Pregnancy bridges gender difference in 'Junior'

By Lenah Susianty

JAKARTA (JP): "This is my body and my choice!" is one of the most common slogans of the feminist movement. This time, however, it is the pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger who utters the words.

Schwarzenegger, in Junior, an obstetrics comedy directed by Ivan Reitman, is Dr. Alex Hesse, a scientist who sacrifices himself as a guinea pig for an anti-miscarriage drug which he and his ambitious partner Dr. Larry Arbogast (interpreted by Danny De Vito) have developed.

Being turned down by the Federal Drugs Agency (FDA), which prohibits them from testing the drug on pregnant women, Arbogast steals a frozen ovum belonging to scientist Diana Reddin (played by Emma Thompson), who shares the same laboratory with Hesse, and implants it inside the body of masculine Hesse to enable them to test the new drug.

Shortly after, Hesse gets pregnant. Surprisingly, he experiences the joys of pregnancy and refuses his partner's demand to end it. Besides, the change in his body has transformed him into a new person too. The old Hesse was a closed person who saw the world with irony, but the new Hesse is a humanist and warm person. The sudden transformation also affects everyone around him, including making Diana Reddin fall for him.

Reitman reunites his 'trio', with Schwarzenegger and DeVito, who have proven their potential for sales in Kindergarten Cops (1990) and Twins (1988), to pack his views on masculinity and femininity in a comic wrapping.

"If men can carry babies to term, it's going to really confuse our perception of what makes us different as men and women," Reitman said.

"Are we really different? I think so, but emotionally we have much deeper connections than one would expect. To explore this, I wanted to take Arnold Schwarzenegger, an icon of masculinity, and see what happens when he has to deal with one of the greatest events of life heretofore reserved for women: giving birth."

What Reitman finally shows in the film is his belief that a man is absolutely different from a woman. Only a pregnancy can bridge this difference. Pregnant Schwarzenegger is described as a man who has a great empathy for women, a sentiment he has only after he gets pregnant. The emotionally deeper connections, to quote Reitman, appear with the pregnancy.

Pregnancy makes Schwarzenegger acquire what people usually associate, until today, with femininity (in turn they are also related to female characters) such as sentimentality (Hesse cries while watching a Kodak commercial on TV), sensitive feelings (Hesse is moved by music and dances for the first time in his life) and behaviors and comments which are believed to be possessed only by females (Hesse says "I have nothing to wear to the party tonight" or he gets upset finding out that Arbogast cannot come home for a meal he has prepared). It's as if Reitman wants to confirm that feminine characters are all the product of hormones. It's a contradiction on the feminist opinion that there is no special hormone or gland which can produce the so-called 'feminine characters', but that it is tradition and social norms which separate human characters into 'feminine' and 'masculine' categories. Quoting Kamla Bhasin and Nighat Said Khan, "we do not have special glands to feel compassion and to give attention to others."

To accompany feminine Hesse is tomboy and clumsy Reddin who, according to Thompson who plays the character, "is the kind of girl who is more fascinated by algebra than boys. She hasn't had a normal life... She's really kind of masculine in comparison to Hesse." Another perception which shows that a unfeminine woman is a violation. As the result, before meeting Hesse, who finally has also violated nature, she has not had a normal life.

Reitman, despite his statement that he hopes the film will give a new perspective about relationships and the roles of men and women, records a scene where Reddin utters her disappointment when she finds out that Hesse has not only stolen her frozen ovum but also decided to be pregnant.

"You steal everything, even my right to give birth!" complains Reddin.

The meeting of well-known DeVito (Throw Momma from the Train, Hoffa and Renaissance Man are among his films), Academy Award winner for Best Actress category in 1993, Emma Thompson for Howards End, double Oscar nominee for best actress in The Remains of the Day and best supporting actress in In the Name of the Father this year, and the once America's Mr. Universe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is predicted to gain worldwide success as with Kindergarten Cop and Twins.

The film does entertain, provided we do not mumble over the director's view on femininity and masculinity, especially to see how an icon of masculinity, who previously interpreted mostly 'macho' characters, shows his 'feminine' side. Later, he also wears a maternity dress...to show how ugly he is in it.

Through Junior, Schwarzenegger, who acknowledges that he imitated his broadcast journalist wife Maria Shiver during her pregnancy (the couple have three children together) to play the role of Hesse, proves that somehow he is still the 'hero' we know through Terminator, Predator etc. This time he is a 'hero' because of his willingness to get pregnant.