The trailer for the classic film 'The Breakfast Club'. Source - Universal Pictures
Molly Ringwald, the actress who starred in 1980s teen movie The Breakfast Club, has admitted she now finds the film "troubling".
Regarded as one of the first so-called Brat Pack films, the movie about a group of high school misfits during Saturday detention had a major impact on both the teen film genre and on popular culture.
But Ringwald, now 50, has described how she has re-evaluated the film in light of the #MeToo movement, which saw scores of women and men share their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
Writing in The New Yorker, the actress said she watched the John Hughes 1985 classic again recently after her 10-year-old daughter asked to see it.
"I worried she would find aspects of it troubling," she wrote. "But I hadn't anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me."
One scene, in particular, struck a wrong note for Ringwald.
"At one point in the film, the bad-boy character, John Bender, ducks under the table where my character, Claire, is sitting, to hide from a teacher," she wrote.
"While there, he takes the opportunity to peek under Claire's skirt and, though the audience doesn't see, it is implied that he touches her inappropriately."
Ally Sheedy and Molly Ringwald in a scene from The Breakfast Club. Photo / Getty
Ringwald praised Hughes, who made a teen star of Ringwald with 1984's Sixteen Candles, for making films that explored the experience of teenage girls. But she admitted that the Breakfast Club scene was not the only moment in his work that stepped over the line.
"Back then, I was only vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of John's writing was...," she wrote. "It's hard for me to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot."
Hughes died in 2009 at the age of 59. Ringwald, who also starred in another of his films, Pretty in Pink, said it was hard to know how to feel about "art that we both love and oppose".
"John's movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel, and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teen-agers experience. Whether that's enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say.. .
"Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art - change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go."
Her essay struck a chord on social media, where she was praised for her "nuanced" look back at a sensitive subject.
This, from Molly Ringwald, is such a stellar example of what a personal reckoning looks like, and how nuanced you can make it. https://t.co/MZ5pwIkPmG
This is a really, really good reflection from Molly Ringwald. It's a very fine contribution to the ongoing conversation about how we reconcile things we have affection for with context we know is important. https://t.co/mvXjtBMDwp
— Linda Holmes Thinks You're Doing Great (@lindaholmes) April 6, 2018
This is a tremendously special, thoughtful article from Molly Ringwald that makes for a smart lesson in how to look at the social problems of older movies: not blindly, but not blindly rejecting, either https://t.co/AZCtabGPZn
This part of the Molly Ringwald piece stuck with me, because I feel this way about so many of my favorite male writers & directors. When you're raised on pop culture that tells you women are lesser, or empty characters, you view them that way, and you repeat those mistakes. pic.twitter.com/ZE4jhrXtFN
Hughes was also responsible for directing Weird Science, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, She's Having a Baby, Uncle Buck and Curly Sue.
A successful script writer, he also wrote Home Alone, one of the highest grossing films of all time, starring Macaulay Culkin.
As he advanced into middle age, his commercial touch faded and, he increasingly withdrew from public life. His last directing credit was in 1991, for Curly Sue.
