(*spoiler alert* This is not a review, this is criticism and it reveals plot points in both the film Juno and the film The Breakfast Club)

“It’s obviously not about my generation, but I was like, okay, they’re all just talking and realizing they’re human beings. (…) But then it was all about Ally Sheedy changing to look like the pretty girl to get with Emilio Estevez, for chrissakes.’ She bangs her fist on the table. “I was so angry.”

Later, in the same article (JUNO NATION – Entertainment Weekly #977 February 8, 2008), scribe of Juno – Diablo Cody – is quoted as saying:

“There was a lack of authentic teen girl characters… I saw writing this screenplay as an opportunity to create an iconic female. (…) I think women are often positioned as a support structure for men, and that’s certainly not been my experience. Some women want to be heroes!”

Really enjoyed Juno. Love Ellen Page. Very into Diablo Cody. Am sick to death of people misinterpreting Ally Sheedy’s “make-over” in The Breakfast Club as being a kiss-ass sell-out manoeuvre. Not to mention my ongoing irritation with the tendency on the part of rising stars to diss that which came before them as if there isn’t room for everyone.

Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club describes herself as being “invisible”. She is neglected at home – a fact established visually when she is dropped off at the school at the beginning – and becomes an under-the-radar “compulsive liar” and “basket case” as her way of coping.

The neglect of parents, I think we can agree, is typically not a good thing and Ally Sheedy’s character is not a mostly confident pseudo-outsider like Ellen Page’s Juno. Ally Sheedy’s character is a mess and an unhappy mess at that. She’s in a day-long Saturday detention by choice, people. BY. CHOICE. But most importantly, she does not allow Molly Ringwald to give her a make-over in order to “get with” Emilio Estevez’s “jock” character.

Estevez’s character sees through her defences, calls her on them and reaches out to her from his own vulnerability long before she gets “prettied” up. And, for you sticklers who want to disagree with me – take a number, get in line and before you even open your mouth go to the scene where she dumps her entire purse on the sofa near Anthony Michael Hall and Emilio Estevez and then watch for a while.

She allows the make-over because she’s finally been “seen”, by more than just Estevez’s character, for who she is under the “mess” and it’s not a bad feeling. She embraces that feeling – reluctantly I might add, fearfully – and the make-over is the external manifestation of that embrace.

This is simple, good writing.
This is archetypal storytelling.
This is NOT a feminist sell-out.

No one seems to get all huffy when Juno lets down her own defences and finally admits she loves Michael Cera’s character. Why is gentle surrender to a better self only troublesome – to smart women especially – when it goes hand in hand with a make-over? Ally Sheedy’s character isn’t happy just the way she is. Is she supposed to forever stay that way because we think she’s kind of cool and dark? Where is it written that growth and change must never make someone look different than they did before unless, of course, they are “pregnant” I mean?

Ultimately, isn’t the real point the growth and change? Part of Emilio Estevez’s character’s arc is the breaking of clique boundaries to see Ally Sheedy for who she is even through her dandruffy scruffiness with eyes covered in “black shit”. And her arc is to realize that she has a choice about her “invisibility” and to truly, finally, allow herself to be seen. Because, maybe, the worst part about being “invisible” is that you begin to feel that you are not worth seeing in the first place. And, Molly Ringwald’s hair and make-up contributions literally lift the veil on Ally Sheedy – reveal her from underneath her defences.

It’s a metaphor people, a visual met-a-phor. And though it might jive more with contemporary storytelling to make the guy smitten with her just as she is it wouldn’t have been the best ending to her story because she needed to change somehow. For herself. Not for anyone else but herself. To play it any other way wouldn’t honour the characters as they are written. It wouldn’t honour the stories being told.

It wouldn’t be The Breakfast Club.

Juno is stylized realism. Breakfast Club is – like I said – archetypal storytelling. Comparing them note-for-note just because they both have teenagers in them, is like comparing Written on the Wind with Annie Hall just because there are people who fall in love in both of them. I’m not saying it isn’t fun and interesting to try but seriously?

I always loved Ally Sheedy’s character in the Breakfast Club. I loved the idea that someone could see beneath a messed up girl’s mess and make all the beauty you just know she feels somewhere inside of her SHOW. Juno is no replacement for this. And, it’s not because I’m older now and Juno isn’t speaking to “my generation” because even though I am older Juno DID speak to me… A good film – a good story – can speak to just about anyone. That’s why The Breakfast Club was a revelation to a bunch of 13 year-old girls I knew even less than 5 years ago – and that’s why Juno is raking in the dough.

As successful as Cody’s story is, though, it’s pretty arrogant and thoughtless to say that there have been no iconic characters for women before she took her “opportunity” to write one. This arrogance and thoughtlessness is only heightened, in another part of the article, where Ellen Page is actually quoted as saying “Juno dresses like she wants, says what she wants, and doesn’t apologize for it. Girls haven’t had that sort of character before.”

I’m not going to bother to dredge up pre Hayes-Code female characters of the 30ss and 40s (mostly because I don’t know them well enough to wield them well here even though I, at least, know they exist) and I won’t deny that a lot of modern and contemporary female characters are so thinly drawn they can be blown over with a delicate cough but even without leaving the John Hughes field, I can put forward Molly Ringwald’s “Andie” in Pretty In Pink to contradict both Cody and Page’s statements.

That character stood up to every man in her life at one point or another even as she wearily tended to a couple of them because she was the only one with her proverbial shit together. She dressed how she wanted. She said what she wanted. She took no crap from anyone, not even authority figures. And again, I seem to be able to say this without putting Juno down – so I can’t help asking myself what the hell the point is of comparing female characters just to piss all over the ones you, yourself, did not help to create?

I’ll say it again, I’m glad to know Juno. Glad to see how well Diablo Cody wrote her and how well Ellen Page and Jason Reitman et al brought her to life. But she’s no more the definitive female teenage anti-hero than Ally Sheedy’s “Basket Case” or Molly Ringwald’s Andie were before her.

There have been, and will be, others.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be and I, for one, have room for all of them. So, sadly and not for the first time (even this week) I find myself disappointed that obviously smart women felt the need to forget this and to negate the work of others because they couldn’t be bothered to see beyond themselves and pay closer attention to the details in stories other than their own.