Molly Ringwald Says Coming-of-Age '80s Films That Made Her a Star Are Too 'White' for Today
If you were one of pitchfork-wielders in the angry mob breathlessly awaiting a mea culpa from Molly Ringwald for starring in teen movies that were too “white” for modern audiences, well, this was your lucky week.
I didn’t know that there was such a mob out there, mind you. In fact, there might not be. There might not be a single person who spent more than 12 seconds over the past month considering the sociopolitical implications of the whiteness of ’80s coming of age flicks and how it relates to Molly Ringwald. But if there is, consider them (pardon the pun) mollified.
Ringwald was at the Miami Film Festival over the weekend to receive the Creative Vanguard Award from industry outlet Variety, which I’m guessing is an award you get if you were 1) once famous and 2) don’t die.
Variety’s announcement that Ringwald would be receiving the award last month was additionally of little help, with a quote from a Variety exec merely reminding everyone that Ringwald wasn’t just in a few of John Hughes’ better non-“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” movies.
“It’s important to remember that before Molly Ringwald was the iconic young star of John Hughes’ teen angst-driven comedies such as ‘Sixteen Candles,’ ‘Pretty in Pink’ and ‘The Breakfast Club,’ she first starred in Paul Mazursky’s contemporary update of Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest,’” said Steve Gaydos, Variety executive editor and executive vice president of global content.
“This is important because the secret of Ringwald’s early success and career longevity is the simple fact she has always been one of American film and television’s most gifted and versatile actresses. Her dazzling work this year as Joanna Carson in the Ryan Murphy hit TV series ‘Feud’ is ample proof that Ringwald’s range and acumen remain intact, and audiences can continue to expect new and wonderful surprises from one of their favorite stars.”
Uh, sure. Ringwald actually seemed to have more of a grasp on the nature of this honor: “I think this is the first award that I’ve ever received in my life, so thank you,” she told the audience at the Miami Film Festival.
However, she did swap out one illusion for another: the idea that, to have ever starred in a film that existed before the era of the diversity rider, one needs to wring one’s hands profusely in public.
“The movies that I’m so well known, they were very much of a time, you know,” she said.
“I think that if you were to remake that now, I think it would have to be much more diverse. You couldn’t make a movie that white now,” she added with a laugh.
But lo, that wasn’t enough: “Those movies are really, very white, and they don’t really represent what it is to be a teenager in a school in America today,” she added.
“But I think that they were really great and they were of that time and they really represented Hughes’ experience.”
Molly Ringwald on how #PrettyinPink #SixteenCandles and #TheBreakfastClub would need more diversity if remade today: “Those movies are very white and they don’t really represent what it is to be a teenager in a school in America today.” @MiamiFilmFest https://t.co/zADRyU4CfW pic.twitter.com/rrtlQGj4ir
— Variety (@Variety) April 12, 2024
So, wait: The films represented the lived experience of their writer/director, which is what we’re told films are supposed to do. Hughes was also an immensely talented writer and director, with both his lived experience of life in Chicagoland suburbia and his love of Hollywood entertainments — he focused on family films later in his career — having played a part in the writing and/or directing of these classics:
- “Sixteen Candles”
- “Pretty in Pink”
- “The Breakfast Club”
- “National Lampoon’s Vacation/European Vacation/Christmas Vacation”
- “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
- “Home Alone“
- “Weird Science”
- “Uncle Buck”
- “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”
The first three starred Ringwald in some capacity, mind you, and probably represent at least 60 percent of what you’ve seen her in. But, no, #JohnHughesTooWhite.
Moreover, this isn’t the first Hughes star to engage in self-flagellation in the wake of the epochal events of 2020. In fact, just days into the long, hot, fiery but mostly peaceful summer of our discontent began brewing, “The Breakfast Club” co-star Ally Sheedy told the U.K. Metro that “I think they would have to change quite a bit in the movie if it was going to be relevant now.”
“I don’t think it would be all white kids in a suburb of Chicago. I think that’s one thing by itself. I don’t think that [five white kids] would be particularly relevant or powerful today,” she said.
“I think there would be some changes in the women in the film and how they are spoken about and how they speak to other people. It was very much John Hughes’ story and vision.”
In other words, both Ringwald and Sheedy agree that Hughes’ films represented the “lived experience” and “story and vision” of a writer and director who made good movies … but that “lived experience” and “story and vision” came from a white man, so naturally it’s Not Good™. (Hughes himself isn’t around to comment on all this; the auteur died an untimely death at age 59 in 2009 after collapsing during a walk.)
The great irony is that Hughes’ films, while set in an upper-class suburban Chicago milieu, often confront privilege — very specifically “The Breakfast Club,” where Ringwald’s spoiled, rich school queen is forced to interact with characters she normally wouldn’t during the weekend detention session in which the film is set, including an abused working-class troublemaker, Sheedy’s nonconformist outcast, and a geek facing mental health issues played by Anthony Michael Hall.
But no nonbinary BIPOC character or an illegal al– oops, undocumented Latinx lesbian characters in the mix? Sorry, folks — erm, folx — that won’t fly.
And it’s not as if “The Breakfast Club” is the only work in the Hughes oeuvre that foregrounds class difference in eighties suburbia. “Pretty in Pink,” another one of the Ringwald/Hughes productions, practically bases its entire plot off of working class and upper class conflict. So, too, do “Uncle Buck” and “Plains, Trains and Automobiles.” If you’re one of the #HollywoodSoWhite crowd, at least consider there was a far greater diversity of character background in Hughes’ films than there was in other cinematic productions of the era.
If one wishes to acknowledge that our vision of America has changed since John Hughes’ heyday as a director in the 1980s, it is enough to say some variation on autres temps, autres mœurs in passing and move along. But, no. These interviews, like so many others, come across as Hollywood hostage tapes: “I’m sorry my films back in the day were so, so, so white. Really, we got it so wrong. And trust me — I wasn’t the one who did it! Really! Let me praise the Glorious Fourth Year of Our Great Racial Reckoning. Please let me keep getting some bit parts.”
It would almost be funny were it not so pathetic.
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