happy birthday jesus over merry christmas

[lostcosmonaut]

Th overs-generating machine was rusty, but it still cranks

1. Patrice Lumumba Malcolm O'Neal over Andy Kaufman
   
   

Comments

[bad_juice]

yeah that is completely not what i am saying. i think you've misinterpreted my argument from the start. in the scene i mentioned above, the joke is not on amh and compadre for being shallow, it is on the frumpy girls. we are invited to join in the boys' disgust. and those two boys end up with the hot girls. they get what they want. there's no ramifications for their shallowness, which would back up your argument about the dangers of giving horny dorks superpowers. meanwhile, those two frumpy girls are non-entities, and disappear once they have served to be the butt of hughes' joke. my issue is not that i want frumpy boys' power taken away and bestowed on frumpy girls, but that hughes would never do the same thing if the genders were reversed. he identifies too strongly with male dorks to ever make them a one-note joke character (he reserves that for popular boys). it's telling of hughes' obvious biases that he has no compunction making fun of women he deems unattractive, but would never be so superficially cruel to a male character.

which leads into my second point, which i think you have also misunderstood. i bet if you asked john hughes what he thought of molly ringwald's looks he would say she's gorgeous. she has red hair, big lips, big smile. she has a look that plenty of people would say is hot. and lots of women saw those movies and wanted to look like her. no one ever watched amh in those movies and thought "i want to look like him." he is, at best, a bland cipher. (i think this pic illustrates my point pretty well: one of these things is not like the other) like the ugly dudes in porn, the point is not "i could look like him" -- which, given molly ringwald's brief fashion icon status, was absolutely true of her -- the point is "it doesn't matter that i look like him, hot girls should still want me." this is true of tons of hollywood, so i can't hold john hughes completely responsible, but i don't think he brings enough other worthy attributes to his films to overcome his unabashed endorsement of the hollywood patriarchy fan club.

th socratic method over soliloquy

[lostcosmonaut]

basil, thank you for clarifying. 1) You're right that Hughes' heart is w/ th nerdy boys, especially AMH. His heart's also w/ Molly Ringwald, whose relationship to Hollywood female beauty standards is similar to AMH's relationship to Hollywood male beauty standards. Yr argument depends on acceptance of th premise that AMH is so much less attractive than MR that their respective successes w/ th opposite sex in Hughes' films constitute an injustice. Yr evidence is what -- a photograph. If you had selected a photograph of AMH in Tiger Beat -- of which there have to be a few -- yr argument wobbles. For th record, I think she's cute and he's a gnome, but what I think is mostly irrelevant to their respective power fantasies. Th question is what does th high school quarterback think ? What does th head cheerleader think ? In Sixteen Candles, MR & AMH take unlikely paths to get what they want from th h.s. quarterback and th head cheerleader, respectively. It's arguable that that is an egalitarian ending, power-fantasy-wise, even if it doesn't satisfy yr social activism requirement or make any sense outside of th Hughes universe. That's th nature of power fantasies -- if you introduce likelihood to them, they cease to be power fantasies

2) Ringwald was def an icon, but her (Hollywood) career peaked in 1986 because Hollywood has no mercy for female actors who fall below a certain lowest-common-denominator attractiveness threshold. In other words, outside of th Hughes universe, th quarterback just wasn't that into her. Unfair ? Of course. It does suggest, though, that Hughes saw something in her that transcended looks

3) Yr point about ironic detachment is no less subjective than our respective assessment of AMH's cuteness. High school boys in movies as in life tend to be shallow and cruel. You want Hughes to telegraph that he doesn't approve of their shallow cruelty. Fair enough. Not all viewers would require dat

4) Let's be clear that what we're talking about is th lowest of th lowest-common-denominator 1980s Hollywood writers. That's not a value judgment, just th truth based on box office success and enduring cultural iconicity. Th Ringwald Trilogy and Weird Science weren't close to being his most popular work, but given th constraints of th genre, th audience, and his peculiar interest in power fantasies, his films were egalitarian in dispensing both cruelty and pleasure. As for yr assertion that Hughes exempted his male characters from superficial cruelty -- da fug ? See Long Duk Dong

5) Porn is a useful example to bring up here: complaining about th attractiveness double standard in teen movies is like demanding a higher instance of ugly chicks or an equal pay grade for ugly chicks in porn. To use a less ridiculous and more personal example: I don't like fake breasts. I don't want to see fake breasts in porn movies or regular movies. Until th demand for pneumatic breasts disappears, I'm wasting my breath

6) Mileage, as always, may vary. You're probably right that as works of art, Hughes' films' ratio of worthy attributes to used-up clichés is low; but if you're going to make a social justice argument, it's not enough to point out biases. Everyone's got biases, and it's always going to be messy sorting out th diff between art as engine of change and art as mirror. Hughes' films might be negligible as engines, but as mirrors they're damn near perfect

--mza.