Picture this: At the end of a high school house party, a senior hands his passed-out-drunk girlfriend off to a stranger he met that night and tells the other guy he can have his way with her as long as she gets home afterward.
It’s like watching one of my nightmares being reenacted before my eyes, only worse: It’s a scene played for laughs in John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles.
I grew up on Sixteen Candles and his other ’80s teen films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Weird Science, and Pretty in Pink. I let their plot lines guide my daydreams throughout adolescence and the movies seemed so appealing. But watching some of Hughes' work again now leaves me more aghast than appreciative. The guy that handed his girlfriend off to be date-raped? That’s Jake Ryan, the “perfect” boyfriend in Sixteen Candles. The stranger that essentially rapes the unresponsive girl? The sympathetic geek of the film, played by Anthony Michael Hall. (Adding insult to injury, when the drunk girlfriend wakes up next to the geek, she declares that she can’t remember much about having sex with him, only that she enjoyed it.) There’s a disconcerting thread of misogyny in Hughes’ movies that can't be explained away like the racist portrayal of Long Duk Dong, by saying it’s a reflection of the white suburban culture of the time.
Hughes’ movies endorse the notion that if you stay true to yourself, others will notice and appreciate you: That's the message that the dad gives Molly Ringwald's character in Sixteen Candles; that's what's so admirable about her character in Pretty in Pink; that’s what’s so infuriating and inspiring about Ferris Bueller; and what the fembot in Weird Science keep reiterating to the young nerds who created her.
But Hughes undermines his message when it comes to women. Jake Ryan is attracted to Molly Ringwald’s character based purely on her looks. (He can’t possibly like her for being herself because they don’t speak to each other until the end of the film.) In The Breakfast Club, Ally Sheedy’s character is deemed dateable only after a huge makeover that renders her nearly unrecognizable, and Molly Ringwald not only accepts Judd Nelson’s unjustified verbal abuse, but seeks him out at the end of the film. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Jennifer Grey is a raging bitch with a vendetta against Ferris until Charlie Sheen makes out with her.
It’s like John Hughes had a hard time deciding if women were people or simply the means by which adolescent boys could achieve manhood and coolness. He flops between fleshed out portrayals like Molly Ringwald’s characters Andie and Sam in Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles—who, as A.O. Scott pointed out in this past Saturday’s Times, have guys’ names—and those that are simply defined by their flesh: Jake Ryan’s drunk girlfriend, Long Duk Dong’s busty sex partner, Ferris Bueller’s bland-but-blameless future trophy wife, and the fembot of Weird Science, whose raison d’être is to get the nerds laid, if not by herself, then by two hot high school chicks. In Some Kind of Wonderful, which Hughes wrote, Eric Stoltz’s character has to choose between the two portrayals: a humanized tomboy (named Watts), and a blank-canvas-but-beautiful popular girl stereotype. (Watts wins, but barely.) Hughes loses me after that; his post-adolescent films portray women as un-fun and unappealing, like She’s Having a Baby, or, as in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, leave them out of the picture entirely.
A.O. Scott might have praised Hughes for articulating an outsider’s perspective of the ’80s high school experience, but his teen movies are such a tangle of conflicting messages about women’s roles and their intrinsic worth that I end up feeling more alienated than ever.
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