Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (9 page)

Before the eighties, young women didn’t tend to do too well in teen films. In the fifties they were generally ignored as movies focused instead on the agonised plights of young men (
The Wild Ones
,
Rebel Without a Cause
). In the sixties filmmakers realised that making movies about teenage protagonists made it even easier for them to shoot endless scenes of young women in minimal amounts of clothing without having to bother too much about things such as plot or logic. So young women were ostensibly given leading roles, but star billing really went to their bikinis (the hugely popular Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello films). By the seventies, teen films were synonymous with horror movies (
Halloween
,
Carrie
) or movies sentimentalising teenagers from an earlier era (
American Graffiti
,
Grease
), and, blood-soaked prom queens aside, they were utterly devoid of admirable female characters. But then Hughes arrived in the eighties, and suddenly the girls started getting the good roles.

Hughes loved to write about awkward kids, but unlike too many male filmmakers, then and now, he didn’t only write about awkward boys: he also grasped the extraordinary idea that teenage girls were humans – not sex objects or icy bitch temptresses – and his close friendship with Ringwald doubtless helped him with this. He said that some of Ringwald’s roles in his films were ‘really a portrait of myself’, and the fact that he gave the two best roles he wrote for her male names – Sam and Andie – further suggests his identification with them.

‘When I first read John’s scripts, I couldn’t believe someone could write such amazing parts for young women. There had been movies with strong female protagonists before, but not ones with a strong female teenage protagonist,’ recalls Ringwald.

Hughes’s teen films are peppered with awkward, truculent, even difficult young female characters: Jeanie, the patron saint of unhappy siblings everywhere, in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
; Allison, making her dandruff blizzard out of her hair in
The Breakfast Club
; Watts, who proudly wears men’s boxers instead of women’s underwear in
Some Kind of Wonderful
; Iona, Andie’s delightfully mouthy boss in
Pretty in Pink
, played by Annie Potts, aka Janine from
Ghostbusters
. In
The Breakfast Club
, Hughes showed he recognised one of the great plights of being a teenage girl when the two female characters discuss how to answer the question of whether or not you’ve ‘done it’: ‘It’s kind of a double-edged sword, isn’t it?’ Allison says to Claire. ‘If you say you haven’t, you’re a prude. And if you say you have, you’re a slut. It’s a trap. You want to but you can’t, and when you do, you wish you didn’t, right?’ It’s not only boys, Hughes knew, who struggle with sex. But of all Hughes’s great female characters, there is none greater than Andie.

I first saw
Pretty in Pink
when I was nine, and while I did, like every other heterosexual female, promptly develop a lifelong crush on McCarthy, it was Andie with whom I fell in love. She was the first girl I’d ever seen on screen who felt recognisable to me. While I pretended sometimes I was Sloane from
Ferris Bueller
, all pretty and confident and with a boyfriend who picked me up from school in a car, I recognised that the teenager I would be was the awkward girl who drove herself to school. At the time, I lived in a Jewish enclave of Manhattan, meaning my life looked so different from the suburban white bread ones depicted in John Hughes’s films that I may as well have grown up in a different country. Yet even if the details of my life looked nothing like Hughes’s movies, they nonetheless taught me something important: that I, a weird girl who lived too much inside her own head, whose looks somehow never seemed to coincide with the fashions of that day and wouldn’t even kiss a boy until well into her third decade, deserved to be the star of my own movie.

This is not a message girls and young women can take for granted any more. Until the
Twilight
series and
The Hunger Games
came along, studios had assumed for years that young women couldn’t front franchises for teenagers. ‘Teenage girl [audiences] just weren’t even in the equation until
Twilight
came around. When people talked about the teen market, they meant the male teen market,’ says film producer Lynda Obst. ‘This is because studios look at a movie’s takings from the first weekend and teen boys tend to go out in packs on a first weekend, whereas girls didn’t. Also, teen boys tended to match the international market, so studios would market to them, because the international market is so much more important these days. It wasn’t until
Twilight
that it was the girls who came out in droves.’

