In Which It Is Really Human of You To Listen To All My Bullshit

They Fucking Forgot My Birthday

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Sixteen Candles

dir. John Hughes

The Jewish Conspiracy has succeeded at making sure non-traditionally attractive and awkward Yidboyz get portrayed onscreen and off as being capable of winning the affection of 10s even when they themselves are 5s at best. But where does that leave all the non-normative and jolie-laide girls?

There is this optimistic myth often perpetuated by the media that women are less shallow than men. And it bothers me because honestly, we're not. Just like boys, most girls would rather project ideals onto a beautiful blank template than deal with an actual average human being. And then when we find out the hot guy is, you know, not really that smart or interesting we still find ways to convince ourselves he must just be secretly rilly deep.

TV examples are Jordan Catalano from My So Called Life and Daniel Desario from Freaks and Geeks. You know they're out of your reach, that they're probably kind of stupid, but who cares? They're just so cute! You could probably make Brian Krakow or Nick Andopolis your actual boyfriend but that's so attainable and boring. Plus those guys are both needy and stalkerish.

Decidedly non-awkward Jewish girls include Winona Horowitz Ryder, Natalie "Manic Pixie" Portman, and Cher Horowitz in (still my favorite movie) Clueless. They are not the point of this piece. We all know a hot babe can do well regardless of which Testament she follows. The question posed here is how can we show the same favor to ordinary looking girls.

I mean, there are a few "Awkward Girls Coming Of Age" movies but they are generally the polar opposite of wish fulfillment fantasies. The two I can think of are Welcome To The Dollhouse and Slums Of Beverly Hills. They both depict what it's like to be totally miserable and have no control over your living situation. It's like the antithesis of Animal House or Porky's.

There are barely any teen movies that don't end with the poorly socialized male geek protagonist getting laced up with his babe of choice. The only one with a genuine seventies style downer ending is The Last American Virgin, based on cult Israeli sex comedy Lemon Popsicle. I assume this is where Wet Hot American Summer got its downer ending conceit. For every movie starring a hideous Hebrew moppet who gets to tag-team bang a mother/daughter duo of hotties there should be at least one film about an awkward Jewish girl who gets to date a beautiful shaygetz guy played by like, Aaron Eckhart or Viggo.

Okay wait, actually Dirty Dancing has the exact kind of plot I just described, but I really hate that movie. I just find it phony, despite the abortions. To my mind the real flaw in Dirty Dancing is that the Patrick Swayze character is symbolically standing in for a black dude. Why not just let Baby get involved with a black dude? It would have made for a much better story.

In Sixteen Candles the nerdy girl gets to have true agency. She is the main character rather than a cipher. She's not a sex bomb hidden behind glasses, she's just totally average looking. And yet she aspires to date a guy much hotter and more popular than she is. Try coming up with other movies where it's the case. The only ones I thought of are Hairspray and Teen Witch.

When faced with a realistic mate of semi-equal status, who among us doesn't get horribly insulted and shudder "THEM?!?" Farmer Ted doesn't really want Sam either, he's just desperate for somebody. As it turns out both Sam and The Geek want to get with the popular hotties, and who doesn't? He even gets to date-rape Jake Ryan's girlfriend. It was the eighties!

You can argue against Molly Ringwald's acting skills, but there's no denying that she nails what it feels like to be an average slightly offbeat teenage girl. She's hardly ugly, but neither pretty nor charismatic enough to merit attention from the high school boys preoccupied with the big breasted blondes of the North Shore. Sam Baker and Square Pegs were the best chances a geek girl in the eighties had to see herself represented onscreen.

Sixteen Candles makes no judgment on Sam wanting to date way out of her league jock Jake Ryan. She has no interest in her outcast peer played by Anthony Michael Hall, (known only as Farmer Ted or "The Geek"). But he does charge other nerds for views of her panties, which is legitimately creepy and gross.

Like Kevin Smith, Apatow, or the Revenge Of The Nerds series Hughes aims to inspire those disenfranchised by popularity. It's just so rarely that teenage girls are depicted realistically and sympathetically, instead of as superficial objects of male lust.

On the downside, there's also The Donger. Like most AZN characters in films of the eighties, Long Duk Dong is a horribly embarrassing racist caricature. Only Short Round makes the modern day film viewer cringe quite as much as Gedde Watanabe's oriental minstrelsy. On the plus side, he too gets his athletic dream girl, so everyone wins. Happy endings for all!

A fun fact is that in real life, Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall actually briefly dated. Another fun fact about Pretty In Pink (which is more or less the same plot with more class issues and James Spader directed by Howard Deutch) is that Robert Downey Jr. was originally going to play Duckie.

