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Life Moves Pretty Fast

The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (and Why We Don't Learn Them From Movies Anymore)

Hadley Freeman

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82 quotes

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Introduction

  • To divide up anything by decade is, by nature, totally spurious—best nineties dance music! best seventies hair styles!—but in the case of eighties movies there is a point because movies made in Hollywood in the 1980s marked the beginning of a new era (the Producer Era) and, by 1989, the start of another (the corporate buyouts of the studios). As anyone who has ever watched an eighties film—or who even is (gasp!) old enough to remember the eighties—knows, life has changed a lot in the past thirty years: cell phones aren’t the size of cars and men don’t tend to sport eighties Michael Douglas–style bouffant hair; more’s the pity. Moviemaking in Hollywood has changed a lot in those years, too. The big studios are now owned by international conglomerates: Columbia has been owned by the Sony Corporation since 1989; Warner Bros. merged with Time Inc. and became Time Warner, also in 1989; 20th Century Fox has been owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation since the mid-1980s; Universal has gone through a series of owners in the past twenty years, including a French water and media company and General Electric, and is now owned by cable provider Comcast; Paramount is owned by Viacom. Whereas once moviemaking was the sole business of the studios, now it is a relatively tiny part of a big company.May 28 2024 10:44PM
  • This also means that they want movies that appeal to as many demographics as possible, or “quadrants,” as film marketing staff refer to people: men, women, old people, and young people. This in turn has led to the demise of traditional women’s movies, because they wouldn’t appeal to enough quadrants (according to a Hollywood theory that has been around only for the past thirty years, women will see movies starring men and women, but men will see only movies starring men). It also means that films become less interesting because whenever anyone says they want to make something appeal to everybody, they inevitably blandify it to such a degree that it is loved by nobody.May 28 2024 10:50PM
  • What studios don’t want anymore is the kind of mid-budget movies that were made alongside the blockbusters and blockbuster franchises in the eighties, which is what John Hughes’s films were. The Breakfast Club, let alone Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, would simply not get made today by a studio. The eighties invented the film franchise, and now it’s film franchises that are killing the best sort of movies that were made in the eighties.May 28 2024 10:51PM
  • “Without a film that can work on thousands of screens and draw in big audiences based upon a presold property, i.e., a remake, sequel, bestseller, major star vehicle, no one will commit the money to marketing the film. So we’re getting a certain kind of film, the McMovie, and there’s a growing sameness to what works in these big mainstream releases.May 28 2024 10:52PM
  • But this is not just about studio system shenanigans. It’s also about how Western culture and politics have changed. American culture has become increasingly conservative since the 1980s. This might seem counterintuitive, considering the legalization of gay marriage and the election of a two-term mixed-race president. But the fightback from these and other developments has been vicious, and this and the growth of pressure groups have impacted on what studios feel able to show now in movies, especially when it comes to young women’s stories, sexuality, and abortion. “What happens in movies always reflects what’s happening in the culture and what we’re seeing on-screen is an American culture trying to put women back in their place,” says Melissa Silverstein.May 28 2024 10:53PM

