“The Model Modern Teen”
In his profile of the star in the May 26, 1986 issue of TIME magazine, Richard Corliss describes Molly Ringwald as a variation of the Valley Girl stereotype, a clean-cut American teen living in “Steven Spielberg’s idea of suburban paradise”. At the center of her image is her ability to both embody the present while remaining steadfastly in the past. As Corliss writes, “Molly Ringwald is both hip enough to be the style setter of Right Now and traditional enough to be any American teen of the past 50 years”. She is the personification of the 1980s, a remix culture both recklessly obsessed with the new and fastidiously enslaved to its pop antecedents, a “retro Time Warp that tosses all previous decades in a Cuisinart and purees them into The Latest Thing” (Corliss). In an era of such conspicuous consumption, even Corliss’ article indulges in a trip to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, issues of class and access to the lifestyles represented on screen were a faultline upon which many of the contradictions of the decade played out. While certain individuals were living some combination of a Spielberg-Hughes fantasy, the rest, a large portion of Americans who didn’t fit the straight, white, upper-middle-class mould of success, were forced to contend with a culture that prescribed desire based on a schema that didn’t necessarily reflect them or their interests.
One of the primary ideological tasks of celebrity, according to Richard Dyer in his aptly titled book Stars, is the star’s ability to “mask people’s awareness of themselves as class members” (27). By channelling divisive dialogues through the lens of individual experience, the star serves a somewhat cathartic function, allowing the audience to sublimate their dissatisfaction with society through the cinema. It is fitting, then, that in the three films she made with John Hughes, Ringwald played characters from vastly different class backgrounds while the films themselves foregrounded issues of class as they played out in the hallways of American high schools. Each of the films addressed class as it manifested itself in individual personal relationships rather than its social structure, finding solutions to class-based conflict in the spontaneous ecstasy of teen love. By personifying class reconciliation through rebellious romance and personal expression, Molly Ringwald became the 80s, crafting an image rooted in materialism and consumerism while championing personal expression within those discourses.
