When I was sick recently and looking for a comfort movie, I immediately gravitated to my VHS copy of Junior (1994). Ivan Reitman’s second team-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito after Twins (1988) has a bit of a cult status in my queer friend group. Even if you haven’t seen it,, perhaps you know it as the “pregnant man” comedy of the ‘90s. The film follows Dr. Alex Hess (Arnie), a male obstetrics researcher, through all three trimesters of a pregnancy he initially undertakes to test a fertility-assisting drug but continues when he realizes that, improbable or not, he wants to keep his baby. On its face, it’s probably obvious Junior traffics in overtly transphobic narratives: Its laughs are inherently predicated on the idea that a man getting pregnant is a hilarious impossibility at best. Thirty years on, though, the production’s empathetic engagement with its “comedic” premise lends what could have been yet another transphobic Hollywood product an unmistakable –– and deeply enjoyable –– queer subtext.
I began researching this article in the leadup to the 2024 presidential election and, writing in the immediate aftermath with the grim knowledge that both trans and reproductive rights teeter on the cusp of monumental and devastating setbacks, I find myself engaging with what I thought would be a purely silly subject in a far more complex way than I’d originally intended. Strangely enough, the tangled production history of Junior, as well as its contemporaneous reception and the queer readings we can glean from it now, touch on many of the most pressing issues of our political moment: trans healthcare, reproductive autonomy, and “nontraditional” families’ right to exist. None of this is to say Junior is a perfect genderqueer text — perhaps ironically the film is, among other things, overtly sexist in its depictions of pregnancy — and its creators certainly weren’t thinking deeply about most of these issues at the time. In retrospect, though, I find its complex cocktail of heteropatriarchal expectations and its unexpectedly open spirit make it a playful entry point into thinking about the often painful history of the most mainstream forms of trans representation and their potential to make us think, make us laugh (or not), and bring us some kind of comfort.
A Genderqueer Reading of Junior
From its first frame, Junior aligns the viewer with our unsuspecting mother-to-be’s perspective, adding an empathetic trans register to a traditionally othering narrative framework used for cheap yuks by “pregnant man” films like Rabbit Test (1978). The film begins with a dream sequence: Dr. Alex Hess wakes up in a university library alone to the sound of crying. He follows the sound to find a baby alone at the circulation desk, wailing plaintively. He picks it up, Schwarzenneger’s signature bulk making the child seem even smaller and more vulnerable in contrast, and nervously calls out to the empty space, “There’s a baby here! There must be a mother!” When no one arrives and the baby wets itself, he panics: “Help!”
This dream could readily be read as a suggestion that the stone-faced Alex–– who we quickly learn has, as his research partner Dr. Larry Arbergast (DeVito) puts it, “all the charm of a wall-eyed pike” –– is a little afraid of kids. But foregrounding this moment of unexpected parental responsibility in Alex’s unconscious mind also suggests that Alex, who doesn’t fit anyone’s stereotypical notion of maternal, is already drawn to children (on an explicitly maternal register, taking the role of “mother” in his mind) and fears he’s not cut out for parenthood. Even before his pregnancy begins, then, the stiffly masculine, glumly solitary Alex is tacitly, sympathetically framed in non-traditionally gendered terms as a would-be mother. To put it another way, he just kind of feels like an egg from the start and, in the immortal words of Marisa Tomei, his biological clock is tickin’ like this!
You may be wondering how Alex gets pregnant. Don’t worry about it too much. The movie certainly doesn’t, and that’s another thing that gives this movie a campy queer undertone. After stealing a frozen egg labeled “Junior” (more on this later) from their neighbor in the research lab, Dr. Diana Reddin (Emma Thompson), Alex, and Larry fertilize it with Alex’s sperm, inject it into his abdominal cavity, and leave it to free float. This hysterically literal sci-fi approach to gestation feels like something out of a John Waters movie (reminiscent of trans antihero Mole McHenry [Susan Lowe] in Desperate Living who simply sews a penis onto himself when he wants one). It also leads to some genuinely Cronenbergian visuals in the form of repeated graphics of a digitally rendered stomach with a creepy blue fetus floating like clip art over a set of intestines.
This breezy handling of one of the film’s central biological conundrums gives the movie a lightness that adds to its undercurrent of queerness. As in the work of David Cronenberg, no one tells Alex what he’s doing is morally wrong or sinful or repulsive. Rather, Junior takes an oddly radical approach to bodily autonomy and suggests that where there’s a will –– and, importantly, the freedom to exercise it –– there’s a way. As Larry tells Alex when he asks him to undergo the experiment, “Is it possible? Who knows! Natural? So what! Good science? You bet!” To solidify the political subtext of this call for personal freedom, when the head of the men’s university (Frank Langella) tries to claim ownership of Alex’s soon-to-be-born baby as an experiment and thus his “property,” Alex defends himself by pushing the man aside and crying: “My body, my choice!”
