Breakfast Club star Molly Ringwald ‘troubled’ by John Hughes classics she starred in upon reevaluation

'Back then, I was only vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of his writing was'

The Breakfast Club star Molly Ringwald has “reevaluated” the Eighties films she starred in as a teenager in the wake of the #MeToo movement and didn't like the result.

Ringwald, now 50, decided to revisit the 1985 John Hughes film after her 10-year-old daughter asked to watch it and described her findings in a piece for The New Yorker.

“I worried she would find aspects of it troubling. But I hadn't anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me,” she wrote, highlighting the character of John Bender - played by Judd Nelson - as a particular issue.

“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 writes. “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."

She adds: “Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film. When he’s not sexualising her, he takes out his rage on her with vicious contempt, calling her 'pathetic' “.

While praising Hughes' “sensitivity,” she questioned how he was able to possess “such a glaring blind spot,” adding: “Back then, I was only vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of John’s writing was.” She acknowledged that his writing “could also be considered racist, misogynistic, and, at times, homophobic."

The actor also highlighted several issues with Sixteen Candles (1984), namely the scene in which a boy named Jake gives his extremely drunk girlfriend to another man in exchange for underwear belonging to Ringwald's character.

“The Geek takes Polaroids with Caroline to have proof of his conquest; when she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she 'enjoyed it.' (Neither of them seems to remember much.) Caroline shakes her head in wonderment and says, 'You know, I have this weird feeling I did.'

"She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought, because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t. She was basically traded for a pair of underwear. Ah, John Hughes.”

Hughes, who died in 2009 at the age of 59, was the director of such films as Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off as well as the writer of hits Home Alone and Pretty in Pink.

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