Chapter 1

  • She is just as determined when it comes to getting what she wants in her own life, and what she wants in Dirty Dancing is to have sex with Johnny, and the film is very, very clear about that. It’s no surprise that at MGM none of the men liked the script, or that it was ultimately produced by a woman, because Dirty Dancing is very much a film about female sexuality. In particular, the physicality of female sexuality, and all the excitement and messiness that entails. It’s Baby who makes all the moves on Johnny when she turns up at his cabin at night and then, as he stands stock-still in helpless befuddlement, takes the lead again by asking him to dance.May 28 2024 11:03PM
  • “The whole film is told through the female gaze, if I can use that jargon, because I wanted to make a movie about what it’s like, as a young woman, moving into the physical world, which means the sexual world,” says Bergstein. “So you get those shots of Jennifer looking up with her big eyes and then about a hundred shots of Patrick. I remember when we were in the editing suite and people were saying, ‘Why do you have all those shots of Patrick?’ I’d say, ‘It’s because that’s what she sees.’ The film is through the female gaze and most movies are not.”May 28 2024 11:04PM
  • Today a girl in a teen film who has sex—or even just wants to have sex—risks being ravaged by her boyfriend and eaten from within by a vampire baby (Bella in Twilight). At the very least, a girl who has sex is certainly emotionally damaged (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) and will be universally shamed (Easy A). Good, smart, sane girls don’t have sex, or at least are extremely reluctant to do so and submit only under sufferance because the boys want it so badly (Dionne in Clueless, Vicky in American Pie).May 28 2024 11:07PM
  • “When I wrote the film, abortion—like feminism—was one of those issues that people thought just wasn’t relevant anymore. A lot of young women thought those battles were won, and talking about it was tiresome,” says Bergstein. “But I thought Roe versus Wade was precarious, and that’s why I put in all that purple language about the ‘dirty knife’ and everything. The film is set in 1963 but came out in 1987 and I wanted young women seeing the film to understand that it wasn’t just that she went to Planned Parenthood and it went wrong.”May 28 2024 11:10PM
  • “I knew that if I put in a social message it had to be carefully plotted in. A lot of movies have social messages but they end up on the cutting room floor. It’s true that not many people talked about the abortion plot when it came out, but it meant that I was getting the message to people who wouldn’t go see a documentary about abortions, and we were also getting big feminist audiences,” says Bergstein.May 28 2024 11:11PM
  • Fast Times was born out of [the film’s screenwriter] Cameron Crowe’s investigations into modern high schools, and this is what high schools were like. Women were having abortions and the movies then talked about this.”May 28 2024 11:15PM
  • Women still have abortions, but you wouldn’t know it from today’s mainstream movies, teen or otherwise. Even smart films that are forced to confront the issue dodge it awkwardly. In 2007’s Knocked Up, which focuses on a couple who conceive after an awkward one-night stand, the only two people who mention the word—her mother, his roommate—are derided as heartless.May 28 2024 11:16PM
  • In the 2007 film Juno, the eponymous teenager is dissuaded from having an abortion after an anti-choice protester tells her that her baby will have fingernails, and she then goes into a clinic that appears to have been dreamed up by the Westboro Baptist Church’s press office.May 28 2024 11:16PM
  • What makes the movie industry’s increasing conservatism especially bizarre is that roughly the same percentage of Americans support the legalization of abortion as did in the 1980s.May 28 2024 11:17PM
  • Teen abortion rates in the United States are at a historic low, having declined by percent between 1990 and 2010 thanks to the commendable work by sex education workers who have so effectively taught young people about the importance of contraception. Therefore why movies should be so fearful of discussing them seems bizarre. Whereas in the eighties there were movies that were both pro- and anti-choice, Hollywood speaks with one voice on the issue today.May 28 2024 11:18PM
  • But the problem isn’t that Juno had the baby, I say. It is that she decides not to have the abortion because of something a pro-life protester said.May 28 2024 11:21PM
  • “American movies have become much more conservative since they were in the 1980s, and this is partly because of the international market,” says film producer Lynda Obst. Profits from China, for example, have grown by more than 400 percent in the past half decade. This then affects what studios feel they can and can’t show on-screen, and one issue they are especially conscious of showing to the increasingly important foreign markets is teenagers having sex and abortions.May 28 2024 11:26PM
  • This growing conservatism has been very much reflected in America’s attitudes toward teen sex: as part of the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation, Congress authorized $50 million annually to fund abstinence-only education. By 2008, the U.S. government had spent more than $1.5 billion on abstinence-only sex education, and federal guidance forbade any discussion of contraception except to emphasize its failure rates. Between 2006 and 2008 one in four teenagers in America received abstinence-only sex education with no instruction about birth control; in 1988 only percent had done so. The Obama administration and Congress have since eliminated two abstinence-only sex education programs yet thirty-seven states still require sex education that includes abstinence. Twenty-six of those stress that abstinence is the best method, even though states that teach abstinence-only sex education, such as Mississippi, notoriously have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies. As of 2011, more than half of all women of reproductive age in the United States lived in a state hostile to abortion rights, an increase of percent in just one decade.May 28 2024 11:27PM
  • “One big problem is the [U.S.] motion picture ratings system: it is much harder these days on sex than violence and so if you don’t want to get an R rating, which would kill the film, but to still attract the kids, you put in violence but leave out the sex. The ratings board is much harder on teen sex than violence and everyone knows it,” said one producer who works in teen films.May 28 2024 11:28PM
  • Thus, the U.S. ratings system is built to “reflect the standards of American parents,” as Graves puts it, and if that sounds somewhat fluid, then it is. There is no strict rubric about what is and isn’t allowed, only a sense of what “American parents” will tolerate. But Graves is very clear that the ratings board does not offer instructions to filmmakers about what they can and can’t film—that’s the studio’s job. All it’s there to do is “reflect [American] society,” and in its angst about teen sex and relaxed attitude toward violence, in a country where three people are killed every hour by guns and abstinence is still part of many schools’ curriculum, one can easily argue that it succeeds at that.May 28 2024 11:31PM

