Of all John Hughes’ films, I’ve probably seen The Breakfast Club the most times, followed by Sixteen Candles. While I was too young for them to have a huge impact when they were released, they were staples for anyone growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. That being said, I haven’t seen those movies in years. I wonder if I would watch them with different eyes today, at my age and at this moment in our current cultural conversation about feminism, abuse and more. As it turns out, Molly Ringwald wondered the same thing. Molly starred in three John Hughes films – The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles – and those films made her a star. They made her a cultural phenomenon. She was on the cover of Time Magazine. She was the It Girl for an entire generation. Molly is 50 years old now and the mother of two daughters and a son. Upon one of her daughter’s requests, Molly recently re-watched The Breakfast Club and she came away feeling discombobulated and uncomfortable. She ended up writing a piece for The New Yorker about revisiting John Hughes’ work and legacy in the age of #MeToo. It’s a good read – go here for the full piece.
It’s a strange experience, watching a younger, more innocent version of yourself onscreen. It’s stranger still—surreal, even—watching it with your child when she is much closer in age to that version of yourself than you are. My friend was right: my daughter didn’t really seem to register most of the sex stuff, though she did audibly gasp when she thought I had showed my underwear. At one point in the film, the bad-boy character, John Bender, ducks under the table where my character, Claire, is sitting, to hide from a teacher. While there, he takes the opportunity to peek under Claire’s skirt and, though the audience doesn’t see, it is implied that he touches her inappropriately. I was quick to point out to my daughter that the person in the underwear wasn’t really me, though that clarification seemed inconsequential. We kept watching, and, despite my best intentions to give context to the uncomfortable bits, I didn’t elaborate on what might have gone on under the table. She expressed no curiosity in anything sexual, so I decided to follow her lead, and discuss what seemed to resonate with her more. Maybe I just chickened out.
But I kept thinking about that scene. I thought about it again this past fall, after a number of women came forward with sexual-assault accusations against the producer Harvey Weinstein, and the #MeToo movement gathered steam. If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes. I made three movies with John Hughes; when they were released, they made enough of a cultural impact to land me on the cover of Time magazine and to get Hughes hailed as a genius. His critical reputation has only grown since he died, in 2009, at the age of fifty-nine. Hughes’s films play constantly on television and are even taught in schools. There is still so much that I love in them, but lately I have felt the need to examine the role that these movies have played in our cultural life: where they came from, and what they might mean now. When my daughter proposed watching “The Breakfast Club” together, I had hesitated, not knowing how she would react: if she would understand the film or if she would even like it. I worried that she would find aspects of it troubling, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me.
Ringwald then goes on, in a very journalistic way, detailing the moment of John Hughes’ arrival and how no one was making films about teenagers that seemed authentic TO teenagers at the time. At every step, Ringwald gives Hughes credit for the authenticity with which he wrote so many characters, and for choosing to make her the rare female protagonist in his first two films (Sixteen Candles and Pretty In Pink). She gives him credit for treating her well, for respecting her opinions, for listening to her and for even making some script changes when certain things made her uncomfortable. But, as time has passed, she sees clearly that so many of the storylines she was apart of were and are problematic. For example, Bender’s verbal abuse of her character, Claire, in The Breakfast Club, and Bender’s sexual harassment and perhaps even assault of Claire (the scene where he puts his head between “Claire’s” legs underneath the table).
Ringwald talks a lot about Sixteen Candles and the character of Caroline (Jake’s beautiful girlfriend) who gets blackout drunk and then traded to the Geek, who apparently rapes her when she’s unconscious. Ringwald even contacted the actress who played Caroline, Haviland Morris, to ask her what she thought of that part of the story now, looking back on it. Haviland seemed to blame her character for getting that drunk (ugh). Haviland later sent Ringwald an email saying that on second thought, she did have a problem with all of it. That’s the thing about these Hughes films – we grew up with them and we grew up thinking they were amazing, and once you see them with fresh eyes, you’re like “holy God, this story is problematic as f–k.”
Ringwald ends on a note of “where do we go from here?” She really doesn’t have an answer – she used to be proud of the work she had done with Hughes, and she still feels proud that those films touched so many people in very positive ways. She’s clear that she’s not advocating for erasing Hughes’ films from the film-nerd conversations, but she suggests that we should review these “old classics” with new eyes and a new understanding of many of the problematic stories and characters.
Photos and posters courtesy of IMDB, WENN and Universal Pictures.
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