First of all, I invite all of you to wish my sister, Cathy, a very Happy Birthday.
She and my nephew came down last weekend and the four of us had the chance to spend some time together. We didn’t do a heck of a lot but it was nice to just have the family together after weeks and months of winter weather keeping us limited to video chats and telephone calls.
My Mom and I took Easter Monday and headed to the One of A Kind Antique Store in Woodstock. I won’t go into all the details of our purchases, except to say that I picked up another Dale Earnhardt diecast, a Ken Schrader figure, and a Richard Petty mug.
I was hoping to get up on Tuesday and get back to work on getting back to work, to say nothing of any of the dozen or so of the other projects I’ve been wanting to get to. A funny thing happened. Around 1:20 a.m. on Tuesday morning, I went to turn over in bed. My body stopped…but the world kept going. After it happened a few more times over the next several minutes, I went and woke my Mom up. She seemed a lot calmer about it than I was and when I did a little Googling, it seems I had benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. (Anything with the word “benign” in it can’t be all bad, right?) I was still ready to go to the hospital at 2 in the morning, but I read that a physician would perform something called an “eply maneuver.” I found instructions on how to do it online and it helped a bit. Of course, when the world starts spinning on you and you’re still quite dizzy and off-balance, it’s like being seasick. I took Tuesday and most of Wednesday off, just doing the essentials (like some social media updates and I got back on the job hunt on Wednesday – oh, and I wrote a lot of this blog entry).
Overall, however, I’m trying not to let this get in my way too much. On Thursday, my Mom and I started to do a little spring yard work. We racked up two bags of leaves from the front yard and headed into Ingersoll on Friday to get some more bags. If this weekend is nice, we’ll be trying to clean up the front and possibly back yard.
For those of you playing along at home, Mom and I are still in the routine of watching Storage Wars every weekday night. We had been watching Cheers for the past couple of months. However, Mom said she was getting tired of Cheers, especially once Shelley Long left and was replaced with Kristie Alley so we’re alternating between Cheers and Golden Girls.
It certainly seems that I’m the bearer of sad news when it comes to my days at Lambton College. Back in late January, I had to tell my former classmates that another former classmate, John Lavoie, had passed away. Today, I woke up to the news that there was a shooting at the College. To quickly summarize the incident, three people were shot at a Lambton College bar and one, a local hockey player, was killed.
It’s easy to pass this all of with the question of “What is the world coming to?” that I’ve been hearing people ask my entire life. However, it’s when you hear of something like this happening, you really do ask yourself. While I was way more socially active in college than at any time before or after, I never went to any of the pub nights that Lambton threw. Even so, it was never out of any fear or threat of violence. The friends I had in college didn’t want to go and it wasn’t my scene either. Now, I’m constantly worried about my nephew going to school or to a concert.
Having said that, it’s ridiculous to think that acts of violence didn’t take place in the world. The École Polytechnique massacre took place while I was in college. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood depicted the murder of the Clutter family that took place in 1959. The Donnelly Massacre, which took place approximately 40 minutes away from where I am sitting, in a small town in Ontario, occurred in 1880.
Violence has always happened. With the rise in media coverage, especially after the 1999 Columbine shootings, and now even more so with social media, we’re more aware of things. (And if social media has taught us anything this past week, it’s that when it comes to world events, people will post ANYTHING as long as it fits their narrative, whether it’s true or not.) And while I have my own opinion on gun control, I’ll put that aside for now. The reason I write this is that, when a school shooting in another country and hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, it’s easy to just change the channel or scroll past. As Crowded House sang in Don’t Dream It’s Over, “In the paper today, tales of war and of waste;
But you turn right over to the TV page.” However, when there’s that connection, whether you know someone involved, or it happens at your alma mater, the headlines become real and you realize that it’s not always going to be someone else.
The world isn’t coming to any place that it hasn’t already been for generations. It’s simply come closer to home than people feel comfortable thinking about.
Okay, back to tamer topics.
While my sister and nephew were down, we spent a lot of time hanging out and watching TV. I never realized how many good movies that AMC shows. While they had a Tom Hanks marathon (Apollo 13, Forrest Gump, the Green Mile) on Monday, over the weekend they were airing a slew of 80s teen flicks, including the Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and 16 Candles.
My Mom decided she wanted to watch Pretty In Pink and while AMC wasn’t airing it, I do have the “Everything’s Duckie Edition” DVD and we spent Friday night watching that. My nephew’s response was “It wasn’t as horrible as I expected.” (He thought James Spader might have been playing a young Trump, and I have to admit I don’t know that I’ll ever unsee that going forward.)
