Pretty in Pink

Pretty in Pink is my favourite film of all time, and I was born 15 years after it was made.

How can a film about angsty teenagers made in the mid eighties, still resonate with teenagers over 30 years later, in a completely different era and even country?

Everyone feels like a weirdo 

The film follows protagonist Andie Walsh (Molly Ringwald), an outcast due to her lack of money who hangs out in the ‘weirdo courtyard.’ Her best friend Duckie devotes his life to following her around and admiring her, but ultimately has to watch her fall in love with one of them, a rich boy. Despite the maybe, not so realistic outcome (she totally should have chosen Duckie), she is still one of the most relatable characters to ever grace our screens.

From her ‘the worlds against me’ attitude, to her short temper, to her falling in love with someone she barely knows, Andie can relate to any teenager who’s going through puberty. It’s comforting to a teenage audience to see someone as temperamental and angsty as they are, ending up happy and seeing that everyone isn’t actually out to get them. Don’t get me wrong, I spend 90% of my time during the film screaming at Andie about how Duckie is the one for her not Blane (that’s a major appliance, that’s not a name!), and that she shouldn’t take everything so seriously, but to be honest, it’s hard to deny that I haven’t acted the exact same way. Part of the frustration comes from the reality of what I’m seeing. How could someone act like that? I didn’t act like that did I? I hope I didn’t act like that…  But the truth of the matter is, we’ve all acted like that at some time in our life, and that is what John Hughes has captured perfectly. Molly Ringwald portrays Andie in a way that was probably just how Molly was feeling at the time. There’s clearly not been much interference from the director about how she should act like there is nowadays, she’s playing what she knows teenagers to be like, and it works perfectly to her advantage.

Recent ‘rom-coms’ can fall into dangerous traps

Nowadays, coming of age films can fall into the trap of overthinking the protagonist. Often actors in their mid-late twenties are called in to play the roles of sixteen year olds, something that immediately makes the film less relatable. Ringwald was just 18 when filming Pretty in Pink, with the rest of the cast being in their very early twenties. Recent films overthink the ‘outsider’ character too much and tend to make them overly awkward, cringy and unrealistic. Take The Kissing Booth as an example, the latest craze in the rom-com world. I found myself cringing multiple times at the unrealistic situations and awkward one liners. The truth of the matter is, directors are overthinking the rom-com conventions too much. Recently, I feel that directors are going too far down the line of trying to break the conventions and come up with new ideas, that it’s becoming unrealistic and hard to relate to. All we want to see is an awkward teenager, making the same mistakes as normal teenagers make, in similar situations to the ones many of us find ourselves in. When films like Pretty in Pink were made, people were thinking more about what they were trying to say with the film and paving the way for the conventions we have today. This makes the film feel less constricted and like it could exist in the real world. Even Andie’s minimal make-up and volcanic ensembles, something that wardrobe and makeup would never do now,  makes it feel like the characters could exist alongside us, even now in 2018.

At the end of the day, teenagers want someone to tell them it’ll all be okay. Whether it’s a moody girl wanting to see that it’ll all work out in the end, or an emotional guy trying to see that sometimes, it’s just not meant to be, we all just want comfort out of a coming of age rom-com. Someone we can easily relate to, without all the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. The eighties was the prime era for coming of age rom-coms and, for the most part, they have stood the test of time. No, we don’t know our classmates numbers off by heart and no we don’t even call our friends nowadays, but the intimate inner workings of a teenager are all the same. Pretty in Pink is a film that represents being a teenager so purely, and that is what stands the test of time.