balance. The problem is that I can probably never watch the film again without girding my loins, because those opening minutes are excruciating.
So, herewith the lesson: Don’t try too hard. Trust yourself to make your characters interesting and your dialog cool without laying it on so thick and so obvious that it’s weirdness can be seen from space. Otherwise someday a cranky writer like me is going to write about you.