Molly Ringwald became an icon in the 1980s thanks to a trio of movies all directed by John Hughes: Sixteen Candles,Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club. The films were instant hits, and a genre unto themselves for the realistic way they portrayed American teenagers. They’ve since been heralded as classics, and though they occasionally come in for criticism—Sixteen Candles’ stereotypical Asian character in particular—they haven’t lost their place in the pop-culture pantheon.
Ringwald, who owes her career to these films, might find it more difficult to criticize them than anyone. But in a searing essay for The New Yorker, the actress confronts the plain misogyny of various scenes and plot points, while also reckoning with the beloved hold Hughes’s oeuvre still has on the culture.
She was inspired to look back on the film while watching The Breakfast Club with her daughter, particularly analyzing how the character Bender (played by Judd Nelson) bullies her character, Claire, and touches her inappropriately without her consent.
“As I can see now, Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film,” Ringwald writes. “When he’s not sexualizing her, he takes out his rage on her with vicious contempt, calling her ‘pathetic,’ mocking her as ‘Queenie.’ It’s rejection that inspires his vitriol . . . He never apologizes for any of it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end.”
Ringwald also mentions a scene that almost ended up in the film, which involved a pretty female gym teacher swimming naked in a pool. Ringwald writes that she convinced Hughes to cut it. She also talks about the embarrassment of hiring another actress to play her in the scene where Bender looks at Claire’s underwear under a table. “Having another person pretend to be me was embarrassing to me and upsetting to my mother, and she said so,” she says. “That scene stayed, though.”
At the end of Sixteen Candles, the hot jock, Jake, passes his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, on to the Geek. It’s implied in a morning-after scene that Caroline and the Geek had sex—or something along those lines—and that Caroline enjoyed it. As Ringwald writes, “Caroline shakes her head in wonderment and says, ‘You know, I have this weird feeling I did.’ She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought, because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.” Ringwald interviewed Haviland Morris, the actress who played Caroline, about the scene. She sees it differently, telling Ringwald that Caroline is partially responsible for what happens. “I’m not saying that it’s O.K. to then be raped or to have nonconsensual sex,” Haviland said. “But . . . that’s not a one-way street. Here’s a girl who gets herself so bombed that she doesn’t even know what’s going on.”
It wasn’t just the movies that Ringwald was analyzing. She also read old pieces that Hughes wrote for National Lampoon. “The scope of the ugliness” in the pieces took her aback, she says, recounting several jarring pieces about rape, a pair of teens who wake up one day with swapped genitals, and a mocking how-to guide titled “Sexual Harassment and How to Do It!” Ringwald then turns her focus back to the films and how, despite the ugliness of certain scenes, so many people still tell her about the powerful impact they had on their lives.
“John’s movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel, and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teenagers experience,” she writes. “Whether that’s enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say—even criticizing them makes me feel like I’m divesting a generation of some of its fondest memories, or being ungrateful since they helped to establish my career. And yet embracing them entirely feels hypocritical. And yet, and yet . . .”
What’s important now, she writes, is how we continue discussing these films with this new understanding. “The conversations about them will change, and they should. It’s up to the following generations to figure out how to continue those conversations and make them their own—to keep talking, in schools, in activism and art—and trust that we care.”
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