Chapter 2

  • The reasons why Nell loved this film so much exemplify, I think, why it is universally adored in a way that, say, the vaguely similar and contemporary The Never-Ending Story is not. It’s a fairy tale for those who love fairy tales, but it’s also a self-aware spoof for those who don’t; it’s an adventure film for boys and—for once—girls, too, but without pandering to or excluding either; it’s got a plot for kids, dialogue for adults, and jokes for everyone; it’s a genre film and a satire of a genre film; it’s a very funny movie in which everybody is playing it straight; it’s smart and sweet and smart about its sweetness, but also sweet about its smarts. Unlike, say, Shrek, there are no jokes here for parents that go over the kids’ heads: all generations enjoy it on exactly the same level. It’s a movie that lets people who don’t like certain things like those things, while at the same time not betraying the original fans. But most of all, The Princess Bride is about one thing in particular: “The Princess Bride is a story about love,” says Cary Elwes. “So much happens in the movie—giants, fencing, kidnapping. But it’s really a film about love.”May 28 2024 11:46PM
  • Because stories for kids tend to be relatively simple, villains in these films are almost invariably evil, and that’s all there is to be said about them. Cruella de Vil, Snow White’s stepmother, the witch in Rapunzel: WHAT a bunch of moody bitches. This is also certainly true of movies for children in the 1980s, from the frankly terrifying Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit to the enjoyably evil Ursula in The Little Mermaid. It’s a pleasingly basic approach, and one that validates most kids’ (and adults’) view of the world: “I am good and anyone who thwarts me is wicked and there is no point in trying to think about things from their point of view because they have no inner life of their own beyond pure evil and a desire to impede me.” The Princess Bride, however, does something different.May 28 2024 11:50PM
  • It’s easy to forget this once you’ve seen the movie and fallen in love with the characters but Inigo and Fezzik are, ostensibly, bad guys. When we first meet them in the movie, they knock our heroine, Buttercup, unconscious and kidnap her for Vizzini. We are also told they will kill her. Our princess! In the eyes of children, you can’t get much more evil than that. They are hired guns in the revenge business, which is not a job for a good guy in any fairy tale. But Goldman flips it around. We quickly see Inigo and, in particular, Fezzik being extremely sweet with each other, doing their little rhymes together and trying to protect one another from Vizzini’s ire. Their love for one another shows us there is more to these villains than villainy. Goldman then ups the ante even further by having Inigo describe to the Man in Black how he has devoted his life to avenging the death of his father, thus giving him the kind of emotional backstory kids can definitely understand, as well as adding another mission to the movie. Soon after beating (but not killing) Inigo, the Man in Black fights with Fezzik, who we already know has a similarly sad past (“unemployed—IN GREENLAND”).May 28 2024 11:51PM
  • Plenty of villains were once good before crossing to the dark side: Darth Vader, many of Batman’s nemeses, Voldemort. The point in those stories is that the difference between true evil and true greatness comes down to one wrong decision, one wrong turn, and there is no going back from that. But The Princess Bride does something more subtle: it suggests that good people sometimes end up doing bad things, but are still good, have stories of their own, and are capable of love. Inigo and Fezzik both killed people in the past for Vizzini, but they’re all still good people. This is quite a message for kids (and adults) to take in: not everything is clear-cut when it comes to good and bad, even in fairy tales.May 29 2024 12:03AM
  • Next, on a smaller level, is the love between Miracle Max (Crystal) and his aged wife, Valerie (Carol Kane). Initially they seem simply like a squabbling old couple, playing purely for broad comedy (and their scene is the broadest comedic one in the film). But it soon becomes clear that Valerie is needling Max only because she wants him to get back his confidence in his work after Prince Humperdinck destroyed it by sacking them, and her little cheer when her husband agrees to make a miracle for Inigo is really very touching. By the end of their scene, they’re working together, finishing one another’s sentences, holding each other arm in arm, and whispering little asides to one another. As a portrait of elderly marriage goes, this one is a pretty lovely one.May 29 2024 12:02AM
