MY MOVIE SHELF: Sixteen Candles

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 186  Days to go: 128

Movie #252:  Sixteen Candles

First off, the premise of Sixteen Candles, in which Sam (Molly Ringwald) discovers her whole family has forgotten her birthday, would never have happened to me, because the second my older sister scheduled her wedding for the day after, I’d have caused an uproar. Not that she couldn’t have her wedding the day after my birthday, of course, but people would hear about it enough that it couldn’t possibly escape their minds. So in a way, it’s Sam’s fault for not being more vocal about her birthday expectations right up front.

Still, the idea of your parents forgetting your birthday (particularly a milestone birthday, but any birthday will do), sounds like an absolute nightmare to me, and the fact that John Hughes used it as the subject for his first feature film (he’d wanted to do The Breakfast Club first because of its single, confined location, but this one was greenlit before that one) exemplifies his legendary status as a writer/director who really understood and “got” the 1980s teenage psyche. He knew what was important to them, he knew what they wanted, he related to them. And by extension, he related to the adolescent youth of the entire nation.

The Breakfast Club is more famous for having more important things to say, but Sixteen Candles is actually my favorite for the simple reason that I heart Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling). Jake is perfect and beautiful and a senior and … perfect. He’s everything you want in a crush on an upperclassman. And miraculously, he not only knows who Samantha is, but she intrigues him.

The movie is maybe not something one could get away with today — for the jarring gong musical cue every time Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe) comes on screen, at the very least. It’s probably also not the best idea to talk about how you could violate your unconscious girlfriend ten different ways or have to explain why you won’t. In that way, it’s definitely a film of an entirely different era. But it still makes me laugh and it still makes me sad and it still makes me hope. Anthony Michael Hall as Farmer Ted is just about the most ridiculous and embarrassing nerd ruler to ever be both a character and a caricature on film, and yet Hall’s performance is not at all self-conscious or hesitant. He gives 100% to every dance move, every lifted eyebrow, and every smug come-on. Moreover, Molly Ringwald was the absolute embodiment of the high school girl who felt invisible and unlovable. (Honestly, I can’t even tell you the number of times I said “I’m going to kill myself” in the exact same sing-song voice she uses. It’s uncanny. It’s universal.) Her humiliation is palpable, her despair is both overexaggerated and all-encompassing. Her neurotic obsession with Jake is … pretty on point, actually. It’s just perfect.

And big props to all the actors playing Sam’s grandparents for really doing stellar supporting work, whether it’s by scolding Jake over the phone or by feeling up Sam’s newly sprouted boobs. Somehow only grandparents can be even more out of touch than your parents. Good on them for doing the awkwardness justice.

Additional fun facts:

Bridal veils, whether you’re hopped up on muscle relaxers or not, feel like a spider web on your face. You really do that blowing/spitting thing Ginny (Blanche Baker) does in order to get it away from your skin.

I never actually knew anyone in high school who either showered naked after gym, like Jake’s girlfriend, or wore headgear, like Joan Cusack’s nameless geek character. But we did go to a lot of school dances.

I was in love with Jake, yes, but I also thought John Cusack was cute as Bryce. Adorable nerds are kind of my sweet spot.

My birthday is this month. Nobody is ever allowed to forget it. Ever.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Breakfast Club

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #39: The Breakfast Club

I don’t think I ever realized this when I was a teenager, but I really wished back then that something like The Breakfast Club would happen to me. I loved the movie, of course — who doesn’t? — and I connected with it, but it didn’t ever occur to me how much I longed for this type of connection with other people.

I’ve always been introverted, uncomfortable speaking up around people I didn’t know. And I’m pretty introspective too, so a lot of my observations remain internalized if there’s not someone around to draw them out of me. I’ve always known this about myself, but never really admitted how lonely it made me. I know everyone feels lonely in high school — or awkward or misunderstood or whatever — but nobody understands that at the time, do they? I didn’t. I had a few wonderful friends — girls who were my lifelines, truly — but I still always felt like I was separate somehow. I mean, maybe I was just too wrapped up in my self and my own problems in high school, or maybe everyone is — hell, maybe that’s how everyone is all the time — but I didn’t even realize how isolated my very good friends felt. Not then. It’s like we were all our own separate islands.