But Bella in
Twilight
and Katniss in
The Hunger Games
are, obviously, very different kinds of heroines to Andie. For a start, Bella is as passive and blank and tedious as the most retro of Disney heroines, always requiring the services of males to save her. She puts herself at risk for her creepy, cold and dangerous boyfriend, and this is depicted as romantic. Whereas Andie refuses even to change her hat for Blane, Bella enthusiastically changes entire species in order to stay with her boyfriend, going from human to vampire, which is some makeover.

‘Passive’ is not a charge one would ever lay at the feet of Katniss Everdeen, one of the most admirable female characters to be seen in a teen film for some decades, albeit one who kills other teenagers. Many reviewers praised Katniss as a rare example of a strong female hero in modern movies, but strength doesn’t always have to be demonstrated physically, despite what today’s superhero-loving Hollywood might think. Katniss also lives in a completely different world from that of the audience. A film doesn’t have to look familiar to inspire teenage audiences – after all, Hughes’s high schools looked downright exotic to me – but at least there was a pretence of realism there. Audiences might sympathise with Katniss, and maybe even Bella, but they could empathise with Ringwald and her contemporaries.

But the real difference between Bella and Katniss and Andie is the kind of movies they are in. For a start, they are self-consciously dark films, reflecting a common belief among Hollywood filmmakers today that darkness equals depth and serves as a compensation for throwaway, forgettable scripts. It’s easy to make a movie feel dramatic when the stakes are as high as the characters’ lives, as they are in
Twilight
and
The Hunger Games
. It is trickier in a film that features comedy and focuses on people’s real lives.

John Hughes understood that while American teenagers in the eighties didn’t have the problems their parents had endured in their youth – Vietnam, namely – their daily anxieties felt no less pressing. He knew that one doesn’t need to soup up the daily minutiae of a teenager’s life in a film in order to make it feel important to teenagers. This lesson was already forgotten by the nineties when the biggest teen films winkingly used plots from classical texts, such as Jane Austen’s
Emma
(
Clueless
),
The Taming of the Shrew
(
10 Things I Hate About You
) and
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
(
Cruel Intentions
), simultaneously to mock the teen film genre and give it ironic credibility, as opposed to relying on the films to stand up for themselves (and thinking up their own plots, although, for the record, I do love
Clueless
and
10 Things I Hate About You
). These films didn’t believe that the mundane details of the average teenager’s life were interesting or important enough to make a film about, as eighties teen films definitely did, and Hughes especially did.

This reduced interest in female audiences has led to the rise of that dreaded stock (read: lazy) female film character whose presence has become such a given in certain types of films aimed at young people that she was eventually given a name. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a ‘bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures’, as journalist Nathan Rabin, who coined the term, put it. Many successful teen films very much feature the trope, such as 2009’s (
500) Days of Summer
and 2012’s
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
in which, respectively, Zooey Deschanel and Emma Watson play attractively damaged pixies whose eyeliner and spontaneity rejuvenate their male leads while they themselves apparently have no inner lives (the vast majority of films featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, including these two, are written and directed by men). Most of all, they are not the star of their movie.

Stories serve as guides about how to live and what to expect from life, and if you’re a girl who grows up believing that the most you can expect is to be a supporting character to a man, that’s all you’ll ever ask for. Rabin has since disowned the term, claiming, correctly, that misappropriation of the name has become as much of a cliché as the trope itself and the misappropriation tips into precisely the kind of sexism the term is supposed to satirise. But as Ben Beaumont-Thomas wrote in the
Guardian
: ‘Rabin is rightly uncomfortable in thinking about women in terms of stock subgroups, and yet this is exactly how a male-dominated film industry thinks about them – and after a trickle-down process, how ordinary men will end up thinking about them. By lampooning it in a tangy phrase like MPDG, a trope which has creeped along suddenly gets the light shined on it, and its ridiculousness becomes so well articulated that it’s difficult to get away with it again.’

