Free Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) by Hadley Freeman Page B

frustration and fury that the girl he always revered turns out to lack the wisdom to fall for him, and who among us has not felt so let down by a love interest? But what really makes the film stand out is the character of Andie.
    Before the eighties, young women didn’t tend to do too well in teen films. In the fifties they were generally ignored as movies focused instead on the agonised plights of young men ( The Wild Ones , Rebel Without a Cause ). In the sixties filmmakers realised that making movies about teenage protagonists made it even easier for them to shoot endless scenes of young women in minimal amounts of clothing without having to bother too much about things such as plot or logic. So young women were ostensibly given leading roles, but star billing really went to their bikinis (the hugely popular Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello films). By the seventies, teen films were synonymous with horror movies ( Halloween , Carrie ) or movies sentimentalising teenagers from an earlier era ( American Graffiti , Grease ), and, blood-soaked prom queens aside, they were utterly devoid of admirable female characters. But then Hughes arrived in the eighties, and suddenly the girls started getting the good roles.
    Hughes loved to write about awkward kids, but unlike too many male filmmakers, then and now, he didn’t only write about awkward boys: he also grasped the extraordinary idea that teenage girls were humans – not sex objects or icy bitch temptresses – and his close friendship with Ringwald doubtless helped him with this. He said that some of Ringwald’s roles in his films were ‘really a portrait of myself’, and the fact that he gave the two best roles he wrote for her male names – Sam and Andie – further suggests his identification with them.
    ‘When I first read John’s scripts, I couldn’t believe someone could write such amazing parts for young women. There had been movies with strong female protagonists before, but not ones with a strong female teenage protagonist,’ recalls Ringwald.
    Hughes’s teen films are peppered with awkward, truculent, even difficult young female characters: Jeanie, the patron saint of unhappy siblings everywhere, in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ; Allison, making her dandruff blizzard out of her hair in The Breakfast Club ; Watts, who proudly wears men’s boxers instead of women’s underwear in Some Kind of Wonderful ; Iona, Andie’s delightfully mouthy boss in Pretty in Pink , played by Annie Potts, aka Janine from Ghostbusters . In The Breakfast Club , Hughes showed he recognised one of the great plights of being a teenage girl when the two female characters discuss how to answer the question of whether or not you’ve ‘done it’: ‘It’s kind of a double-edged sword, isn’t it?’ Allison says to Claire. ‘If you say you haven’t, you’re a prude. And if you say you have, you’re a slut. It’s a trap. You want to but you can’t, and when you do, you wish you didn’t, right?’ It’s not only boys, Hughes knew, who struggle with sex. But of all Hughes’s great female characters, there is none greater than Andie.
    I first saw Pretty in Pink when I was nine, and while I did, like every other heterosexual female, promptly develop a lifelong crush on McCarthy, it was Andie with whom I fell in love. She was the first girl I’d ever seen on screen who felt recognisable to me. While I pretended sometimes I was Sloane from Ferris Bueller , all pretty and confident and with a boyfriend who picked me up from school in a car, I recognised that the teenager I would be was the awkward girl who drove herself to school. At the time, I lived in a Jewish enclave of Manhattan, meaning my life looked so different from the suburban white bread ones depicted in John Hughes’s films that I may as well have grown up in a different country. Yet even if the details of my life looked nothing like Hughes’s movies, they nonetheless taught me something important: that I, a