  • Finally, there’s the great love story that frames the whole movie: the one between the grandson/Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) and the grandfather/Columbo (Peter Falk). In the beginning of the movie, the grandson is irritated by his cheek-pinching grandfather and can hardly believe that he has to stop playing his adorably primitive-looking computer baseball game to listen to grandfather read a book.IX As the film progresses, the relationship between the grandson and grandfather progresses almost like a traditional love story: the grandson slowly gets more interested, clutching his covers anxiously when Buttercup is almost eaten by the Shrieking Eels; then he gets angry, banging his bed with his fist when it seems like Westley has been killed; and finally, he comes around entirely and tells his grandfather to come back the next day to read the book again.May 29 2024 12:03AM
  • This relationship feels especially significant because the reason this film exists is that of the bond between particular parents and their children. Rob Reiner first came across the book when it was given to him by his father, the comedian and actor Carl Reiner. Elwes, too, was given the novel when he was thirteen by his stepfather, and his love for the book made him especially determined to get the role. And most of all, the reason the book was written in the first place was that of the love one father felt for his children. Back in 1970, William Goldman decided to write a story for his two daughters, then seven and four years old, to entertain them while he was away in Los Angeles working on a movie: “I said to them both, ‘I’ll write you a story, what do you want it to be about?’ And one of them said ‘princesses’ and the other one said ‘brides.’ ‘Then that will be the title,’ I told them. And so it has remained.”May 29 2024 12:05AM
  • The Princess Bride is funny, and exciting, and scary, and funny, and silly, and sweet, and funny (I might have mentioned that). But the reason it has endured is that it is such a warm film, one without cynicism or calculation, and a film as lovely as this one could only have been born out of love itself—all kinds of love.May 29 2024 12:05AM
  • “We were in dangerous terrain—because when you mix genres in a movie, that’s where you end up,” Goldman writes in his delightful essay on The Princess Bride. It wasn’t until the movie came out on VHS and audiences were able to discover the film for themselves, without the cack-handed meddlings of the studio, that it became the success it deserved to be.May 29 2024 12:07AM
  • There are plenty of reasons why The Princess Bride could not be made today: “It would all be done by CGI, which would make the movie completely different,” says Elwes. “Also, I seriously doubt that a studio would let a director cast two unknowns, as Robin and I were then, in the leads of such a big movie. They’d want a big box-office draw, like Tom Cruise, or whoever.” But the most obvious reason is in its complex layering of different loves about different ages. Unlike movies today, which are nervily sliced up into their varying demographic quadrants, The Princess Bride has faith that children can cope with a love story between the elderly, just as adults are happy to watch a fairy tale that might lack in sex but more than makes up for it with a brilliant script.May 29 2024 12:11AM
  • Modern classic children’s movies feature many kinds of love: the love between an elderly couple in Up; the love a boy feels for the plastic cowboy he is leaving behind in Toy Story ; the love between a donkey and a dragon in Shrek. Ah, love in its infinite varieties! But I can’t think of another children’s movie in which there are so many different kinds of love featured, and all aimed fully at the children to understand. The Princess Bride teaches children that the love their grandparents feel for them, and what they feel for their grandparents, and the love friends have for one another, is true love, as important as Westley and Buttercup’s true love.May 29 2024 12:12AM