Andie is pretty much the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She exists totally in her own right. She is confident and insecure, wise and foolish, happy and furious, mature and childish, lustful and fearful, savvy but gauche. She is, in short, a teenager, and often unsure if she’s worth what she wants. But as much as she doubts herself, she always stands up for herself: she screams in disarmingly unabashed rage at Blane when he lets her down, and she snaps back when Steff bullies her. I always liked that Hughes took the trouble to slip in the reason for Steff’s hatred of Andie, and it has nothing to do with her being poor, or a nerd, or different – it’s because she knocked him back. In other words, it’s not about her, it’s about him, and as messages to young female audiences go, telling them that misogyny often stems from male insecurity is a pretty good one. Most of all, Andie learns never to change herself for anyone.

When we first meet Andie in
Pretty in Pink
, there’s a very big part of her that does want to be part of the popular and moneyed set, as much as she hates them. She drives down a street in the wealthy part of town and looks, longingly, at the big houses, much to Duckie’s bemusement. There’s no question that part of Blane’s appeal to her is that he represents entry into that world, which is precisely why she’s so conscious of him being from a different social class from her, despite her father reassuring her that it doesn’t matter. It’s only when she and Blane start dating that she realises how much she values herself, and she refuses to change an iota for him.

All the men have to change in the movie: Blane, Andie’s dad, Duckie, even Steff. The one person who doesn’t change is Andie, and she still gets her dream boy – although that wasn’t quite what Hughes intended, because in the original ending of the film Andie ends up with Duckie.

When he wrote the script, Hughes pictured Blane as fratty and obnoxious, and Charlie Sheen – unsurprisingly – was seriously considered for the role. Another Jake from
Sixteen Candles
, in other words, but with Ringwald getting together with The Geek in this film. Instead, he and Howard Deutch decided to cast the more sweetly soulful McCarthy, thereby making Blane seem more like a plausible boyfriend for Andie, despite his wealth.
^fn4

As any straight woman could have told them beforehand, McCarthy was so damn cute – his delicate looks so perfect for the beautiful but weak Blane – that there was no way female audiences were going to accept any ending other than one in which Andie gets together with him. But Hughes and Deutch, not being straight women, were ‘completely shocked’ when test audiences affirmed this after seeing the film with the original ending: ‘The teenage girls were very clear about this: they wanted Andie to get what she wanted and to get with the cute boy, forget the frog, and I resented that,’ recalls Deutch. Speaking as a former teenage girl, teenage audiences would probably have found Robert Downey Jr – who they initially considered for the role of Duckie instead of Jon Cryer – to be a more acceptable consolation prize than Cryer, but that was no longer an option, and so, reluctantly, Hughes rewrote the ending.

Thus, the film now ends with Blane turning up at the prom and informing Andie that the reason he stopped calling her is because, while he believed in her, ‘I didn’t believe in me.’ Duckie tells Andie to go with Blane, and he heads off into the sunset with Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer (try to keep up). Andie and Blane then kiss happily ever after.

Hughes and Deutch absolutely hated this revised ending: ‘The movie became something else. Something that was not what the movie was supposed to be. It felt immoral,’ says Deutch. My only real problem with the revised ending is that McCarthy had to wear a wig during the re-shoot as he had since shaved off all his hair for a new movie and the obviously synthetic nature of this tonsorial monstrosity is a downright insult to his youthful, beautiful bouffant. But in all honesty, I don’t mind that Andie ends up with Blane. After all, why shouldn’t the awkward girl get the beautiful boy if that’s who she lusts for? (And boy, does Andie lust for him – she practically eats him when they kiss.) Also, as Hughes shows through the storyline of Andie’s heartbroken and abandoned father, women should not get together with nice men if they don’t actually love them. That is a too little noted but important message.
^fn5