Let Sleeping Teen Classics Lie
Molly Ringwald’s look back at “The Breakfast Club” fails to account for the sexual themes of its era
“There is no way it would have been made today.” I said, and my husband concurred.
A few month ago we decided to show Back to the Future to our kids, and came to the above conclusion after watching the scene in which the protagonist’s father, George McFly, still in his teens, and armed with a pair of binoculars, climbs the tree to watch his future wife undress.
In centuries past, serenading a woman might had been a mark of chivalry, but if attempted in today’s America, it would be viewed as a sign of psychosis. No boy would dare to hang out under his beloved’s window just to catch a glimpse of her. Staying in his room and watching porn is far more socially acceptable. And George McFly wasn’t just hanging out, he was peeping-Toming, which had always been a shady activity. And to think that a cool teen like Marty McFly was conceived in a union of this type of creepiness! If now we shudder watching the scene, thirty years ago we laughed.
By the 80's standards Back to the Future was tame. Teen screwball entertainment was in high esteem then. But now the Reagan-era teen star extraordinaire Molly Ringwald took to the pages of the New Yorker to rethink her youthful experience with director John Hughes from #MeToo perspective. I want to look at her piece as a part of the #MeToo phenomena.
Ringwald watched the movie Breakfast Club with her ten-year-old daughter, and found herself gasping for explanations for risqué parts. The former it girl of adolescent cinema was uneasy about the prospect, and talked to experts about watching the film with her pre-teen and got a go-ahead:
A writer-director friend assured me that kids tend to filter out what they don’t understand, and I figured that it would be better if I were there to answer the uncomfortable questions.
While this is true of kids in general, children who see their parents on screen might develop a whole different kind of questions. After all, it’s not just some remote individuals in abstract situations, but the very people who gave them life, and who are teaching them about right and wrong. Ringwald ran into a problem:
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.
Right, because the ten-year-old wasn’t merely watching a humiliation of some character, but her mom, her primary role model. We’ve all done something we don’t wish to share with our children; in Ringwald’s case that something happens to be a part of a film of generational significance. That her films might cause some degree of discomfort with her future family is probably something that had occurred to the actress at the time, and probably (and correctly) she judged it not to be a big deal. I don’t think her daughter will grow up confused and troubled because of this episode.
Ringwald herself doesn’t have much of a #MeToo claim. She admits to almost getting in bed with a filmmaker when drunk. She says she’d been attracted to verbally abusive men until the age of thirty, something that she strongly implies was a consequence of playing the part of Claire in Breakfast Club. That would require her to get so absorbed into the role, that she carried the character’s traits for more than a decade. Maybe. But then she’d be equally devastated by any other film where she’d be given a part of an imperfect human being. Occupational hazards, you know.
Yet here she is, an attractive middle age mother of three. Albeit, the former teen star has divorced, but that only happened once, which is not at all scandalous by the Hollywood standards. She never became a tabloid darling, or, as far as we know, had to check herself into a rehab. By all appearances, her life is turning out pretty well.
She might have been John Hughes’s muse, which implies some kind of fascination on his part, but he never made a pass on her. What’s more, the director valued her underage opinion enough to be persuaded by Ringwald to cut out a scene that she thought was inappropriate. He sounds like a nice guy, honestly.
Ringwald makes an issue of screwball humor in Hughes’s movies. From #MeToo perspective it’t unforgivable, to be sure. What we are forgetting is that this kind of cinema is a product of a different era, with a different view of teen sexuality.
That young people have sexual urges is the central premise of rock-n-roll creed. In the 1960’s a demographically dominant generation was growing up, and it adopted the music genre that celebrated both you and uninhibited sexuality. Rock stars had love affairs with underage groupies, and teenagers, most of them boys, formed bands to impress their peers. Although in the 80's the AIDS scare kept a lid on the excesses, somewhat, this was still very much the age of decadence.
Hughes made films about coming of age in the rock-n-roll America. He was a baby boomer, very well-versed in the irreverent aesthetic of the 60's, making movies for the next generation. The director preserved some the rebellious spirit of his own youth — Ringwald references his work at National Lampoon — but tamed it significantly.
He told the stories about suburbia and the personalities that inhabit it. I’m not sure if Hughes’ movies can be called realistic. I came to the US at 17, and spent a year an a half in an American high school. To me, the most realistic high school film of the day is Encino Man. My husband thinks it’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but he’s from the Valley, so it might be a case of bias. He finds Hughes’s characters a bit formulaic. I think they are still relatable.
There are many ways of telling a coming of age story, but the one was considered realistic a few decades ago is through the prism of sexual awakening. The creepiest, most awkward aspects of young men’s sexuality were brought to center. Hughes’s audience took it for granted that adolescent boys had sexual urges, that they talked about sex to each other, and that high school students weren’t at all interested in settling. This left girls in a difficult place.
Stolen underwear traded for a drunken girlfriend sounds like an urban legend young men tell between themselves, but what for a boy is a projection of pure id, for a girl is a cautionary tale. Hughes, being a man, naturally told stories from boys’ perspective, and he told them in a way that seemed fresh at the time.
Cautionary tales, too, need to be told. Not to frighten pubescent girls — I’m pretty sure getting a pair of panties from a classmate is a rather impossible task — but to warn them that their male counterparts have carnal desires. Today we like assure girls that the boys would act as if they don’t, and that they, girls, should always be in charge.
Hughes’s films shock more now than they did in the 80's. The kind of narratives he embedded in them, the ones traditionally relegated to locker rooms, is now being pushed back to where they belong. Expected rebellion of the second decade of the 21st century is the opposite of sex: it’s teenage girls removing body parts and taking hormones to bypass puberty.
Boys are taught that if at any point after an erotic encounter the girl begins to regret it, they might find themselves in deep trouble. In this environment, jacking off by an electronic device doesn’t seem like a bad idea. The kids are hooked to electronic devices all day long anyway.
If the #MeToo/#Slutwalk sensitive male utopia will ever come true, it will be in no small part thanks to the efforts of hardworking porn stars (who are, of course, all doing it of their own free will). In contemporary understanding, all sexuality is almost always normal in abstract — but not in practice.
Molly Ringwald failed to explain the sensibility of her era to her daughter. Although I shouldn’t say “failed,” because her daughter is really too young to understand. Maybe she should had waited a few years? Or maybe she’s just not a very good advocate for her own work.
A shame! By her own admission Hughes’s films transcend their time and the narrow lenses of race and gender through which we look at the world today.
