Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) cried alone in the hallway outside her high school dance, trying to salvage any hope for a good reputation when the popular girls passed by, making plans for a raucous after-party. Our twelve-year old selves cringed, fearing the girls would intensify Sam’s humiliation. The girls didn’t. They weren’t cruel. The world was safe and scripted. This is why John Hughes’ 1984 cult classic Sixteen Candles was beloved by innocent middle school girls who could hope that Prince Charming went to a suburban high school and could blot out the inevitable embarassments of being a teenager. Sixteen Candles is mostly a comedy, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously, so this type of analysis may be contrary to the film’s spirit. But for those of us who viewed it as a harbinger of our high school lives to come, Candles was grave business indeed.
Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling, who hasn’t been heard from since), the irresistible prince, makes Samatha’s wishes come true. To middle schoolers who rented Sixteen Candles or stumbled upon it on TV, Jake was someone we could believe in. The sheen is off now. The fantasy of Awkward-Girl-Gets-Gorgeous-Guy-Because-Inner-Beauty-Matters-Most dies in real-world high schools. No Jake Ryan swoops in at an opportune time with belated birthday wishes and a chiseled jaw.
Sixteen Candles, Hughes’ debut as a director (he cut his teeth writing comedies like Mr. Mom and National Lampoon’s Vacation) was unique in its realism. Samantha,a teenage movie character who was actually played by a teenager, suffered painfully embarrassing moments, including watching Long Duk Dong find some love within five hours of arriving in town. She was gawky, frequently chagrined, uncomfortable at home and at school—she was real, and the movie was real.
The film has one moment of pure magic, at the end, when Sam exits the church where her doped-up sister has just wed some “bohunk” stiff. She ran back inside to fetch a forgotton item, like any dutiful daughter would do, and everyone has disappeared. She stands on the steps alone for a moment, forgotten yet again. But a car passes by and into view comes swaggering, confident Jake Ryan who is there for her. Her!
The movie up this point is real; her humiliation is easily related to. Movie magic does not save her from the same pathetic scrapes we all could imagine for ourselves that dominate her life before Jake gets a clue. He didn’t even know she was alive and now he is waiting by his car ready to whisk her away.
The movie’s hopeful message got more annoying as we followed Samantha to homeroom and high school dances in crepe-papered gyms. Sam made silly mistakes—mistakes involving public displays of underwear no less!—but she still got her man in the end. The film gives fumbling teenagers a false sense of security, implying that despite the cattiness and embarassments of high school, there is true love out there. Figuring out that the film’s happy ending is as much a Hollywood fantasy as the rest of the movie wasn’t is a bitter pill to swallow.
And only now, later, after the disillusionment has faded, after we have crossed the crucial 16-year-old threshold, can we look back at Molly and her universal appeal and understand.
Removed from the immediacy of how impossibly elusive Jake and Sam’s magical first kiss is, the movie is lovable again, not for the same reasons it was lovable in the first time. Now we are older, arguably wiser, and certainly ecstatic to not have to deal with the daily indignities of teenage life. While we may be looking for love, we’re more secure with where we are in our love lives and we are not expecting our perfect match to arrive as neatly wrapped as Jake Ryan.We can see more clearly Jake’s struggle not to be tied down to the older, more womanly Caroline, who might have possibly wanted marriage. Marriage is in fact one of the biggest jokes in the whole movie. In the film’s beguiling worldview, young infatuation is pure and real, unsullied by the nuptial-obsession of elders (Caroline, Sam’s family). We can appreciate Ringwald’s youthful charm and honesty anew, and see how she stands head-and-shoulders above the curent crop of teen movie queens/Maxim models.
Recent teen romances retail entirely in fantasy, where nerdiness triumphs over popularity with the help of eyeshadow, tweezers and the natural beauty that was there all along on the inside and—like, way more importantly—the outside. She’s All That and its ilk are transparantly unbelievable products of the Hollywood assembly line. The faith they project in the transformative power of love would never be as readily believed as Sixteen Candles was.
Now, without seeing Sixteen Candles as a template for anybody’s life, we can appreciate it for what it is. It’s just a feel-good movie with hottie Jake Ryan, and that’s enough.
