Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (11 page)

Thanks at least partly to Hughes, young actresses enjoyed lead roles in teen movies for a brief period in the nineties, such as Julia Stiles as the fuming feminist in
10 Things I Hate About You
and Alicia Silverstone in
Clueless
, as well as a brief flurry of independent films about tough girl heroines, such as 1996’s
Girls Town
, 1998’s
The Opposite of Sex
and 2000’s
Girlfight
and
Bring it On
. But the return of raunchy comedies and superhero films pushed them to the back again. There have been occasional teen films starring young women in the twenty-first century, such as, most obviously, 2004’s
Mean Girls
, but these are the exceptions. From a Hollywood studio’s point of view, it makes more sense to have a male lead in the belief that they’re more likely to attract a wider audience. (The closest raunchy nineties teen movies came to creating an Andie-like character is Michelle in
American Pie
, Alyson Hannigan, the goofy flute player who is always utterly herself, even when consumed with lust. But she is played in the movie for laughs, and is really just a side character to the male lead.)

But Ringwald herself would never get to play another great Hughesian heroine because by the time
Pretty in Pink
came out, she and Hughes were barely talking. During the making of
Pretty in Pink
, Hughes told Deutch to ask Ringwald if she would appear in their next film,
Some Kind of Wonderful
, which Deutch also directed, as Watts, another awkward girl. But Ringwald felt it was time to grow up. She knew the film was just too similar to ones she’d done before, as
Some Kind of Wonderful
is really just a gender-reversed
Pretty in Pink
, with the original ending reinstated. (Deutch insists that Hughes didn’t write it as a reaction to having had to rewrite
Pretty in Pink
and somewhat improbably suggests that Hughes didn’t see a connection between the two films.) So she turned it down, and Hughes stopped speaking to her and, after
Some Kind of Wonderful
, he never made another teen film. It turned out there was a downside to working with a director so in touch with his inner teenager: sometimes he really acted like a teenager.

‘John could be very sullen – if his feelings were hurt, he’d shut down and not speak to you for days,’ says Matthew Broderick, the star of
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
.

Ringwald later wrote in the
New York Times
: ‘We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back. And, true to his word, not only were we unable to return, but he went one step further. He did away with Neverland itself.’

‘There was a tremendous sense of loss for him when she moved on, as I think there was for her, too. They were very, very close and it was really sad to see that end,’ says Deutch.

Hughes died in 2009, at the ridiculously premature age of fifty-nine, of a heart attack: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’

Reporting his death, newspaper coverage barely mentioned
Home Alone
, which was his most financially successful film by a hefty mile. Instead, the media focused on his teen films, especially those he made with Ringwald. In the
New York Times
, chief film critic A.O. Scott wrote: ‘Molly Ringwald was for Mr Hughes what Jimmy Stewart was for Frank Capra: an emblem, a muse, a poster child and an alter-ego.’

But Hughes and Ringwald never spoke again, and she instead pursued an acting career without him. There was no final tearful make-up scene between her and her former mentor, no Hughesian climactic final scene. But that’s the thing about awkward girls: they might get their happy endings, but they don’t always follow the script.

TOP FIVE BRITISH BAD GUYS

5 Charles Dance,
The Golden Child

Charles Dance, phoning it in and all the funnier for it.

4 David Bowie,
Labyrinth

One of the weirdest villains of the eighties and one of the weirdest songs, too. I expect nothing less, David Bowie.

3 Steven Berkoff,
Beverly Hills Cop

It’s the law for Berkoff to appear in any list of top villains: Shakespearean, James Bond, you name it. He clocked up a few in the eighties, including in
Rambo First Blood Part II
. But obviously this one’s my favourite.

2 Terence Stamp,
Superman 2

‘KNEEL BEFORE ZOD.’ For his facial hair alone, Stamp comes zooming in at number two.

1 Alan Rickman,
Die Hard

No competition. Unbelievably, this was Rickman’s first film role, and with his debut, he became the uber-Brit villain (albeit playing a German). Unbettered by anyone until Rickman played the Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991’s
Robin Hood Prince of Thieves
.

When Harry Met Sally
:

Romcoms Don’t Have to Make You Feel Like You’re Having a Lobotomy

Come closer, children, come closer, and sit by your old granny’s knee. I’m a-gonna tell you a tale from times of yore, of what life was like back in the olden days. Oh, it was all very different back then, I can tell you! Back then, we didn’t have things like mobile telephones – good gracious, no! If you wanted to walk around with a phone that had a photo of you and your friends on the front, you’d have had to cut a handset off the wall and tape a Polaroid on to the back of it. What’s that you ask? ‘What’s a handset on a wall? What’s a Polaroid?’ Oh dear, I’m using old world language. Let’s try again. So as I was saying, back when your granny was a young child, we didn’t have mobile phones, we didn’t have the internet and, perhaps most shockingly of all, romcoms weren’t synonymous with mind-numbing retrograde crap that made you think all women were insane and all men horrible human beings. I know! It’s like hearing about a time when people didn’t have indoor plumbing, isn’t it?

Those of us who were born before 1995 know that romcoms didn’t used to be terrible, but we know this in the way that we know we used to love Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby in a manner wholly uncomplicated by their personal lives. We accept that time did exist, even if it does feel impossible today. The low status of the romcom today makes me very sad because it is so wrong. What’s more fun to watch than romance and comedy, for heaven’s sake? The answer is ‘ANYTHING’ if by ‘romance and comedy’ we now mean ‘misogynistic bullshit starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler’, as apparently we now do, judging by 2009’s
The Ugly Truth
. And the result is, romcoms have been declared dead.