Chapter 3

  • Hughes could see the value of Ringwald’s unfashionable looks for the same reason he was able to write films about teenagers that felt so true to young people at the time, and still do today: because, at heart, he was still the sensitive teenage outcast he loved to write about. “John was frozen in time emotionally in a way. He would not have been able to create the sense of truth in those characters had he not been so much like that himself,” says director Howard Deutch, Hughes’s frequent collaborator.May 29 2024 12:26AM
  • Hughes, more than any other filmmaker, made the 1980s the golden age of teen films because he realized that the trick to making good films about teenagers was to take them as seriously as they take themselves. “One of the great wonders about that age is your emotions are so open and raw. That’s why I stuck around that genre for so long,” he said in an interview. “At that age it feels as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.” It’s only as a teenager, Hughes believed, that you have this capacity for deep feeling, which explains why his own work was divided between the swoonily soulful teen films, including Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful, and the slapstick “dopey-ass comedy,” as he put it, such as National Lampoon’s Vacation, The Great Outdoors, and, in the nineties, Home Alone.May 29 2024 12:27AM
  • Hughes’s teen films feel so heartfelt because they were written with such honest respect for his teenage actors, and the one with whom he felt the closest affinity was Ringwald: “We just instantly connected. He felt more like a friend than a director. We talked about everything,” she says. So it is not surprising that the truest character Hughes ever wrote was one he created for her: Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink.May 29 2024 12:35AM
  • 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.May 29 2024 12:40AM
  • In The Breakfast Club, Hughes showed he recognized 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?”May 29 2024 12:42AM
  • Until the Twilight series and The Hunger Games came along, studios had assumed for years that young women couldn’t front franchises for teenagers. “Teenage girl [audiences] just weren’t even in the equation until Twilight came around. When people talked about the teen market, they meant the male teen market,” says film producer Lynda Obst. “This is because studios look at a movie’s takings from the first weekend and teen boys tend to go out in packs on a first weekend, whereas girls didn’t. Also, teen boys tended to match the international market, so studios would market to them, because the international market is so much more important these days.May 29 2024 12:49AM
  • A film doesn’t have to look familiar to inspire teenage audiences—after all, Hughes’s high schools looked downright exotic to me—but at least there was a pretense of realism there. Audiences might sympathize with Katniss, and maybe even Bella, but they could empathize with Ringwald and her contemporaries.May 29 2024 12:54AM
  • It is trickier to give a movie emotional heft when it focuses on average people’s average lives, and the fact is, most teen audiences will be average kids—they will not be superheroes or sufferers of terminal diseases. John Hughes told those kids that their stories were worth telling.May 29 2024 12:54AM
  • Hughes also understood that while American teenagers in the eighties didn’t have the problems their parents had endured in their youth—Vietnam, namely—their daily anxieties felt no less pressing. This lesson was already forgotten by the nineties when the biggest teen films winkingly used plots from classical texts, such as Jane Austen’s Emma (Clueless), The Taming of the Shrew ( Things I Hate About You), and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Cruel Intentions), simultaneously to mock the teen film genre and give it ironic credibility, as opposed to relying on the films to stand up for themselves (and thinking up their own plots, although, for the record, I do love Clueless and Things I Hate About You).May 29 2024 12:54AM
  • The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a “bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures,” as journalist Nathan Rabin, who coined the term, put it.May 29 2024 12:55AM
  • Stories serve as guides about how to live and what to expect from life, and if you’re a girl who grows up believing that the most you can expect is to be a supporting character to a man, that’s all you’ll ever ask for.May 29 2024 12:56AM
  • Andie is pretty much the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She exists totally in her own right. She is confident and insecure, wise and foolish, happy and furious, mature and childish, lustful and fearful, savvy but gauche. She is, in short, a teenager, and often unsure if she’s worth what she wants. But as much as she doubts herself, she always stands up for herself: she screams in disarmingly unabashed rage at Blane when he lets her down, and she snaps back when Steff bullies her. I always liked that Hughes took the trouble to slip in the reason for Steff’s hatred of Andie, and it has nothing to do with her being poor, or a nerd, or different—it’s because she knocked him back.May 29 2024 12:58AM
  • What a makeover means for women in a movie is “Conform and show off your boobs,” and all the examples cited above say just that. Change for men, in other words. By contrast, in the vast majority of eighties teen films, girls are celebrated for being their own gauche, unique selves, and this is a common theme in almost all eighties teen movies for all teenagers, from Teen Wolf to Say Anything. This celebration of the unique explains, I suspect, why so many kids in eighties teen films have such weird names (Boof and Styles in Teen Wolf), and especially in Hughes’s teen films (Ferris, Bender, Sloane, Duckie, Blane, Watts).VIII With the exception of the makeover scene in The Breakfast Club, Hughes celebrates his leading ladies’ quirks, and Andie’s vintage clothes—which she wears because she can’t afford new ones—are depicted as proof of her admirable creativity. If she does then wear the ugliest prom dress of all time, that’s a price worth paying for individuality. Pretty in Pink is the anti-makeover movie.May 29 2024 1:05AM
  • Nineties teen makeover scenes are all about stamping out a teenage girl’s awkwardness and unique personality, whereas the girls in eighties teen movies celebrate those two qualities.May 29 2024 1:06AM
  • Celestia Fox, a casting agent who discovered and worked with some of the most successful British and American teen actors in the eighties, says the reason teen films and teen characters are so much glossier today than they were thirty years ago can be summed up in one word: “Clueless. That changed everything. And, to a certain extent, Beverly Hills 90210 did, too. These shows completely altered the look of American films and TV shows aimed at teenagers. In America, everything made after Clueless immediately became much more aspirational and glamorous, and it still is.”May 29 2024 1:07AM
  • Actresses in teen films and teen TV shows have also become progressively thinner over the past few decades, especially in the past decade. A comparison between the original cast of the TV show Beverly Hills 90210 (1990–2000) and the cast of the revived series 90210 (2008–2013) is so jarring it’s eye-watering: the actresses on the recent series look—and this is barely an exaggeration—half the size of those on the old show, and, shockingly, the original cast look almost chubby in comparison when they were seen at the time as very slim. Even the young actresses on the Disney Channel (aimed at nine- to fourteen-year-olds) are getting thinner, as a brief comparison between Hilary Duff (a star on the channel in 2000) and Bella Thorne (2010) proves. Not only are teenage girls seeing fewer representations of their lives on-screen; they’re seeing fewer actresses who even vaguely resemble them.May 29 2024 1:07AM
  • But really, this change has largely come from the fashion world. Films, especially films aimed at young women and teenage girls, have always taken their cues from fashion trends and there is no question that the fashion industry venerates a much skinnier look now than it did in the eighties, as the most skirting comparison between eighties supermodels and today’s jarringly attenuated models proves.May 29 2024 1:08AM
  • 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.May 29 2024 1:37AM
  • 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.”May 29 2024 1:38AM

