By Simmone Howell
"Love is awful."
"Love is complicated."
Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer in Pretty In Pink. Credit: Paramount Pictures
"Love is a bitch, Duck."
If Pretty in Pink taught me anything in 1986 it was that love was all those things, but it was also a reason to get out of bed in the morning – the hope of it, anyway. Nothing was going to happen at school, but there was always the commute: maybe I'd bump into my dream guy in the food court. We'd share donut holes and talk about the Smiths. At 15 I was so far from romantic love that I practically have a violin soundtrack to my memory stream. That was me on the train with the acne and ankle socks staking out porcelain-skinned private school boys, or shabby punks thumbing Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
Teenage romantics have to get it where they can. One of my Year 10 texts was Wuthering Heights, but that was too sophisticated for me. I didn't really understand Cathy crying, "Nelly, I am Heathcliff"; I was taking my cues from teen movies. Hollywood seemed to have moved on from the story-less breast-fests of Porky's and Animal House, and John Hughes was in ascendance.
Of all of Hughes' films, Pretty in Pink is closest to my heart. The New Wave Romeo and Juliet territory had been covered by Valley Girl two years earlier, but while the latter relied on the gimmickry, Pretty in Pink was touched by social realism. Molly Ringwald plays Andie, from the wrong side of the tracks, who falls in love with wealthy Blane, (Andrew McCarthy). It's "zoid' meets "richie", but, as Blane says hopefully, "That doesn't make it wrong. It doesn't mean we can't try." Their union is opposed from both sides: Andy's best friend/stalker Duckie Dale (Jon Cryer) despairs, while Steff McKee (James Spader), alpha asshole and keeper of the social order, wears Blane down with well-aimed jabs: "If you've got a hard-on for trash, don't take care of it around us."
Even the adult characters were fleshed out and believable: Harry Dean Stanton as Andie's sweet-but-hopeless dad and Annie Potts as her kooky employer/mentor. Pretty in Pink also looked great. I consider the set dressers of bedrooms in '80s teen movies to be artisans – the walls of Andie's room were covered with photos and kimonos and junk jewellery, while Blane's sports only a lonely Edward Hopper print. All of this: the casting, the "look", the music, resulted in a world where teenage me would have happily lived.
Were the tropes there before John Hughes? Losers lusting beyond their station, mean girls, love triangles, hopeless parents, wild best friends, house parties, "lipstick-and-load" montages. Hughes recycled his best efforts: Matthew Broderick lip-syncing to Danke Schoen becomes Duckie Dale killing Try a Little Tenderness (choreographed by Kenny Ortega!) Molly Ringwald's heart-to-heart with her father in Sixteen Candles feels key but by Pretty in Pink, the advice is going the other way ("A kid isn't supposed to know more than her father.")
Hughes' actors were always breaking the fourth wall, inviting the audience in: Ferris Bueller talks directly to camera, while Farmer John and Duckie Dale both give the camera a look when a girl falls in their lap. Like, "Do you believe this?" Uh, no. But romance requires a suspension of disbelief. Because waking up in a bush with vomit down your unbuttoned shirt-front, that would be someone else's movie.
In his essay Party Politics, George Pendle writes that the John Hughes house party is "an anarchic, artificial space in which roles are reversed and caste systems toppled. It is a topsy-turvy venue where geeks can bed prom queens, and bullies can end up being bullied … The house party is a prelude to the house being torn apart, and with it the ties to staid family life." In my barbarian years I went to a few parties on a Hughesian scale, but I never ended up with a Jake Ryan-type kneeling on a coffee table over a cupcake. At one I swayed drunkenly close to a bonfire. At another I saw a couple having sex on the neighbour's lawn. At yet another I fell into a cactus patch and had to be magnaplasm'ed by some stranger's mother – I now know it is possible to dance with cactus spikes in your cans but I don't recommend it.
I saw Pretty in Pink at Doncaster Shoppingtown and immediately went down to K-Mart to buy the novelisation, devouring it across the three forms of transport it took to get home. The book was based on the script with the original ending – where Andie ends up with Duckie.
In the film version, she runs off with Blane but I much prefer the original ending. I like to imagine Andie and Duckie, post-graduation, moving into a flat and eating Chinese take-out and doing face-masks and watching old Joan Crawford movies. Maybe Andie could just use Blane for sex. Maybe she could use Steff too.
There is no question that Hughes' films have dated, that they suffer from moments of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism – his whole white-on-white palette wouldn't wash today, but in terms of emotional content, and in their depictions of adolescent longing and the desire to both stand out and belong, they feel true.
I am reminded of a line in Chris Kraus's I Love Dick, where the author compares her adult infatuation to "teenage psychosis".
"When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any difference between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you are both omnipotent and powerless."
Hughes understood this contradiction. His films epitomised teen fantasy. While watching them, for 90 minutes, and the hazy hereafter of the final credits, I could believe that a high schooler could hijack a parade float, or a fascist school principal could wind up beaten and humiliated, riding the bus, or that the nobody girl could get the beautiful guy, and everyone's hair would be perfect.