Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (10 page)

But I think what I love most about this final scene, revised or otherwise, is what Andie’s wearing which is – by anyone’s measurement – the ugliest prom dress of all time, which she made for herself. ‘Oh my God, that dress!’ groans Ringwald. ‘That is one thing in the film I won’t take responsibility for. I remember thinking at the time that it was really funny because Andie wants to be a fashion designer, and she makes that dress. Pick a new career, Andie!’ But in defence of this dress, it does encapsulate one of the truly great things about girls in eighties teen movies: they dress like shit.

When girls in eighties movies go on dates, they dress as demurely as the Amish: in
Valley Girl
, Julie’s (Deborah Foreman) party outfit is a high-necked Victorian blouse and a pair of slacks; in
Lucas
, Maggie (Kerri Green) woos Cappie (Charlie Sheen) away from sexy cheerleading captain Alise (Ally McBeal’s future nemesis Courtney Thorne-Smith) while wearing full-length skirts and shapeless jumpers; Chris (Elisabeth Shue) in
Adventures in Babysitting
attracts the attention of a college boy – a college boy! – while wearing her dead grandfather’s coat; Boof (Susan Ursitti) in
Teen Wolf
dresses like a middle-aged suburban mother and she gets her dream boy; Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson) wears boys’ clothes and still gets Eric Stoltz at the end of
Some Kind of Wonderful
; in
St Elmo’s Fire
– strictly speaking, a twenty-something movie as opposed to a teen movie, but a Brat Pack movie so, scientifically, it still counts – Leslie (Ally Sheedy) is every man’s sexual fantasy despite dressing like a Quaker and sporting an amazing pudding-bowl haircut, while Wendy (Mare Winningham) pulls Rob freaking Lowe despite wearing her great-grandmother’s wardrobe, right down to the underwear; Molly Ringwald’s wardrobe in all her teen movies is a testament to the power of one’s imagination if one apparently does not possess a full-length mirror.

These outfits are not actually a reflection of eighties fashion – in fact, it’s usually the mean popular girls who wear the typically eighties clothes, from rah-rah skirts to cropped tops. Chris, let alone Watts, would never wear a puffball skirt. Instead, they reflect a female attitude that has been absent from teen films since the early nineties: dressing for oneself as opposed to dressing to look sexually available. Unlike teens in post-eighties movies, even good post-eighties teen movies, girls in eighties teen films don’t dress to show off their ‘big boobs’ (
Easy A
) or ‘to show a little skin – this reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex’ (
Clueless
) – they dress entirely for their own pleasure, even their own comfort.

By contrast, in 1999’s
She’s All That
, Laney (Rachel Leigh Cook) has to take off her glasses (obviously) and show off her breasts (OBVIOUSLY) in order to go from school joke to potential girlfriend for the popular boy, Zack (Freddie Prinze Jr). Zack’s sister even comes over before their date to pluck Laney’s eyebrows, thereby ensuring that the date would be credible in the eyes of others, and the film blatantly approves of this, with the sister making ‘hilarious’ comparisons between Laney and Bert from
Sesame Street
. Natural body hair on women: GROSS-A-RAMA. And this brings us to a central teen movie issue: the makeover.

Eighties teen movies aren’t averse to the occasional pointless makeover. One of the most misguided cinematic makeovers of all time takes place in
The Breakfast Club
when Allison (Sheedy) wins the glorious prize of Emilio Estevez’s attention – but only after she swaps her fabulous eyeliner for pink blusher and a quite lame alice band. And I like alice bands. (This makeover is why Allison, in the pantheon of great Hughes female characters, is something of a disappointment. Sheedy herself was unsure about her makeover: ‘I didn’t want it to be a makeover scene, as if somebody painted a face on Allison and suddenly she became acceptable. But I thought if she wore this heavy black eyeliner, then it would be like wiping off the mask to reveal the person underneath. I could have done without the bow in the hair, but it was a compromise.’
^fn6
) Looking further back, one of the most famous movie makeovers took place in a 1970s teen movie when Sandie in
Grease
swaps her lovely 1950s bobby soxer clothes for the wardrobe of roller derby groupie and wins back her boyfriend in the process (fistpump! Go women!).

Some of the most popular makeovers in movies, from 1958’s
Gigi
to 1990’s
Pretty Woman
, have involved courtesans and prostitutes, emphasising that cinematic makeovers are invariably about making the female characters look more sexually available. But it wasn’t until the nineties that they became such a staple of teen movies that the stereotype was later satirised in 2001’s
Not Another Teen Movie
in which nerdy Janey (Chyler Leigh) is rendered slo-mo sexy simply by taking off her glasses and loosening her ponytail. In 1995’s
Clueless
, Cher (Alicia Silverstone) makes Tai (Brittany Murphy) Beverly Hills-ready by reapplying her make-up and swapping her loose trousers for tiny miniskirts. In 1999’s
Never Been Kissed
, Josie (the always lovely Drew Barrymore) is rescued from (undercover) high school hell thanks to some fashion and social help from her cooler brother Rob (David Arquette). Kat (Julia Stiles), the feminist protagonist in 1999’s
10 Things I Hate About You
, endures a makeover from her little sister before the prom because everyone knows feminists are just too ugly to be seen at social occasions unless heavily overhauled.

