‘Junior’s’ Baby Is No Joke

I found Kenneth Turan’s review of the Ivan Reitman comedy “Junior,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, to be as light and fluffy as he claims the film itself is (“Arnold’s Mommy Syndrome,” Calendar, Nov. 23).

The main objection I had to the film: the worship of technology to the point of devaluing human life. For all of its appearance as a comedy, this film puts forth the notion that life is and should be under the control of a laboratory, and a “mother” is whomever (or whatever) scientists decide it should be.

Forget the impossibility of an embryo growing in a man’s abdominal cavity or Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous “labor pains” as he prepares to give birth. The notion that children can and should be created by scientists and grown like so many hatchlings in Aldous Huxley’s imagined laboratories is put forth as being in the proper scheme of things.

A Times Op-Ed piece reports that the National Institutes of Health wants government funding to experiment on human embryos. The NIH will be “creating, manipulating and then destroying ‘developing human life’ ” in the name of research (“A Brave New World Is Hatched,” Opinion, Nov. 27). With real-life events like this going on, I find Reitman’s view of babymaking in the lab, for reasons as specious as testing a new drug, to be arrogant and irresponsible.

The “experiment” undertaken by Danny DeVito and Schwarzenegger places the human embryo in second position, behind the drug being tested. “We made it--we do what we want to with it,” is the attitude permeating “Junior,” as though DeVito just came up with a better computer chip.

If we can make babies inside any warm repository of tissue, how about in a St. Bernard? Is nothing sacred? 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. No need to mention that the child exists mainly as the byproduct of an attempt to make a bundle in pharmaceuticals.

If you think Schwarzenegger was offensive in “True Lies,” where he kidnaps Jamie Lee Curtis and forces her to play the part of a prostitute, he goes even further in this movie, showing unparalleled invasiveness in his actions toward Emma Thompson. Sure, in the sugary Reitman style, it’s all softened in an ooze of tearful schmaltz. In the movies, it’s apparently OK to plunder someone’s genes in the name of science. In real life? Let’s hope not.