The pregnancy plot itself deepens the sense that Alex’s gender has already been giving him a little trouble. After moving into Larry’s house (a non-romantic queer coupling that’s, mostly, treated with grace) and starting a regiment of the pregnancy drug alongside levels of HRT that “you’d take preparing for a sex change operation,” Alex begins to soften up. He’s visibly happier, losing all the stiffness that characterized his pre-pregnancy self. “Look at how soft my skin is!” he marvels at Larry after telling his prospective love interest, Diana, “we should be pausing to hear the joyful melody of life itself!” Importantly, Alex doesn’t really seem to enjoy the experience of being pregnant. “I feel like I’ve lost control of my body,” he moans to Diana at one point early on. Rather, he enjoys being feminine. Where his transformation from muscle-bound hunk to rounded, ravenous, nauseated pregnant person leads to profound physical anxiety, asking his lover “does my body disgust you?,” the hormones he takes make him “radiant” and far more comfortable socially, more easily engaging with the people around him and more willing to start a new romantic and sexual relationship with Diana.
In the same way that no one really judges Alex for keeping his pregnancy once he makes his decision (though Larry is initially trepidatious of the implications), his friends and peers counsel him through his physical symptoms in a manner that continually undercuts simple “pregnant man” comedy conventions: His body doesn’t disgust Diana at all. Rather, she starts her relationship with him while he’s pregnant. When he confides to Larry his “nipples are sensitive,” a setup clearly meant for a throwaway laugh, two researchers overhear him and assure him they’ve had similar experiences from a soap allergy and chafing from surfboard wax. When he sits in an obstetrician’s waiting room with a group of pregnant women, they ask him questions about how far along he is and, though confused, express support as he talks about baby names (“Junior if it’s a boy and, if a girl… Junior!”). Similarly, when he tells Larry he’s experiencing increased arousal, his colleague promises him it’s “normal.” His nervousness with his newly feminine, pregnant state, then, can be read as poignantly analogous to anyone’s experience of gender transition when it’s supported by a warm, caring community. He’s continually reassured that, despite his fears of being perceived as aberrantly different, he’s “normal.” At one point, he arrives at a spa in drag to wait out the last weeks of his pregnancy and explains away his masculine appearance as a result of forced hormone replacement by the East German Olympic team. “Alexandra,” a doctor tells him rather than fully rising to the joke, “You are beautiful.”
In addition to the pregnancy plot, Alex’s romantic relationship with Diana is ripe for queer interpretation. Where Alex evinces discomfort with his masculinity, Diana expresses even more overt frustration with her femaleness alongside an incredibly queer-coded distaste for men. The egg Larry steals for Alex, we quickly learn, is hers: She’s the father-to-be to Alex’s mother. She’s introduced as the kind of kooky professor Cary Grant played in Monkey Business (1952) –– brilliant, but clumsy, ungainly in her physicality. One review compared her performance to the work of infamous lesbian rogue Katherine Hepburn. Her key monologue in the film is centered on the challenges of being female: “Men are pathetic really… You should try being a woman sometime. It’s a nightmare. Your body goes peculiar with your first period, and it doesn’t stop until menopause. It’s a lifetime of leaking and swelling and spotting and smears, crippling cramps, raging hormones, yeast! And that’s if everything’s normal!” Meanwhile, when Larry asks her whether she has a boyfriend, she laughs hysterically before ending the conversation with a definitive “No!” The child she and Alex have together is a product of a gonzo version of the kind of reproductive assistance common to queer couples as well, and the two don’t have sex until late into Alex’s pregnancy –– again, initiated by Diana who, to repurpose an old sexist idiom, literally wears the pants in their relationship. The dynamic between this central romantic couple, then, is a decidedly non-normative, non-heterosexually framed one. Their romance is epitomized when, in their first moment of connection, they dance together at a party, awkwardly finding their rhythm in a room full of pairs who can clearly, elegantly perform a set of pre-established steps they themselves self-avowedly cannot. It’s sweet and romantic precisely because these two people are joined by their shared, ambiguous sense of difference from the “typical” couples around them.
At the film’s conclusion, the kind of classical order Hollywood narrative calls for is seemingly re-established: Alex once more appears traditionally masculine (though still displaying the warmth and ease he originally developed through HRT) while Diana wears a dress for the first time in the film, pregnant herself. The newly “normative” heterosexual couple, alongside Larry and his no-longer-ex-wife (Junior is so densely plotted that I’ve skipped an entire B-plot here about Larry’s infertility and the estrangement it caused between him and his wife, who gets pregnant by an Aerosmith roadie) sit on a beach celebrating their children’s shared birthday. Rather than maintain the kind of stable heterosexual reproductive framework suggested by this nearly parodic image of familial bliss, though, the film continues its pattern of subverting expectations. Diana chats with Angela about having a second child, to which Angela demurs. “It doesn’t have to be you,” Alex grins in response, staring at Larry. In the final moments, all three chase Larry across the beach, extolling the virtues of pregnancy for men. With this, the film ends with a silly yet oddly utopian deconstruction of biological essentialism.
