The Breakfast Club star recants and caves in to mainstream-media pressure.
Actress Molly Ringwald became the latest celebrity to parade before the court of mainstream media in her one-off “Personal History” column last week for The New Yorker in which she recanted her own legacy as a star of the 1980s John Hughes movies Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Don’t be fooled. This personal rewriting of history, in support of the popular political trend intended to control politically incorrect behavior between the sexes is, essentially, a culture-war offensive.
Through a new version of what old-time fan magazines called “true confessions,” Ringwald joins those I-now-see-the-light Hollywood spoilsports who feel the need to slap back at their onetime benefactors in the name of gender parity. Although writer-director Hughes (who died in 2009) discovered Ringwald and considered her his “muse,” she repudiates the films in which they both debuted and is newly embarrassed at what she laments as no longer acceptable sexist and racist content. Ringwald regrets her naïve participation (she was a teenager at the time), but she naïvely disdains the film’s contribution to our culture’s Neanderthal treatment of women. Her aim, like a religious convert’s, is to make us repent our enjoyment.
Ringwald’s apologia is a genuinely reflective but wrongheaded piece of cultural criticism. Having stepped out of her wheelhouse and into my arena, she misses aspects of cultural appreciation that need a critic’s perspective to make clear: The Hughes comedies from Sixteen Candles and Home Alone to She’s Having a Baby, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles translated Baby Boomer ideology into cultural satire. The heartwarming nostrums of MGM’s Andy Hardy films were rejuvenated through plot gimmicks that also flattered the ’80s generation’s sense of entitlement. (The films’ cornball undercurrent kept viewers coming back for more.)
But Ringwald’s detailed, first-person account describes her Hughes films in terms of unenlightened general opinion. With no particular insight into the films’ meanings, she implies that their popularity reflects society’s shortcomings about youth and sexuality. Hughes played out those issues through male privilege, she claims, oddly downplaying today’s trendy emphasis on racial identity — his, and her own, “whiteness.” Ignoring how those movies work as popular art that appeals to, reproduces, or affects cultural ideas, she writes like a bad film critic — a pseudo expert who thinks movies are made without ideology and that their humor or drama either works or doesn’t, depending on a filmmaker’s skill.
It’s Hughes’s skills — the toolkit he magically inherited as a privileged American male — that Ringwald takes to task, criticizing his apparent wit and storytelling, which she sees as manifestations of masculine entitlement. Ringwald attempts to prove this by citing behind-the-scenes disagreements she and her mother had with Hughes (plus recent, after-the-fact discussions with other actresses, filmmakers, and friends). Mostly, however, she rebukes the director for his early career as a writer for the sophomoric humor magazine National Lampoon. Described in The New Yorker as a fount of crudity, National Lampoon featured several stories by pre-Hollywood Hughes that seemed to anticipate the brazen irreverence toward women that now makes adult Ringwald cringe. In thought-police mode, she denies the mischievous common feelings that are part of growing up for most people; they are what made those films feel new and are the reason people enjoyed Hughes’s goofiness.
This is where the straightforward recantation of ’80s sweetheart Ringwald begins to seem a little insincere. As the mother of a pre-teen daughter, she says, she is now concerned about the impact of movie humor and sexuality. Her moralizing syncs with the now-fashionable but impersonal movement toward gender reeducation. This mindset disregards the fact that movies, whether crude or sophisticated, are the uninhibited expression of their makers — even if the maker has the backing of a billion-dollar corporation that influences social standards. That this is generally the case in Hollywood doesn’t absolve a filmmaker of social responsibility, but it should remind us that a director’s personality is always exhibited on screen (or as film critics used to say, he is the auteur of the images, characters, and storyline that bear his name). Movies are not simply naughty or virtuous.
But Mother Ringwald doesn’t allow fratboy Hughes the cultural freedom to express his particular ideas about youth and sex, girls and boys. Again, like a bad film critic, she thinks only in terms of movies as “entertainment for the whole family.” She overlooks the irony that perhaps Hughes’s films — like National Lampoon itself — were not necessarily appropriate entertainment for kids, regardless of how the films were marketed or the intense identification felt by young filmgoers.
Ringwald’s retrospective criticism grants that teenagers responded to Hughes’s movies for scenes that confirmed adolescent self-involvement, but she finds fault with the immaturity that is their subject and their very lingua franca, the latter enhanced by Hughes’s attention to ’80s new-wave music that supplied the soundtrack for teenagers’ imagined school and home lives. (The Breakfast Club theme song, Simple Minds’ hit “Don’t You (Forget about Me),” was an “Open Sesame” to the teen audience’s sentimental heart, whether they were nerds, bullies, or goody two-shoes valedictorians.) Hughes’ uncanny pop-music connection to teen romanticism should have informed Ringwald’s analysis of the films’ impact. She also fails to relate the Hughes-films phenomenon to Madonna’s zeitgeist revolution, a simultaneous cultural event that promoted female sexual prerogative and male lust. And Madonna perhaps had a worse impact than Hughes’s films— a subject too complicated ever to be admitted by zealots caught up in the media’s #MeToo show trials.
Ringwald serves the progressives’ scheme to change our future by getting us to hate our past.
It is strange that an actress known for the teen-movie genre still, apparently, doesn’t understand its function as part of Hollywood’s system of public suasion. Instead, Ringwald parrots trite accusations against systemic sexism. When I wrote about the genre for Film Comment in 1985 in an article titled “Kidpix,” I referred to The Breakfast Club as “National Lampoon’s Persona,” mocking its teen-angst melodrama as a middle-school version of Ingmar Bergman. Of that decades’ many youth-baiting films (fiction and nonfiction), The Breakfast Club differed wildly from the vérité insight of the Jeff Kreines–Joel DeMott documentary Seventeen about interracial dating in Muncie, Ind. It’s important to appreciate the distance between ribald teenage fantasy and real life. We must remember that Hughes’s comic fantasies reveal a frame of mind based on accepted social customs that requires a viewer’s moral and emotional scrutiny.
Ringwald’s screed resembles a forced confession, as in Communist show trials or the “evidence” sponsored by mainstream media’s routine tell-alls and op-eds. When comparing the Hughes films to Porky’s to illustrate the ultimate coarse juvenilia, Ringwald seems to be brainwashing herself to believe that her collaboration with Hughes was somehow a betrayal of teenage sexual frankness and mischief. She serves the progressives’ scheme to change our future by getting us to hate our past.
Even though Ringwald twice brags that the Hughes films are taught in colleges (respect at last, even without Ingmar Bergman’s pedigree), her look back is myopic, narrowed down to a view that is artistically restrictive. In the name of #MeToo groupthink, she writes a memoir with insipid reasoning very much in character with the role she played in The Breakfast Club. You might remember that film’s most convincing moment, which belonged to Anthony Michael Hall’s nerdy outsider. Hall looks at Ringwald’s self-pitying rich girl and, with tearful exasperation, sizes her up: “You’re so conceited!”