We watched the film Juno tonight. I quite liked it, though it was strange to view the adoption process from the reverse angle. Before we conceived Sonora, we had begun the adoption process and were starting to spread the word among our acquaintances that we were looking to adopt, should they know anyone...We were considering placing advertisements of ourselves, hoping to lure a pregnant college woman to choose us as the parents of her child. It felt unnatural to me, this process of selling ourselves like a grocery item, like so much sterile canned food with a flashy label.

So I liked the way the film shined some light on this struggle, but more than that, I liked how the film captures the feeling of an age. When I write "age," I don't mean adolescence or adulthood, but era, or epoch. You see, I've been contemplating of late about what attitudes will shape the next age. I'm pretty sure we are beyond Post-Modernism--with its uneasy relativity--and we are heading toward something else, though I'm not sure what. The idea that a sort of Jungian-like shared mythology permeates the minds of millions of people simultaneously is a fascinating idea to me: Separate from a shared culture, what defines us, the whole lot of us, right now and probably for the next few decades?

Many people have jumped on 9/11--U.S. paranoia; the suicidal evolution of guerrilla warfare; Terrorism replacing the Red Scare in our political dichotomy--as the defining characteristic of the new times. Fear, loathing, and Irony are the fall-outs. To some extent, I think this is true, but for some reason, the reality represented in the film Juno stands out in opposition to the 9/11 conclusions. In Juno, we find a celebration of the life of the individual as it is protected, fostered, by the New Family. Of the different incarnations of Family in the film, none are the traditional nuclear family, but all provide a sense of strength, a sense of comfort, a sense of refuge. This suggests to me that, as we recover from anchorless post-modernism and from fear-inducing 9/11, people are embracing as their anchor and their harbor the family, whatever form that might take, and the communities that surround them.

I jump on Juno as an example because to me it felt timely; the film didn't necessarily capture my convictions, but I think it might have captured and portrayed a large swath of America's, perhaps much of the Western world's, convictions.

Another film I watched a while ago that I think likewise taps into a philosophical/collective-unconscious vein is Donnie Darko. This film was originally released in 2001, so it was all filmed pre-9/11. Strangely, though, it is steeped in a sense of post-9/11 uncertainty; part of the plot involves a jet-engine falling from the sky to crash into Donnie's house. Beyond a deep sense of uncertainty and shifting reality, however, are interesting questions of existence and meaning. Existentialism, it seems, is still a driving philosophy. Or, at least, the questions that is raises are still being asked in seriousness. One thing that Darko brings to the table that most other existential discussions have not, however, is God. God remains a nebulous, remote presence, but the presence is there, introduced unabashedly into the plot as a changer of events, a true force.

The films Juno and Donnie Darko seem to be the two ends of this new age: on the one end is family and a celebration of living; on the other end is the misunderstood, absurd individual who recognizes a god in some form, and the reality of inevitable death with the idea that life and death need not necessarily be meaningless.

So we are perhaps squirming away from the edge of post-modern drift and unknowability toward a grasping of family/community and some overt sense of God or spirituality. Where the individual previously struggled alone in a state of separate desperation, she or he now might be more inclined to pull others into the fray to see if they might all make some meaningful connections that will make the whole experience less frightening.

I think I'll name our new age: The Juno-Darkoist Age. I think the name will stick; it's very catchy.