Junior in Context
Junior’s production history speaks to a similar set of complicated political dynamics around feminist ideas and masculinist systems of authority. As Karina Longworth mentions in her film history podcast, You Must Remember This, the material that eventually became Junior was originally developed by actress-director Sondra Locke. Locke’s personal and professional life was dominated by a tumultuous relationship with Clint Eastwood that ended in deep acrimony and a series of lawsuits. While they were together, as Longworth explains, Eastwood insisted Locke have two abortions before eventually mandating that she undergo sterilization (his preferred birth control: the rhythm method); later, to end their messy palimony battle, Eastwood orchestrated a sham $1.5 million directing deal for her with Warner Bros., leading her to believe she would be able to helm her own projects. While there, however, all her pitches –– including Junior, to which she had already attached Arnold Schwarzenegger –– were rejected. After Locke sued Warner Bros., who terminated her contract, Schwarzenegger gave the project to Ivan Reitman, who interestingly used the film as a jumping off point to deconstruct bioessentialist notions of gendered difference, enthusiastically telling one interviewer that “if men can carry babies to term, it’s going to really confuse our perception of what makes us different as men and women.”
These dynamics help explain the film’s deeply political undercurrents. It’s noteworthy that the original creative mind behind this project was Locke, a woman whose reproductive history was indelibly altered by a man’s domination and a fundamental lack of autonomy. In this light, the empathetic treatment of both queer-coded pregnancy and heterosexual infertility takes on an even more overtly political register that amplifies the finished film’s unexpectedly radical approach to personal freedom, grounding Alex’s cry of “my body, my choice!” in the experience of a woman who never had that choice herself. Even after this project was stolen from her as a result of a deeply sexist series of Hollywood power struggles, this explicitly feminist inflection was then deepened by her male replacement, Reitman, not only through his comments, but textually in the selection of Kevin Wade to write the screenplay: Wade’s first screenwriting credit was Working Girl (1988), a woman-centered Wall Street rom-com discussed on explicitly “feminist” terms.
Junior’s critical reception was also a strangely political one for an Ivan Reitman comedy, speaking to the immediacy of these issues. Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5/4 stars and praised it highly, provocatively asking, “Is a pregnant Arnold any harder to believe, really, than Arnold as Conan the Barbarian?” speaking to the unrealistic and artificial nature of his hyper-masculine persona before concluding his review with the suggestion that “in an unexpected way, ‘Junior’ is a good family movie, for parents and adolescents to see together, and then to discuss in terms of male and female roles and responsibilities.” At the same time, the LA Times published dueling reviews. The first compared Schwarzenegger’s performance in drag to blackface (“if it’s no longer acceptable for white folks to don makeup and mimic black behavior, or for males to prance around being cliched, limp-wristed gays, it is an interesting question why this kind of comedy remains more than acceptable…”). The second, meanwhile, took a tone reminiscent of the kind of language now common among TERFs: “Is nothing sacred?” critic Laura Brown asks, “Reitman shoves his cameras into the most intimate of human experiences, the delivery room, and manipulates us with scenes of the tearful Schwarzenegger holding ‘his’ newborn.” Janet Maslin’s New York Times review took this kind of transphobic argument further, adopting a tone of outright disgust: “The supposition is that no one, not even those who are reproductively disadvantaged by the possession of male anatomy, should be unable to bear children,” she argues, suggesting the story represented “carrying political correctness to an uncomfortable extreme.”
A good number of women film critics found the film sexist, and they have a good point: It patently is at times, lampooning Alex’s hormonal state by showing him weeping at sappy TV commercials. Larry’s theft of Diana’s egg is in fact a flagrant violation of her own bodily autonomy that’s been critically discussed in subsequent academic articles as well as at the time. In contrast to Janet Maslin’s unpleasantly TERF-y review, Marjorie Baumgarten at the Austin Chronicle highlighted this chauvinistic detail alongside a worthy critique that the film isn’t queer enough. Junior, she suggests, is too reticent to fully engage with the idea that Alex is transitioning, pointing out“he suffers morning sickness but no breast engorgement, his sexual desire is heightened but he remains a confirmed male heterosexual. Funny stuff, this estrogen.” At the same time, even as Junior dodges explicit trans representation, many critics still clearly found its anti-bioessentialist depiction of a trans-coded person –– even in the context of a surrealist comedy within a genre that often made queer people the butt of the joke –– deeply threatening, speaking to its value as a queer text of its time, despite its flaws. In an interview with NPR the week of the film’s release, Ivan Reitman said the film had felt “dangerous” to make because it ran the risk of “offending” “both men and women.” From a modern perspective, reading between the lines, this admission speaks to this frivolous big-budget comedy’s capacity to disrupt a fragile cis-heterosexual notion of gender –– and that speaks volumes.