‘RIP Romantic Comedies: Why Harry Couldn’t Meet Sally in 2013,’ blared the
Hollywood Reporter
. ‘Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad?’ mused the
Atlantic
. ‘Death of the Romcom,’ read a graph on Box Office Mojo, showing how the romcom has tanked while movies about superheroes have soared.

Do we really want to live in a world in which
Captain America
is considered to be more universal than romance and comedy, for heaven’s sake? Nobody, goes the theory, wants to see romcoms any more, because they are terrible. The end. But the truth is, the only reason romcoms are terrible these days is because Hollywood stopped giving a shit about women. Fin.

Romcoms were once amazing. In fact, the romcom genre encompasses some of the finest – and most feminist – films ever made, from
The Philadelphia Story
in 1940 to
Annie Hall
thirty-seven years later. There were so many great romcoms in the 1980s that I feel like there should be a collective noun for them: a delight of romcoms, a swoon of romcoms. And they weren’t just good – they were critically respected: romcoms such as
Moonstruck
and
Working Girl
won Golden Globes and Oscars. Sure, the Oscars are stupid and ultimately meaningless, but the only romcom of the past fifteen years that has been comparatively lauded was 2012’s
Bridesmaids
, which – uniquely for today – was written by and starred women. Which brings me to the next point.

What marks eighties romcoms out is that so many of the best ones starred women. Whereas Woody Allen made himself the protagonist of his great seventies romcoms, such as the wonderful
Annie Hall
and the now pretty much unwatchable
Manhattan
, in the eighties he made his then-partner Mia Farrow the focus, and his movies became sweeter, more varied and more interesting for it. She is very much the star in films such as
The Purple Rose of Cairo
and
Hannah and Her Sisters
. Cher was forty-one when she starred in
Moonstruck
and Nicolas Cage, her romantic opposite, was twenty-three, and no one in the film ever comments on this (fairly obvious) disparity.
^fn1
Working Girl
transplanted the romcom to zeitgeisty eighties Wall Street, with a vague (very, very vague) feminist spin, and has three fabulous actresses at its core: Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver and Joan Cusack. Kathleen Turner proved that women can front romantic action films when she co-starred with Michael Douglas in the sweetly screwball
Romancing the Stone
and
The Jewel of the Nile
.

‘I was the first! The first female lead of an action movie. I knocked up a lot of firsts,’ hoots Turner. ‘But I don’t remember that being discussed at the time – certainly no one expressed to me that they had any concerns. You know, I’m a strong woman and I was a terrific athlete so the only thing that they were worried about was they had to stop me from doing my stunts: “No Kathleen, you can’t swing across the gorge on a vine, insurance doesn’t cover that.” Ah, come on!’
^fn2

All these films attracted not just female audiences but (gasp! Shock! Amazement!) men, too.
The Princess Bride
proved that romcoms didn’t just have cross-gender appeal, they had a cross-generation one, as well, because only people without souls don’t enjoy romance and comedy and men, women and children alike all generally have souls.

The wonderful
Tootsie
showed that you could have a romcom that looked at love from both gender sides simultaneously. When aspiring actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman and redubs himself Dorothy Michaels, in order to get a role on a soap opera, this former selfish asshole finds himself helping to empower the women on the show against the sexist director (Dabney Coleman, everyone’s favourite sexist in the eighties). So far, so early eighties comedy. But Hoffman plays the part much more tenderly than audiences have come to expect from movies featuring actors cross-dressing. In an emotional interview with the American Film Institute in 2012, a tearful Hoffman described how shocked he was when he first saw himself made up as a woman because he wasn’t beautiful. He then went home and cried and said to his wife that he had to make this movie. When she asked why, he replied: ‘Because I think I am an interesting woman when I look at myself onscreen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character. Because she doesn’t fulfil physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out. There’s too many interesting women I have … not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.’

To the film’s credit, it does show various men in the movie learning to appreciate Dorothy, despite not being conventionally attractive, including her co-star John (played by George Gaynes, better known to eighties movie fans as dippy Commandant Lassard from the
Police Academy
films), the father of a friend and even, to a certain extent, Coleman. You can tell that Hoffman truly did respect both the character and the film because he managed to make a whole film about a man cross-dressing without once coming across as even slightly transphobic – a downright marvel, considering the film was made thirty-five years ago, and this is why it feels as timeless as the similarly transphobia-free
Some Like it Hot
. Nothing dates a film quicker than bigotry (that, and giving a cameo role to Paris Hilton). At most, the movie has a small plotline about his co-star Julie thinking that Dorothy’s a lesbian, but even this is done rather sweetly: when Michael-as-Dorothy tries to kiss her, Julie reels away in shock but, instead of being shocked or even horrified, she burbles apologetically, ‘I’m sure I’ve got the same impulses. Obviously I did …’

But the movie flakes out when it ends with Michael getting together with Julie, played by the astonishingly beautiful Jessica Lange, whereas it would have been much more interesting if Michael himself had learned to see the appeal in women who don’t necessarily look like goddesses – such as, for example, his best friend Sandy who likes him, played by Teri Garr, but who he dumps. Still, at least the point of the film is that women shouldn’t date assholes, and if it take Michael dressing as a woman to become the non-asshole that Julie deserves, fair play to them all. And at least Hoffman himself took something away from the movie (even if all I took away from it was that even five-foot-five-inch schmucks with big Jewish noses only want gorgeous blonde shiksas). (Incidentally, I really do love this movie.)

Then, in the final year of that decade, the greatest of all eighties romcoms was released which looked at love from the men’s and women’s points of view in a far more credible, funny and moving way than
Tootsie
:
When Harry Met Sally …

Along with
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
,
When Harry Met Sally
…
is the most quotable film of the 1980s, the most quotable of all the decades. Nora Ephron wrote so many great lines in it that the self-restraint needed not to type them all out in one giant quote binge is actually giving me finger cramp.