As per the original ending of Hughes's script, it would make a lot more sense for Duckie and Ringwald to get together at the end. However after Jon Cryer was cast when RDJ dropped out, audiences in test screenings reacted poorly to Molly dumping prettyboy yuppie Blaine for the Duck and they re-shot it.

Which as it turned out was the right move. Because, y'know, these characters are in fucking high school. Forget about platonic male best friends you're not attracted to. Just date the hot rich guy. Who cares if his friends are all dicks? You're going to break up after the summer to go to college anyway.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here.

LOLJK, THE RICH HOTTIES ALWAYS END UP 2GTHR IRL

In Which John Hughes Invented PG-13

John Hughes On John Hughes

I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I'm done is write another one. Then I don't feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away. That's why I tend to work with the same people; I really befriend them. I couldn't speak after Sixteen Candles was over. I returned to the abandoned house, and they were tearing down [Samantha Baker's] room. And I was just horrified, because I wanted to stay there forever.

Most of my work has been about ordinary people. Just regular folks, the guys that live on the right and left of you, the people you grew up next to. They're people you see every day, but you may never stop and think about them. But if you do stop and look, you discover there are really great dramas taking place in every one of those lives.

Molly Ringwald: Would a woman like Kelly LeBrock have been your ideal when you were a teen?

John Hughes: No. Too scary.

Ferris has a line where he refers to his father's saying that high school was like a great party. Ferris knows what his father was like, and he knows that his father has just forgotten the bad parts. Adults ask me all sorts of baffling questions, like, "Your teenage dialogue - how do you do that?" and "Have you actually seen teens interact?" And I wonder if they think that people under twenty-one are a separate species. We shot Ferris at my old high school, and I talked with the students a lot. And I loved it, because it was easy to strike up a conversation with them. I can walk up to a seventeen-year-old and say, "How do you get along with your friends?" and he'll say, "Okay." You ask a thirty-five-year-old the same question, and he'll say, "Why do you want to know? What's wrong? Get away from me." All those walls built up.

I was kind of quiet. I grew up in a neighborhood that was mostly girls and old people. There weren't any boys my age, so I spent a lot of time by myself, imagining things. And every time we would get established somewhere, we would move. Life just started to get good in seventh grade, and then we moved to Chicago. I ended up in a really big high school, and I didn't know anybody. But then The Beatles came along.Changed my whole life. And then Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home came out and really changed me. Thursday I was one person, and Friday I was another. My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on. I liked them at a time when I was in a pretty conventional high school, where the measure of your popularity was athletic ability. And I'm not athletic - I've always hated team sports.

The Beatles and The Clash are the greatest. I've listened to the Beatles' White Album for more than sixteen years, and when we were filming Ferris Bueller, I listened to the album every single day for fifty-six days.

I was very worried that some of the long dialogue scenes in The Breakfast Club would get booed off the screen, but I think they work because by the time you reach them, you've gotten to know the characters.

Mr. Mom was pretty badly butchered. I just got raped on the project. It is, in fact, the story of my and my two children. I did the first draft in a day and a half, one sitting.

I never start with the jokes. I look at an issue and try to find every story in it. The world can only take so many Airplane!s. To me, Animal House was a character movie. I'm a great fan of Capra, Hitchcock, and The Honeymooners. Stories and characters. You get a lot of bad comedy from people sitting around a bar and saying, "Wouldn't it be funny if?" The Lampoon taught me the value of being honest, to reach deep into myself and put out things that other people were also thinking.

I used to watch The Mickey Mouse Club, those obnoxious, spoiled Mouseketeers you just wanted to beat the tar out of. They could do anything! Disneyland after hours? Whatever you want! They'd wear these horse things, and they'd give away giant Tootsie Rolls. My grandmother was diabetic; there was a fear of sugar in my house. I wanted one of those goddamn Tootsie Rolls, I wanted to dance with that horse for a while, I wanted to go to Disneyland. I never got there as a kid and knew I never would.

I stumbled into this business, I didn't train for it. I yelled 'Action!' on my first two movies before the camera was turned on. They're not perfect movies, they're flawed. They're not cappuccino pictures, they're sort of Maxwell House instant coffee out of the machine at the car wash.

America has this great reverence for New York. I look at it as this decaying horror pit. So let the people in Chicago enjoy Ferris Bueller.

People ask me, ‘Were you the geek?’ No, I wasn’t. ‘So which one were you?’ I don’t get it. Who was Alfred Hitchcock in his movies? Janet Leigh? Did anyone even ask him?

You know that assignment you always get in high school when you’re reading Walden, to keep a journal? Well, I just kept doing that.

"Danke Schoen" — Wayne Newton (mp3)

"Love Missile F1-11 (Dance Mix)" — Sigue Sigue Sputnik (mp3)

"Taking the Day Off" — General Public (mp3)

"Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" — The Dream Academy (mp3)