Sixteen Candles (1984)

2 years ago

Sixteen Candles (1984)

I’VE NEVER BAGGED A BABE

by Tess Lynch

************RIDDLED WITH SPOILERS*******************

Because I am feeling somewhere between sad and horrified that John Hughes has passed away, I am going to admit to several embarrassing things over the course of this review/essay; it’s not right to avoid these topics when you’re writing about a movie whose characters orbit around a big burning mass of embarrassment. They’re governed by humiliation, these teenagers — the orthodontia! The panties made public! The sex surveys passed to the wrong person, wherein you admit to being a virgin who’s saving yourself for a guy you’ve barely spoken to! — and so were you, when you were fifteen going on sixteen. Don’t lie. You owe it to John Hughes not to lie.

long duk

Hughes wrote the script for Sixteen Candles in two days. The plot, in which a girl’s (Sam, played by Molly Ringwald) birthday is forgotten by her family when they’re distracted by her older (beautiful, composed, vapid) sister’s wedding, was lifted from the real-life experiences of Hughes’ friend. The extras were real high schoolers, and ad-libbing was encouraged. Most of the actors, with the exception of Gedde Watanabe (Long Duk Dong), were actually high school age. What am I saying here? That Sixteen Candles functions as some kind of teen movie cinéma vérité? No. Maybe. I don’t know. Look, what I think I’m saying is that John Hughes was never, ever condescending to his subjects. The embarrassments they suffer are never devices. When you write the truth about yourself, and your world, at sixteen, you can do it in two days.

First, I should offer a disclaimer about the Problem Of Long Duk Dong. You simply can’t get through a discussion of Sixteen Candles without someone piping in, “Hey! Wait a second! You’re avoiding the issue of the weirdly racist exchange student!” Though I don’t really care for the Wall Street Journal, I found a good piece about the movie hiding in its blog, written by a person who lived next door to the house used as a location for Sam’s family’s house. An excerpt:

I loved it. It was funny and sad and perceptive and goofy in all the right ways. I couldn’t help but suspend my attitude for its 93 minutes and just find the joy in what I was seeing. I wasn’t too happy about Long Duk Dong. I mean, he was the only guy in the cast who kinda looked like me. Did he have to talk like a boat person? Couldn’t he be a contender for a better-looking babe?

It’s a fair complaint. Gedde Watanabe actually bagged the part by doing a crude impersonation of a Korean friend. Gedde was actually from Utah. Long’s babe was a strange-looking, thick-cut slab of woman referred to as “Lumberjack;” he probably could have been a contender for a better-looking one, if he weren’t such a stereotype of a crazy foreigner. At the same time, LDD seems immune to much of the self-conscious agony of most of the other characters. He’s an outsider in many ways, and his services in providing comic relief make him an almost Shakespearean jester character. Whatever the verdict on Long Duk Dong, I’d argue that the story isn’t really about him, it’s about Sam, and Long’s impact on her, really, ain’t no thang.

Sam

Item Number One: The Devastating Crush On The Person Who Doesn’t Know You Exist

No matter how cool you were in high school, at one point — one terrible point — you fell madly in love with someone who maybe didn’t know you existed, or who knew but didn’t care, or who cared but not that way, or who cared that way but then changed his or her mind; all of these are horrible, but the worst is the variety where you know you’re not cute enough, you’re not cool enough, and remember that time when he saw you fall down the stairs of the admissions building and you had a chocolate frozen yogurt and you fell down the stairs and dropped your chocolate frozen yogurt and when you landed in it — or wait? What? No, I meant do you remember a time like that time. That was a made up time.

From my first day at my high school until the day I graduated I had a life-ending crush on a Popular Guy who didn’t really notice me except during about a month of history classes, where we played footsie under our desks. And, just like Sam’s life-ending crush Jake Ryan, he was just a big Dream Catcher in a Pink Floyd shirt upon which I projected my fantasies. There was absolutely nothing special, in retrospect, about my life-ending crush; there never is. There’s just some kind of crazy hormonal glitch that happens when they pipe up in English class one day when you’ve got a glint in your eye, and suddenly they become the plot of your your own high school movie.

What’s terrific about this set-up in Sixteen Candles is that Sam goes through such terrible humiliations before she actually gets to make out with Jake. A quiz that Sam fills out, declaring that she’s a virgin who is saving herself for him, gets passed around and makes its way to Jake. Her underpants, traded to a nerd (“Farmer Ted”/Anthony Michael Hall) so that he can imply to his friends that he’s slept with her and thus win a bet he’d made with them — the prize is floppy disks — are shown around. Jake eventually ends up with them. Her panties public, her secrets revealed, she probably couldn’t feel less cool…and he still wants to make out with her. He dumps his pretty, popular girlfriend for her. He likes her the way she is.

Item Number Two: Revenge of the Nerds

There is something wonderful about the clique of geeks each high school has who have banded together in the shared agony of experiencing life in headgear, with cystic acne, and in patient memorization of The X-Files in front of a TV in the senior lounge. Or join the juggling club. Or debate. Not that I did those three things, but I might have. Whatever guys, I tried them out like some people try out heroin. I was only chipping, okay? Back to the point: Nerds. They have the courage to refuse to change themselves, they make the most interesting people later on, and there’s always one or two who end up dating the best-looking people in the senior class a few weeks before graduation. They transcend their high-school social ranks, somehow. It’s the underdog fantasy, like Rudy for teenagers who are afraid of how their skin might react to sod and who prefer to wear orthopedic shoes instead of cleats. You know, like Aerosoles.

When Farmer Ted gives Jake Ryan the panties, Jake makes him a deal. He can drive home Jake’s drunk girlfriend Carolyn, who’s a snotty but hot popular girl. When Farmer Ted does this, the two (obviously) hook up; Jake uses this as an excuse to dump Carolyn, which is kind of fucked up, because he could have just been honest with her. But that’s the thing — Jake’s just not that cool. Jake will end up fat at 40, sunk low in a lawn chair with a brew in a koozie, because he’s got no mettle and he’s peaking early. But it’s Sam’s birthday (you forgot too, didn’t you!) and he is her present. Just like Farmer Ted’s present for being a kind of okay guy, with some kind of easy charm, is Carolyn. Jake meets Sam after her sister’s wedding, and they kiss over her birthday cake. Instead of things working out the way you know, as sixteen recedes into the distance, they should have — the people with character, with quirks, ending up together; the headgear is gone, the playing field level, interesting people win — they end up like we wanted them to then, when we were sixteen. You can still feel the thrill, like the kick from an Adidas sneaker under the desk.