Simple Terms, Convenient Definitions: Molly Ringwald and Class Negotiations

Sixteen Candles

Hughes’ first directorial effort is woefully saccharine and struggles to stand the test of time. Marred by devastatingly problematic gender dynamics and one of the worst racial stereotypes in cinematic history, the film nonetheless was popular in its day, grossing over $23 million at the box office and launching both Hughes and Ringwald into instant stardom. The film revolves around Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald), an angsty middle-class teen whose birthday has been forgotten by her entire family, and her search for true love in the form of dating Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), the most popular boy in school. What sets the characters in Sixteen Candles apart from their counterparts in subsequent Hughes films is their blind acceptance of given cultural scripts. Relationships and feelings remain shallow as the film’s characters move through a series of high school rituals (bus rides, locker rooms, dances, etc.) pantomiming hallmarks of maturity they don’t necessarily understand. Each character has a set of assumptions about the way life should be based upon what seems like nothing more than a superficial understanding of popular culture. For example, when talking to the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall) about her birthday, Samantha exclaims that her sixteen birthday “should be platinum”. Anthony Bleach, in his analysis of the three Hughes-Ringwald collaborations titled “Postfeminist Cliques?”, contextualizes Samantha’s desire for the material wealth of the upper class, evidenced by her attraction to Jake and yearning for “proper” recognition on such an important teenage milestone, within a larger narrative of 80s postfeminism, restructuring female empowerment within the discourse of materialism. As Bleach writes, “these films take feminism ‘into account’ at the same time that Ringwald's characters articulate the same ‘individualist, acquisitive, and transformative’ values of postfeminism”(28). The values of individualism, acquisition, and transformation are all on display in Ringwald’s performance in Sixteen Candles. Not tied to a particular schoolyard subculture and comfortably middle-class, Samantha is a type of everywoman, individualist in the sense that her essence is defined by her personal experience rather than overriding class stereotypes. She achieves transformation, in the form of her burgeoning relationship with Jake, through acquisition, she wants him so she gets him. Adding to the postfeminist discourse of the film is its treatment of Jake’s girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), who spends the latter half of the movie drugged and is handed over to the Geek in exchange for a pair of Samantha’s underwear. While the film is ultimately trite wish-fulfillment, it is important for establishing the ideological framework for Molly Ringwald’s star image.

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