As I watched it, however, I was struck by something that I had never really noticed before. And it was enough to inspire me to create some content for my blog, instead of the usual “Here’s what I did this week!”
Some warnings!
- Massive spoilers for Pretty In Pink. Of course, this is a movie that came out in 1986 and to put it in NASCAR terms (because it’s my blog and I can do that sort of thing), it was just under two weeks after Geoff Bodine won the Daytona 500. In other words, if you haven’t seen it by now, you probably weren’t all that interested in seeing it – and you’ve probably left this page.
- I’m not going to get into the whole “lack of diversity in John Hughes movies” conversation. There are plenty of other places on the Internet where this is discussed.
- I write this knowing I will p!ss off several people I know. Of course, since only about three people (all of which are bots) read this, I’m not exactly playing Russian Roulette here. I will say that, overall, I still enjoy watching Pretty In Pink and other movies of the genre and era. I just want to acknowledge some issues I have with the plot and overall messaging that the movie provides.
- I’m Team Duckie, not Team Blane, so I am biased. Wait, someone showing bias on the internet???? NOOOO!!!!!
Let’s begin with our thesis: Pretty in Pink is a terribly written movie.
I don’t mean dialogue-wise. John Hughes does a pretty fair job at capturing what teens sounded like back then. (Or at least as best as I recall, after all, this movie did come out…wow! 40 years ago!) Add to that, I have to show some admiration for trying to write a screenplay illustrating the class divide between the rich, upper-class kids who trashed their homes while their parents were away (Considering the same thing happened in 16 Candles, this seems to be an on-going theme) and the poor, working-class kids who got into post-punk/indie rock.
However, let’s start with the inspiration for the movie. John Hughes apparently heard Pretty in Pink by the Psychedelic Furs and wrote the screenplay. Putting aside the fact that the main “character” of the song is a woman named Caroline, not Andie (played by Molly Ringwald), the song isn’t about a young woman who wants to rise above her low-income life and pursue a career in fashion. Admittedly, the lyrics aren’t quite as raunchy as Walk This Way by Aerosmith but it’s not exactly the stuff that PG movies would necessarily be made of.
Maybe I’m reaching there so let’s turn to the movie itself. Working class Andie and richie Blane (Andrew McCarthy) go on the worst date in the history of cinema (well, other than the one in Miracle Mile). Right off the bat we know something’s wrong because Andie is reluctant to go to a party with Blane’s friends and his response is that the couple could hang out with Andie’s friends, using the phrase “we could go crawl under a rock!”
Blane’s friends (including Steff McKee played by James Spader) treat Andie like crap at the wild and raunchy party and Blane finds himself out of place at the indie club where her life-long friend, Duckie (Jon Cryer) shows his jealousy and ends up kissing her boss, Iona (Annie Potts). After leaving both the party and the bar with Andie upset, they have a fight reminiscent of who’s on first where Blane tries to figure out that Andie wants to go home without Blane actually taking her home. Somehow, they still end up playing tonsil hockey and Blane (“That’s a major appliance; that’s not a name”) asks Andie to prom.
Putting that aside, the bulk of the middle of the film shows Blane defending his relationship with Andie to Steff. Andie, meanwhile, makes plans for the prom. There’s also this whole storyline about her father, Jack (Harry Dean Stanton), missing out on the chance on a full-time job because he’s still hung up on the woman, his wife and Andie’s mom, who had left his four years ago.
Here’s where the writing goes south. One minute, Andie and Blane are making out in the stables of some (it’s presumed) ritzy country club. The next minute, he’s not answering her phone calls. Andie eventually confronts Blane at school who gives this lame excuse that he “forgot” that he had asked someone else to Prom a month before.
Aside: Maybe despite the fact that I never even remotely considered going to my own prom, (Quite honestly, I’m not even sure I knew when the prom happened) I always assumed that it was a fairly big deal…and that the person you went to prom with was a big deal. Soooo…wouldn’t you think that you’d kinda remember asking someone to prom?
Of course you would! Obviously, in a matter of moments (in movie time), Blane somehow went from making out with Andie to blowing her off. The story would suggest that he bowed to peer and social pressure but yet the last time such a thing was mentioned, Blane basically told Steff that he didn’t care about the class difference between him and Andie.
