• Zac to the Future

  Posted Friday, April 17, 2009 1:57 PM | By Dana Stevens
  
  
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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.”
  
  
  Filed under: abstinence, teen pregnancy, 17 again, Zac Efron, Back to the Future, Terminator
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