Chapter 4

  • 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.May 29 2024 1:41AM
  • The wonderful Tootsie showed that you could have a romcom that looked at love from both gender sides through one character. 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 ( to 5’s Dabney Coleman, everyone’s favorite 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 on-screen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character. Because she doesn’t fulfill 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.”May 29 2024 1:43AM
  • When people talk today about the message of When Harry Met Sally . . . , they think of Harry’s claim that “men and women can’t be friends,” and how the movie seems to confirm that. But Ephron said she didn’t believe that at all. Instead, she wrote: What When Harry Met Sally . . . is really about is how different men and women are. The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sport, and I have no idea what else. Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what’s more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help.May 29 2024 1:55AM
  • Unusually for a romcom—or any movie, for that matter—When Harry Met Sally . . . is equally interested in the women in the film as it is in the men, and the reason for this is that Ephron was writing about real people. Harry was based on Rob Reiner, the film’s director, and Sally was based on Ephron herself: “I realized that I had found a wonderful character in Rob Reiner. Rob is a very strange person. He is extremely funny, but he is also extremely depressed . . . but he wasn’t at all depressed about being depressed; in fact, he loved his depression,” Ephron wrote. “And because Harry was bleak and depressed, it followed absolutely that Sally would be cheerful and chirpy and relentlessly, pointlessly, unrealistically, idiotically optimistic. Which is, it turns out, very much like me.”May 29 2024 1:57AM
  • Harry was the first character I’d ever seen in a film who was Jewish the way I was Jewish: if someone was asked what religion they thought Harry and I are, they’d probably say “Jewish,” but it wouldn’t be the first personality attribute you’d list about either of us (that would be “self-absorbed”). This was Jewishness the way I knew Jewishness—being Jewish—and not the self-conscious outsider and faintly minstrel Jewyness that Woody Allen portrayed. Also, like Harry, I was miserable, in a way that only an extremely privileged, middle-class teenage girl from a very nice family can be miserable. And like Harry, I made the mistake of thinking that made me deep.May 29 2024 1:59AM
  • So as I was saying, it’s not always easy to be a female movie fan, especially a female fan of comedies. Men are generally the protagonists of comedies, because comedies tend to be written by men, so it’s easy to grow up resenting your gender, a little. Why do you have to be a woman? Women are boring. Women are there just to laugh at the men’s jokes, or be the disapproving shrew. Women don’t get the good lines. Women are Margaret Dumont and men are the Marx Brothers, and I like Margaret Dumont (especially when she was wearing a swimming costume—her swimming costumes in the Marx Brothers films were amazing), but I prefer clowning to making moues of disapproval at Groucho. Worse, when you grow up watching men play leads in films, as I increasingly did, you get used to wanting everything to work out well for men, because you’ve been trained to be on their side.May 29 2024 2:04AM
  • person. I was thrilled when I read that Ephron based Sally on herself because that meant Sally must be Jewish. I’m not some cinematic Zionist who can enjoy her characters only if they’re kosher, but this proved that the film doesn’t follow that insufferable template of having a goyish woman fall for a Jewish man because of his allegedly adorable Jewish qualities, and the Jewish man falls for her in turn because she is not (mazel tov, sir!) a Jewish woman. Woody Allen populated the cliché and Judd Apatow has since flogged it to death (while Larry David has waved the flag for it on TV). In Sally, Ephron coined that rare-to-the-point-of-nonexistent film character: a desirable Jewish woman. A Jewish woman. Sally also pointed out to me that being miserable didn’t mean I was deep. It meant that I was just ruining my own life.May 29 2024 2:05AM
  • Some nineties romcoms were a complete delight (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Groundhog Day, The Wedding Singer), but even Ephron’s romcoms had diminishing returns, going from the magic of When Harry Met Sally to the sweetness of Sleepless in Seattle to the mehness of You’ve Got Mail. By the late nineties and early noughties, the trend had switched to raunch with male leads, kick-started by There’s Something About Mary. Hollywood made more romcoms with male leads (Along Came Polly, Garden State), which were increasingly tired and formulaic and were written solely from a male perspective.May 29 2024 2:09AM
  • “Women’s films, like weepies and romcoms, don’t get commissioned anymore because they don’t work overseas. There’s a different kind of funny today—less wit. Wit and nuance doesn’t travel,” says producer Lynda Obst, who worked in the romcom market for years before having to move on to sci-fi due to what she describes as “lack of windows for romcom.” “Funny is an Asian man who’s going to blow up your car. Comedies take place in the same style as action movies and they go from set piece to set piece—you don’t see that in Cameron Crowe or Nora Ephron’s films. You see writing and dialogue. Now it’s about dialogue moving you to another set piece where something big will happen. Comedy writers are taught to write set pieces,” she says.May 29 2024 2:10AM
  • Ephron knew that, and she was smart enough also to know that love wasn’t about set pieces, or shticks, meet cutes, or clichéd impediments—it’s about people. Jane Austen knew that, too, and even though so many of the relationships in her books seem to be rooted in issues about money (Darcy is richer than Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Edward is richer than Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, and so on), the only real impediment to them is the characters themselves: Darcy is too proud, Elizabeth is too prejudiced; Edward is too loyal to his commitments, Elinor is too self-effacing; Anne Elliot in Persuasion was too easily persuaded by bad advice, and Captain Wentworth’s pride was hurt; Emma in her eponymous novel is too immature to see what is in front of her face. This is why her novels have lasted, and it’s why When Harry Met Sally has lasted: because stories that are about human emotions don’t date. But it’s hard to translate witty dialogue about complicated human emotions for overseas sales, I guess, and car explosions are a lot easier to write anyway.May 29 2024 2:13AM
  • Not that studios especially want these female-driven movies anyway: they want franchises, and romcoms and female comedies aren’t seen as blockbuster material. “Studio executives think these movies’ success is a one-off every time,” Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, said. “They’ll say, ‘One of the big reasons that worked was because Jack was in it,’ or ‘We hadn’t had a comedy for older women in forever.’ ” According to Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and Hollywood, “Whenever a movie for women is successful, studios credit it to a million factors, and none of those factors is to do with women.”May 29 2024 2:15AM
  • Anyway, I grew up and the more I grew the more I became a mix of Harry (Jewish) and Sally (journalist, dependent on my friends, wanting love) and, like them, I eventually found the right person for me, although, also like them, I took my sweet time about it, and I sure didn’t make it easy for myself along the way. Like Harry, I waited for someone who made me laugh, and like Sally, I waited for someone who wanted me to make them laugh. But the person in this movie whom I learned the most from was Ephron, because she taught me everything I know about, not just men and women, but love and marriage and friendship and funniness and good writing.May 29 2024 2:17AM