Maybe the issue isn’t the writing but the editing. If they had shown Blane and Andie in the stables making out and THEN had Steff talking about the reaction that their relationship was getting from their social group, as well as Blane’s parents (who we never see), Blane’s actions might have made more sense. I guess we’re supposed to assume that somewhere, off camera, Blane had a fight with his parents over his relationship with Andie and that drove him to break up with her. However, no matter what the explanation or how much pressure he was getting from his parents or friends to dump Andie, he comes off as a complete douchebag! (And when exactly was he going to tell her? Was she supposed to assume all was fine until she ended up waiting at home for hours on prom night?)
Fast-forward to the prom. Andie decides that she’s going, despite of Blane’s rejection. She arrives at the prom to find Duckie waiting for her. After spending the latter half of the film riding around on his bike or pining away for Andie in his room, Duckie dons some cool threads and goes to the prom to support the woman who friend zoned him his entire life.
In the novelization, based on the original ending (which you can read here), this is where the movie ends – with Andie and Duckie dancing at the prom. However, the story behind the ending is that preview audiences didn’t like the ending. It was explained away by stating that it might look like “classism” and further a narrative that the upper class and working class couldn’t be involved romantically. (Let’s be honest, the real reason was that audiences back then – as they would today – couldn’t fathom the idea that the pretty girl ends up with her dorky friend and not the handsome, rich guy.)
And maybe that was the reason why the final version of the script makes no sense. If there’s one thing a writer knows, it’s how difficult it is to go back and change a major part of your content once you have everything set in place. It never sounds as good and instead sounds clunky and forced.
No matter what the excuse, Pretty in Pink doesn’t end with Duckie and Andie dancing the night away. Instead, they find Blane sitting alone and dejected at the prom. It turns out that, as we suspected, there was no other date.
Let me just riff on this for a second. As I said earlier, I know that the prom is a big deal to some high school students but if you’re miserable because you bowed to peer pressure and broke your date to this particular event, why would you end up going if you’re just going to sit by yourself and brood?
When he sees that Andie has arrived, Blane goes over to talk to her. Steff intercepts him to talk trash about Andie, and Blane finally tells him off. So far, so good. When Blane finally meets up with Andie, she says he doesn’t need to apologize.
So he doesn’t. He says “I always believed in you. I just didn’t believe in me,” tells Andie he loves here and heads home. Duckie turns to her and says that Blane came here alone.
I could never figure out what Duckie means here. Does he mean?
(A) He came here alone. He can leave alone.
(B) He came here alone. There was no other date. It was a B-S story..
(C) After you two broke up, he never wanted to come with anyone else.
No matter what Duckie means, he ultimately tells Andie – you know, the woman he has been in love with for years and who he showed up to the prom to support? – that Blane isn’t so bad and to go after him, which she immediately does.
She meets up with Blane. They kiss. The credits roll.
I know, with the magic of Hollywood, and the 80s soundtrack playing in the background, everyone goes “Awww! Love wins out!” and for 30-plus years (before we had to discuss the lack of diversity and how creepy Hughes treated Ringwald and her declaration that Duckie would have eventually come out) that’s how they marketed Pretty In Pink. That the film was delivering this message that true love could overcome any obstacles that society put in its place. It was a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.
Bullsh*t.
In retrospect, the message that the film actually delivers is that if you’re handsome and rich, it doesn’t matter how crappy you treat someone. You bow to peer pressure and/or decide someone is beneath you? No problem. You can just mumble some self-depreciating, introspective nonsense and they’ll come running after you.
As I said, I’ve always been Team Duckie, but to me, I’ve always thought that John Hughes should have stuck to his guns and given us the ending we deserved. Let Blane realize his mistake and apologize (showing that the richies do have a conscience), but have Andie end up with the guy who was there for her through thick and thin.
And you all thought all I could talk ad nauseam about wrestling and NASCAR.
If anyone is still reading this, I found out this past week that FM96 is having their annual Small Town Tournament. I definitely have a few towns that I’ll be casting a vote for when the polls open at 6 a.m. on Monday. (I won’t be getting up at 6 to vote but I will definitely visit later in the day.) No matter what small town you’re coming from, I would encourage everyone to make their voice known.
And, on that note, I hope everyone is doing well. Since most of you probably came here from the link on my Facebook page, I will continue to invite you to reach out on Facebook Messenger via text or voice message (whichever is easier). Alternately, you can also email me. Either way, feel free to check in and let me know what you think of the subjects I’ve covered on my blog, or just what you’re up to these days.
johnmilner.ca 