“Racist, Misogynistic, Homophobic”: Molly Ringwald On John Hughes Movies In The #MeToo Era

Actress Molly Ringwald has shone a light on some of the more troubling elements in the movies of iconic filmmaker John Hughes. In a terrific essay for The New Yorker, the star of The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles says that while she is proud of the movies she made with Hughes in the 1980s, his writing sometimes contained streaks of racism, misogyny and homophobia.

“Hughes’s films play constantly on television and are even taught in schools,” Ringwald writes. “There is still so much that I love in them, but lately I have felt the need to examine the role that these movies have played in our cultural life: where they came from, and what they might mean now.”

The actress highlights a number of disturbing moments in Hughes’ films, including the scene in The Breakfast Club where Judd Nelson’s character looks up her character’s skirt, and the sequence in Sixteen Candles when the male lead essentially trades his drunk girlfriend for sex. She also points to the frequent use of the words “fag” and “faggot” in his writing, and the “grotesque stereotype” of the character Long Duk Dong, also from Sixteen Candles.

At the same time, Ringwald praises Hughes (who died in 2009) for the way his movies “convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel”.

“Whether that’s enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say — even criticizing them makes me feel like I’m divesting a generation of some of its fondest memories, or being ungrateful since they helped to establish my career,” she writes. “And yet embracing them entirely feels hypocritical. And yet, and yet…”

Ringwald admits that her discomfort has only grown since the emergence of the #MeToo movement. “If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes,” she writes.

“It’s hard for me to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.”

“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?”

“John wanted people to take teens seriously, and people did,” Ringwald adds. “The films are still taught in schools because good teachers want their students to know that what they feel and say is important; that if they talk, adults and peers will listen. I think that it’s ultimately the greatest value of the films, and why I hope they will endure.

“The conversations about them will change, and they should. It’s up to the following generations to figure out how to continue those conversations and make them their own.”

You can read Ringwald’s entire essay over here.