In high school, you find your niche and you stick with it, just trying to make it to the end when college and adulthood will come along and make everything different. (You don’t know at the time that in a lot of ways, nothing is ever really all that different.) You just try to make it to the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the quarter, the end of the semester, the end of the year, the end. You want to do well enough that your parents stay off your back, you don’t want to be too smart or too awkward or too different lest you be the object of ridicule (or you go the other way and you make a point to be wildly different and outrageous, as if that will make you better), and you just try to get through it. The Breakfast Club, set in a single room (mostly), on a single day — almost like a play, this way — captures all of those feelings of isolation and finding your niche and trying to stay in it and the pressure you feel from your parents and the pressure you feel from your friends and the pressure you feel from yourself, and just trying to survive til the end. It captures every single one. It’s like magic.

And the point of The Breakfast Club is to convey that we all feel this way, that all kids since the beginning of time have felt this way. And not just across the generations, but across the hallways, too. Every one of us feels like a delinquent at times. We all feel entitled or like we have all the answers. We all have our triumphs. We all go a little crazy. It speaks so much to your heart, this movie. But it never happened in real life. I never had a heart-to-heart with one of the jocks. I wasn’t a cool girl who went to parties, and they certainly didn’t have anything to do with me. I was in some honors classes, but I was never dedicated or ambitious enough to really be one of the high-performing brainy kids. I was a little bit wild, in my way, but I wasn’t anywhere near bad girl enough to really run with that crowd either. I was an outlier, friends with other outliers or those who were maybe on the fringes of their own status groups, generally drawn to the ones who were much more confident and outspoken than I was so I could drink in their energy and maybe learn by osmosis how to be more visible, how to make my voice heard.

There were certainly a lot of things I didn’t understand about this movie when I first saw it at probably 14 or 15 (a running theme in these posts), but there were also a lot of things that I got right away. Mostly I loved Judd Nelson as John Bender (my irrepressible attraction to bad boys at work at an early age), but not just because he was witty and defiant and a smart ass. I loved how it was all bravado, how he was so vulnerable underneath. (This is a typical symptom of women attracted to bad boys — they love their wounded hearts. I am not different.) He would never want you to pity him, of course, but he probably wouldn’t mind if you comforted him. In fact, I’m sure now he’d take advantage of it. But just like poor Daddy-issue Claire (Molly Ringwald), I would’ve run right to him, even though he infuriated and sometimes humiliated me.

I also loved Ally Sheedy’s Allison a lot (John and Allison being the two best ones to relate to, I think, when you’re a teenager), because even though she was always being outrageous just so people would pay attention to her (being ignored at home making attention seem both terrifying and vital), as a teenager it feels like she’s the one unafraid to do whatever it is she feels like doing. She doesn’t conform; she’s not a cog in the machine. I think people respect that, because so few people are brave enough to do it. Nobody realizes then that she’s just as scared as everyone else.

For me, the ones I least wanted to admit I related to where Andrew and Brian (Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall), because they were the scariest ones. They were the ones who broke under the pressure that parents can put on you, to succeed, to win, to be better than they were — whatever. I felt that pressure, the same as a lot of people did I’m sure, but I didn’t want to speak it for fear I would break under it as well. It’s always there under the surface when you’re in adolescence, maybe, the tenuous grasp you have on the entire bullshit difficult life you have to lead and how every single decision you make at 16 is going to impact the rest of your life. I kind of make a point now to tell my kids that’s not necessarily true, and that if they screw up occasionally, it probably won’t be the end of the world. Because I don’t think anyone told me back then, and I really wish they would’ve.

Of course, even as I learned quite a bit from the movie, I still didn’t understand back then that Claire had just as many problems and insecurities as the rest of them. I probably really thought that if I were beautiful and thin and popular and rich that I could deal with parents who used me as a pawn. And since my parents were already divorced I didn’t see what the big deal would be to her, or how much pressure and ridicule she felt about her virginity. It took me several more years to see her, and I kind of feel bad about that. Guilty, like I owe her an apology.

I watched this movie tonight with my stepdaughter, who has already seen it a bunch of times and who loves it just as much as I did — just as much as I do. She quoted at least half of it from memory, the same way I’ve done on more occasions that I can count. She’s a little younger than I was when I first saw it, probably, but she’s in the same head space, and I try every day to make her see how universal it really is, how much her feelings are shared by so many others — of her generation and of the dozens of generations before her, and how they will be for the dozens to come. She probably doesn’t really want to hear that yet, though, because she’s an Allison — wanting to stand out, wanting to be different, almost desperately pleading with the world to see her as unique. Which I guess makes her cooler and more confident than I was at that age, because all I ever wanted to do was fit in. Of course, we’re not all that different either. Her two favorite characters? John and Allison, just like mine back in the ’80s.