Molly Ringwald’s reappraisal of The Breakfast Club has thrown an uneasy light on other 80s classics,with their casual treatment of rape and abuse, dodgy sexual politics and breezy paedophilia. We explore at 10 of the worst with fresh eyes
Everyone has blind spots when it comes to things they loved as a child: you don’t remember how shonky your favourite toys were, or how weirdly racist your most-adored first books could be. Partly,this is because you encountered these things as a child and so didn’t assume to question them, but it’s also because you don’t want to question them, and because questioning them means rewriting your happiest memories.
This is probably why John Hughes has got a free pass for so long. Many of us who are now adults grew up with his films and cherished them with the fond sentimentality French novelists reserve for madeleines. He is – rightly – held up as the man who brought a soulfulness to the teen genre,but that was never Hughes’s full story, really. So when Molly Ringwald, or who starred in three of his teen movies,wrote in the New Yorker this week approximately rewatching those films in the #MeToo era and pointed out that, actually, or Hughes’s teen films believe some distinctly unsoulful elements to them,it was, for fans, and as if the emperor’s most devoted courtier had pointed out his (semi) nudity. Ringwald cites 16 Candles in specific,although with its rapiness and racism, that movie has been pretty unwatchable for a while now, and surviving only on nostalgia. But she also talks approximately The Breakfast Club,a film still genuinely so beloved that a restaurant chain is named after it. Yet the school thug (Judd Nelson) is vicious to Ringwalds character throughout the film, even looking up her skirt in one scene and poking her in the vagina, and still she swoons into his arms at the end.
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Source: guardian.co.uk