Chapter 6

  • The eighties, goes the general thinking, was the decade of venality. No one in America—heck, in the WORLD—had been interested in making money before the 1980s came along and corrupted us all. It was, apparently, the era in which everyone walked around in gold lamé and regarded Ivana Trump as the last word in understated chic. Seriously, you couldn’t take the dog for a walk in the eighties without tripping over a giant Versace gold logo. And a pair of giant shoulder pads. And a massive pile of cocaine. And cocaine plays absolute HAVOC with one’s Armani stilettos.May 29 2024 2:20AM
  • Many Hollywood movies argued for, if not actual class warfare, then certainly a suspicion of wealth. Repeatedly, wealthy people are depicted as disgusting, shallow, and even murderous, while working-class people are noble and good-intentioned, such as in not exactly niche films like Wall Street,I Beverly Hills Cop, Ruthless People, Raising Arizona, and Overboard. Contrast this with today’s films like Iron Man, in which the billionaire is the superhero (and is inspired by actual billionaire Elon Musk), and the deeply, deeply weird The Dark Knight Rises, in which the villain advocates the redistribution of wealth—HE MUST BE DESTROYED. But the eighties films that were the most interested in issues of class were, of all things, the teen films.May 29 2024 2:20AM
  • It was social class. There’s The Karate Kid, in which the son of a single mother unsuccessfully tries to hide his poverty from the cool kids at school who make fun of his mother’s car; Dirty Dancing, in which a middle-class girl dates a working-class boy, much to her liberal father’s horror; Can’t Buy Me Love, in which a school nerd gains popularity by paying for it; Valley Girl, in which an upper-middle-class girl dates a working-class boy; Say Anything, in which a privileged girl dates a lower-middle-class army brat and her father turns out to be a financial criminal; The Flamingo Kid, in which a working-class kid is dazzled by a wealthy country club and starts to break away from his blue-collar father; and all John Hughes’s teen films.May 29 2024 2:21AM
  • When you raise questions people say ‘You’re crazy, you’re weird,’ because you’re questioning the authority that people have been brought up to think is the only correct way to think, when there are many correct ways to think.”May 29 2024 2:24AM
  • Back to the Future is such a charming film that it’s easy to be swept along by it and not notice this equation of lower-middle-class status with being a “loser.” But it does echo precisely the same message that other eighties teen films sent: the class you are born into dictates every aspect of your life.May 29 2024 2:25AM
  • For years I had a theory—and I was very proud of this theory—that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t about Ferris at all: it’s about his miserable best friend, Cameron, and the whole movie is actually seen through Cameron’s eyes.V This is why we see Ferris as this golden boy, the one who can do no wrong, the one for whom everything always goes right and the one whom everyone loves: because that’s how Cameron sees him. Everyone had a friend in high school—and some still later in life—who, to their mind, exists within some kind of gilded halo, who is always funnier, smarter, cooler, and more popular than they could ever be, and that is who Ferris is for Cameron. While Ferris happily makes out with his girlfriend by the stained-glass windows in the Art Institute of Chicago (in what is the greatest montage scene of the eighties and my favorite cinematic moment of all time), Cameron has a mini nervous breakdown while staring at Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, as he realizes that he, like the child in the painting, is nothing more than a series of meaningless dots. Nothing comes easy for Cameron, who thinks too much about everything, but everything comes easy to Ferris, who thinks deeply about nothing. The clinching piece of evidence to my theory is that it’s Cameron who goes through an emotional change during the movie. He learns that, in order for him to achieve happiness at last in his life, he’s going to have to stand up to his father, for once. Ferris, by contrast, is as blithe and content at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.May 29 2024 2:30AM
  • Hughes wrote all his teen scripts quickly and with seeming Ferris-like ease, and this, his masterpiece, was no exception. He wrote it, incredibly, in just two nights: “You know how Salieri looked at Amadeus with rage when he’d pulled it out of thin air?” his collaborator Howard Deutch said, remembering Hughes working on Ferris, and using another eighties classic film as an analogy. “That was me looking at John writing a script. I’d be like, ‘How?! How?!’ ”May 29 2024 2:33AM
  • The reason Hughes was able to write his teen scripts so quickly was that he wrote so much of himself in them, both emotionally and in the details. It’s easy to mock the homogeneity of the world presented in these films, a world in which everyone’s white, suburban, and straight. But Hughes never meant his films to be seen as universal—they were utterly personal portraits of his own childhood, growing up as a teenager in the suburbs of Illinois (almost no one made movies set in Chicago until Hughes came along).May 29 2024 2:34AM
  • Hughes grew up in a lower-middle-class family in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, an artistic outsider in a typical suburban high school, and he never forgot how it felt to be “on the lower end of a rich community,” as he told the New York Times. The divisions he draws between the wealthy and poor kids are done with a hand so heavy they could only belong to a man who once felt himself to be the victim of class snobbery. To be rich, in Hughes’s films, means that you are a jerk but granted instant popularity, while the noble working-class kids muddle through in the shadows.May 29 2024 2:39AM
  • But none of these films ever deals with the class issues that Hughes depicted. Partly this is because the people who make these homages are remembering the films from when they saw them as kids and, by and very large, kids didn’t notice all these arguments about social mobility, focusing instead on the power ballads and fights in the school canteen. But it is also because Hollywood—and by extension America—doesn’t talk about class issues the way it used to.May 29 2024 2:42AM
  • Teen movies of the 1980s argue precisely the opposite. “Eighties films were willing to deal with being poor and people’s lives being screwed over by economic structures. You hardly see that at all in movies today,” says James Russell, principal lecturer in film at De Montfort University in London.May 29 2024 2:55AM
  • “Never underestimate Hollywood’s eagerness to copy something successful,” laughs Dirty Dancing’s Eleanor Bergstein. “The reason so many teen movies talked about class is because those movies were successful, so then more movies would come along just like them.”May 29 2024 2:56AM
  • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t just a fantasy about wealth, it’s about growing up. The best of Hughes’s teen films—The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—are ultimately about the dread of growing up, of moving away, of losing that sparkle you have as a teenager and becoming as dead inside as all the adults seem to be around you. As the man wrote, in what is possibly his most famous line of all, when you grow up your heart dies. Everyone who watches those films as a teenager grows up with that dread and, eventually, regret about it. And this is something Hughes struggled with as much as any of his fans. It is ironic that Hughes, who made such a sparkling film fantasizing about what it would be like to be rich and popular, struggled when he attained that status for himself.May 29 2024 2:59AM