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). 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.

Andie stays so true to her style, no matter how much she likes a boy, that Blane doesn’t even realise she’s dressed for their date when he picks her up from the record store and he suggests that she should go home and change (in true Andie style, she refuses). Laney Boggs in
She’s All That
, by contrast, gets so overhauled before her date that her paramour doesn’t even recognise her – and he likes her more for it. 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. Even Diane Court in
Say Anything
, the girl with ‘the body of a gameshow host’, dresses undeniably, unapologetically and gloriously badly, with her frumpy skirt suits that she wears to house parties. And it was the very weirdness of these eighties girls, the Andies and the Dianes, that attracted the boys to them. They didn’t even have to get out the tweezers.

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. Not so much in Britain – British film has always been and is still mainly period pieces and gritty films. But in America, everything made after
Clueless
immediately became much more aspirational and glamorous, and it still is.’

‘
Clueless
was never meant to be a teen film exactly – it was a comedy of manners,’ says the film’s director, Amy Heckerling, who also directed the 1980s teen film
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
. ‘I saw it as a satire, almost, whereas
Fast Times
was about how teenagers actually lived.’ But what was once satire soon set the standard, and not just in terms of how teenage actresses dressed.

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 onscreen, they’re seeing fewer actresses who even vaguely resemble them.

Again, some of this can be traced back to
Clueless
, with its deliberate gloss and glamour. But the actresses in that film look almost chunky compared to the ones in films today. (The one
Clueless
actress who continued to work in popular movies after that film, the late Brittany Murphy, became, notoriously, much skinnier in her later films, thus fitting in with the new and increasingly limited aesthetic.) 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. Fashion editors invariably say that models today look ‘much healthier’ these days than they have of late, and this is true, but only if one thinks that looking better than the pale and miserable-looking eastern European models popular at the beginning of this century – let alone the half-starved teenage Kate Moss of the nineties – is a triumph for health in itself as opposed to a decidedly minor and relative improvement.

‘When I started in this business thirty years ago, teenage actresses were always about a size 6 [10 in the UK], maybe a 4 [UK 8]; now they’re always a size 0, or even a 00,’ one fashion stylist who works for teen magazines told me. A costume designer who has worked on one of the biggest teen films of this century adds, ‘When I get clothes for these girls, I often have to shop in the children’s section, even though they’re sixteen. Teen actresses are not expected to look like teenagers any more – they’re expected to look like models, and this is because female celebrities have sort of taken the place of models. Just look at the covers of fashion magazines today and who do you see? Actresses and celebrities.’ When asked if Ringwald would get work today as the romantic lead in a teen film, the costume designer rolled her eyes.

Ringwald is one of the most successful teen actresses of all time, but her influence proved a lot shorter-lived than her fame. If
Pretty in Pink
were made today, the film would be told from Blane’s point of view and Andie would be relegated to being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, about two stone lighter with heavy eyeliner and blow-dried hair (see:
Along Came Polly
. Or, rather, don’t). Ringwald says:

I feel like the films and TV shows today for teenagers are all about wanting to be famous and rich, and the girls are so skinny and sexualised in them, I just don’t have the stomach for them. The kind of roles I played in teen films just don’t seem to exist any more. My elder daughter is almost ten and I wanted to show her something that would make her feel better so I was thinking and thinking and I thought, Oh my God! I made it! So we sat down together and watched
Pretty in Pink
. It was wonderful to watch it now but it also feels really sad that the only movie that hit the spot was made thirty years ago. But ever since my daughter watched
Pretty in Pink
, she doesn’t want to watch those other shows any more. She knows there’s something else out there.

Plenty of awesome and weird heroines appeared in eighties teen films after
Pretty in Pink
. There’s self-righteous and fearless watermelon carrier Baby in
Dirty Dancing
, which was released the following year; dorky and courageous Thor-obsessed Sara in
Adventures in Babysitting
; and most of all, Veronica in
Heathers
, the film that didn’t just make female aggression scary,
Carrie
-style, but also triumphant, and really, really cool. By the end of the decade, audiences had become so used to teenage girls getting the good parts that Cameron Crowe was able to make one of the most sophisticated and feminist teen films of them all,
Say Anything
, in which the teenage boy, Lloyd (John Cusack), says specifically all he wants to do with his life is to support his brilliant girlfriend so she can shine. ‘This is a very different kind of knight and white horse. It’s not, “I’ll take you away”, it’s “I’ll enable you to be you.” If you’re a terrific girl and you’re brilliant, that’s what you’d hope for,’ said
Say Anything
’s executive producer, James L. Brooks.