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At a pro-life event in Indiana last night, Sarah Palin seemed to be telling the audience that for a moment, she considered aborting Trig:
There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy. It could be easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know.
Of course, anyone who's ever been to a certain kind of church knows that this is a lead-in to a personal narrative, known as a testimony. The testimony follows an established formula, similar to a VH1 Behind the Music special: First things are going well, and then a moment comes when the subject flirts with sin, and their faith is tested. In the end the person triumphs and their faith is redeemed.
So in some sense it's "true" that Sarah Palin thought about it, but also true that there was no other possible outcome than she was going to ultimately decide to "walk the walk" and not just "talk the talk," or she wouldnt be telling the story.
What struck me is how her journey from regret to difficulty to acceptance sounds remarkably similar to the plot of 17 Again (as described by Willa and Dana here).
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Willa, I haven’t yet seen 17 Again, but after reading you on it, I want to. Not because the movie looks particularly enticing (the mere notion of Zac Efron aging into Matthew Perry is depressing beyond belief), but because I'm interested in the way it folds time travel and body-switching into a narrative of teen pregnancy. Time-travel plots are, of course, always about the fantasy of going back and changing the present by doing things differently in the past. It's worth noting, too, that those fantasies often involve motherhood or the possibility of a child: Keep Sarah Connor alive so her unborn son can lead the revolution! Ew, Marty McFly, don’t make out with your own future mom!
Yet even though this movie explicitly sets up the fact that Zac’s character is unhappy in his adult life because of the choices he made as a teen (ie, unprotected sex, having the child, marrying the girl), it sounds like those choices are ultimately affirmed in a feel-good ending. Even if he had the power to turn back time, Zac loves his family so much he wouldn’t have donned that condom. Everyone who’s already a parent gets the paradox of that logic: Once your child exists, it's hard to imagine a world without him. But for crushed-out adolescent girls not long on foresight, there’s a thin line between “Now that my unplanned-for child is here, I’d do anything for her,” and “Woo hoo, let’s make babies with Zac Efron!” The fuzzy-brained hypocrisy of the scene you describe, in which the body-switched Zac recommends abstinence over condoms to a group of high-schoolers including his own daughter, makes Bristol Palin sound like a savvy life coach by comparison. In her words: “Everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.”
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17 Again, a film about a 38-year-old named Mike with a sucky life who gets to go back to being 17, when he looked like Tiger Beat pin-up Zac Efron, opens today. ("What is Zac Efron?" Manohla Dargis wonders in in today's Times. He does have a space-alien quality—those vacant, kewpie doll eyes—but he's just the newest model in an old line of cars that go fast, for a short period of time. Think David Cassidy, Kirk Cameron, The Backstreet Boys). Why does Mike's life suck? Well, he just lost a promotion and quit his job, he's getting a divorce and his kids hate him—but the more fundamental reason that his life stinks is that Mike chose to become a teen father.
See, when Mike was 17, and a star basketball player with a bright future, his pretty girlfriend informed him she was with child. He decided to do the "right thing" (as EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum says, "Levi Johnston, consider yourself schooled.") and happily married his sweetheart. But 20 years later, Mike's decision has had unpleasant consequences. Mike never went to college, so he's been overlooked time and time again for a promotion. He's also spent the last two decades bitterly resenting his wife and kids for the sacrifices he made to be with them. Sacrifices that have kept him from the life he thinks he should have, and could have, had. So Mike wishes he could be 17 again, before he gave up his future for his family.
Unsurprisingly, the film goes out of its way to neutralize this message—that teen parenthood might require enormous, painful sacrifices that don't always pay off—by having Mike "realize," thanks to his repeat performance as a 17-year-old, that his wife and kids are the most important thing in his life and he really ought to appreciate them more.
The movie is schizophrenic about teenagers, sex and responsibility in other ways as well. When Mike returns to high school and condoms are being distributed in his health class he makes an impassioned plea for abstinence. This is played for laughs—Mike's daughter is in his class, and of course he doesn't want her having sex-—but since we know Mike was having sex in high school, and obviously without condoms, it's unfathomably short sighted. Wouldn't this man, of all men, know the importance of protection? Probably, but then he'd have to advocate condom usage—and God forbid a film intended for real teenagers do anything like that.
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