Chapter 7

  • Most people know about the Bechdel Test, which was coined by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel to ascertain how well represented women are in a film by posing the following rubric: 1. It has to have at least two women in it . . . 2. Who talk to each other . . . 3. About something besides a man.May 29 2024 3:05AM
  • Where once studios made women’s movies, now they make “the negative sisterhood movie,” to use Wesley Morris’s memorable phrase. This is what the women’s movie has become today and it is a bafflingly popular genre, one that suggests the women hate each other and should be duly punished for their stupidity by having to spend their lives fighting over men and being humiliated on-screen as much as possible. You know these movies: they’re 2009’s Bride Wars, 2014’s The Other Woman, the toxic glut of overly monikered films like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, He’s Just Not That Into You, I Don’t Know How She Does It, pretty much anything starring Kate Hudson.May 29 2024 3:23AM
  • The common argument in defense of the current low representation of women in movies is that studios aren’t sexist—they’re simply looking after the economics. So while women will see movies starring men and women, men will see only movies starring men—in other words, it’s the audiences who are sexist. This problem is hardly exclusive to the film world. The books website Goodreads recently surveyed 40,000 of its members and found that readers overwhelmingly preferred books written by authors of their own gender: percent of men’s most-read books were by men and of the most-read books by women were written by women. Currer Bell, George Sands, George Eliot, and Robert Galbraith didn’t need 40,000 people to confirm that readers judge authors by their gender.VIIIMay 29 2024 3:27AM
  • “Thelma & Louise [which came out in 1991] was my first experience with the difference between how media respond to something and how it turns out in real life,” recalls Geena Davis. “All of the press was about, ‘Get ready for many more female buddy pictures and road trip films.’ And then . . . nothing. Same thing happened with [1992’s] A League of Their Own: ‘Proof that women’s sports movies can make huge box office!’ Name all of the female sports movies since then, right? This happens every few years, with the press anointing yet another female-starring film as the One That Will Change Everything, but nothing happens.”May 29 2024 3:31AM
  • When I was starting out it was the era of Meryl Streep, Sally Field, Jessica Lange, and Glenn Close getting nominated for movies with spectacular female roles in them. I had heard that great parts for women drop off at forty, but I thought, These women will change everything. It won’t be a problem anymore when I get there. But it didn’t change. Before forty, I was averaging about one movie a year. During my forties, I only made one movie. That’s a big change. But I look back on that decade when I was coming up and there were so many movies about interesting women: Frances, Places in the Heart. They were the anomaly then, which is why women were still in the minority then according to the statistics, but those movies were still made. In 2004, while staying at home with her then-toddler daughter, Davis noticed something odd about the movies and TV shows aimed at children: there were notably few female characters, and this “absolutely floored” her: “Then something else shocked me: NO one seemed to be seeing what I was seeing: not my friends (until I pointed it out), and not the decision makers in Hollywood, either. Whenever I brought the subject up, if I happened to be meeting with a studio executive or director, to a person the response was, ‘Oh no, that’s been fixed.’ And they would very often name a movie with one female character in it as proof that gender inequality had been fixed! That’s when I knew I needed the data.” Davis ended up sponsoring the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in entertainment media, covering more than a twenty-year span at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.May 29 2024 3:38AM
  • The theory that women are being pushed out of movies in order to appeal to the Chinese market doesn’t necessarily stand up, Davis says. After all, according to the latest report from the institute, China has a pretty good record of featuring women in its own films: in films made by China aimed at children and young people released between January 1, 2010, and May 1, 2013, 30 percent featured casts with a gender balance. In equivalent films from the United States, precisely zero films featured a gender balance. In fact, according to the study, it’s not China that’s the problem, but America. When looking at, again, equivalent films made by the United Kingdom, 38 percent featured a female character, 30 percent featured a female lead, and percent featured casts with a gender balance. In U.S.-British coproductions, these figures plummeted to, respectively, 23.6 percent, zero, and zero.May 29 2024 3:39AM

epilogue

  • My test of a great movie is to ask myself two questions: 1. Do I want to see this movie again right now? 2. Does it make me view the world a little bit differently?May 31 2024 4:55PM

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