RINGWALD’S RECKONING
Actress re-examines The Breakfast Club in today’s #MeToo era
In one scene in the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club, rebellious teen John Bender (Judd Nelson) hides from a teacher by crouching under a desk near Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald).
He peeks under Claire’s skirt and the camera flashes to a shot of her underwear. It’s implied that Bender then touches her inappropriately. Claire squeals, squeezing Bender’s head between her knees.
As he emerges from under the desk, Claire slaps him and cusses at him, but keeps a straight face.
“It was an accident,” Bender says. “So sue me.”
In the years since Hughes’s death, Ringwald has praised the work of the Hollywood director, producer and writer, famous for his influential 1980s films portraying teenage angst. Days after his fatal heart attack in 2009, Ringwald wrote an essay in The New York Times mourning her former mentor and friend, who helped catapult her career. At the Oscars in 2010, she helped deliver a tribute to Hughes.
“John saw something in all of us,” said the tribute from Ringwald, best known for her roles in his movies Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club.
“His genius was taking the pain of growing up and relating it to everyone.”
But this fall, as allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein sparked the #MeToo movement, Ringwald began to revisit the Hughes films, including The Breakfast Club. “I 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,” she writes in an essay The New Yorker published last week. As of Monday morning, the piece was still the most-popular article on its website.
Ringwald’s essay provides a nuanced, candid reckoning of some of the most beloved movies of the 1980s, the movies that launched her fame.
Ringwald sheds light on moments she now finds disturbing. She recalls scenes and movie characters she now feels sexualized teenage girls, objectified women and reinforced misogynistic views.
In doing so, she addresses an uncomfortable dilemma facing many movie viewers amid the #MeToo era: how to appreciate the movies they ’ve always loved while revisiting them with a fresh, critical eye. Ringwald herself wrestles with this complicated question, acknowledging that “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.
“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?” Ringwald writes. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art — change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.”
Taking a critical look at these movies matters, she says, because “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.
Ringwald writes about what made Hughes’s movies so unique — how they urged Hollywood to take young people seriously, how they helped teenagers realize they weren’t alone in feeling angry or isolated or rejected.
“No one in Hollywood was writing about the minutiae of high school, and certainly not from a female point of view,” Ringwald writes.
But she’s troubled by parts of these movies, including some of her own scenes. She describes the time when she agreed to watch The Breakfast Club with her daughter, who was then 10 years old. “I worried that she would find aspects of it troubling, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me,” she writes.
In hindsight, Ringwald says she sees that Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film, and Claire responds “dismissively.”
“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,” Ringwald writes. “He never apologizes for any of it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end.”
She also mentions a scene in Sixteen Candles in which the character Jake “essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter’s sexual urges, in return for Samantha’s underwear.”
Ringwald interviewed her former co-star Haviland Morris, who played the character Caroline, and asked for her take on it. Morris responded that it “certainly doesn’t demonstrate responsible behaviour from either party, but also doesn’t really spell date rape. On the other hand, she was basically traded for a pair of underwear … Ah, John Hughes.”
Ringwald addresses the nowcommon issue of separating the artist from the art. “I’m not thinking about the man right now but of the films that he left behind,” she writes.
“Films that I am proud of in so many ways.”