Beyond Junior
The question remains: Why bother reclaiming Junior at all when so much wonderful queer filmmaking was occurring at the same time? Indeed, by the time Junior was released in November 1994, the New Queer Cinema was thriving at film festivals and in the indie film world. A movement defined by feminist film scholar B. Ruby Rich in a seminal 1992 Sight & Sound article, New Queer Cinema would come to encompass the vibrant work of queer filmmakers across the globe, from Greg Araki, Todd Haynes, and Cheryl Dunye to Pedro Almodóvar, Derek Jarman, and Wong Kar-wai. A broad range of films like Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990), Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1992), and Stephan Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) arrived in the early-mid ‘90s, becoming templates for nuanced, empathetic representation of queer communities by queer artists across genres, tones, and styles. At the same time, though, this same period saw an equally significant array of mainstream queer representation that the community rightly found deeply harmful: The same year the New Queer Cinema was defined, Neil Jordan’s infamous drama, The Crying Game, featured a “transgender reveal” scene where a man “discovers” his romantic interest’s transness and vomits violently at the sight of her exposed body. The film was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and, as Caden Gardner and Willow Maclay describe in their book on trans cinema history, Corpses, Fools and Monsters, it also became a touchstone for Hollywood trans representation, sparking wildly transphobic parody scenes in films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective mere months before Junior’s release, to the disgust of the community. Only the year before, the iconic trans villain of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs prompted equally violent backlash from queer people (though the character has been reclaimed by many in the intervening decades). Historically, as these examples would indicate, the transfemme body has most commonly fallen under the purview of cinematic horror, as a grotesque or “shocking” Other, a characterization that most mainstream filmmaking of the ‘90s did little to alter or complicate. But the New Queer Cinema worked against this notion, not with unilaterally “positive” or “respectable” representation, rather with complex portraits of queer characters of all stripes. As B. Ruby Rich put it in her article (in reference to Tom Kalin’s wonderful gay serial killer thriller Swoon): “Claim the heroes, claim the villains, and don’t mistake any of it for realness.”
In this light, as well as in the context of a president-elect who has vowed to pass legislation that would “on day one… [instruct] all federal agencies to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age” and mandate that “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth,” Junior, as a tremendously successful mainstream product, takes on a different cast. In the same speech last year, Trump promised to “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different.” An actively “family friendly” subversively normative non-normative film like Junior, then, with its celebratory message of anti-bioessentialist acceptance and bodily autonomy speaks to the beauty of even the silliest kinds of queer representation. Its reception, even for its famous cast and careful avoidance of explicit queerness, highlights the precarity queer people have long faced in the public eye. Similarly, in a moment when, just as trans rights are under extreme threat, a national abortion ban is almost certainly on the agenda, Alex’s tearful plea that “If you could feel for one minute the absolute joy and connection that carrying a baby is, you’d understand … I want my baby!” felt like more than just silly fun to me as a queer AFAB viewer; it took on multivalent, complex, even painful resonances with our present.
In Junior, silly or not, light or not, deeply flawed or not, I thought of B. Ruby Rich’s reminder that “the queer present negotiates with the past, knowing full well that the future is at stake.” Today, the future is at stake. As we move into our future, I’ll certainly be revisiting films like Orlando (1992), By Hook or By Crook, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) long before returning to films like Junior. At the same time, though, films like Junior aren’t the make or break of queer representation, and they don’t have to be. They’re a playful aside to the kinds of historical work that will bring us real fulfillment. Celebrating the queer valences of this kind of big budget Hollywood product has reminded me this week that, as we fight for our future, subverting even the most mainstream kinds of hegemonic filmmaking can open up avenues for queer play, comfort, and pleasure.
I love this; Junior was one of my favorite movies as a kid!
June Diane Raphael on the How Did This Get Made podcast had an amazing take where she fully thought Arnold was playing a woman the whole movie. Her logic was a fetus needs a uterus to survive so even though Arnold did nothing that suggested he was a woman he was playing one in the movie.
(Now, this is the same woman who asked in the podcast episode with Fast and Furious 5 or 6 “have we seen any of the previous movies?” And her husband going “June! We’ve seen ALL the Fast and Furious movies!” So I’m not putting weight on her analysis but it is a hilarious point to express like halfway through the episode.)