Ugly in Pink

I just want to say this right off: I am not a seething ball of hate.

It’s true, I’ve expressed, within the Prairie Dogs pages, both actual and virtual, a fear and loathing of many things, from emo to the Smurfs to Twilight, to ill-mannered individuals who peel and eat hard-boiled eggs in public. (Okay, that last one got cut before publication. I’m expressing that one now.) But there are so many things I love and adore. Bicycles. Butterscotch. Too-clever power-pop lyrics. High heels. Ridiculously cheap banh-mi. Well-written television comedies. Sicilian-style lemon ice. Dirty jokes. Gender equality. Worn magazine. Nice-looking men. Independent retailers. Baseball statistics . Steampunk novels. Etc. Just to name a few.

But to blog is to vent, and somehow, I end up writing most about stuff I can’t stand. But I am really a sweet, appreciative, loving human girl. Really.

I am in no way capable of mourning John fucking Hughes.

Pretty in Pink was Reaganomics on a high school level, with Molly Ringwald’s Andie as the Deserving Poor, Horatio Alger type heroine. She is entitled to her mating ritual with the rich boy, because she is virtuous capitalism personified. The rest of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks characters? Who cares? Clawing/dating your way up the food chain is the way to win, losers.

Ferris Bueller was a high school Patrick Bateman. Cruel, narcissistic, obsessed with status, willing to walk on anyone’s face for a giggle. You think Ferris didn’t grow up to kill ladies? Ferris is a fucking nutcase. (Best 80’s film festival lineup evar: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Roger and Me, and American Psycho. You get the era’s self-congratulatory fantasy, it’s bleak reality, and posterity’s verdict.)

The Breakfast Club? Because all you really need, young lady, is to scrub that shit off your face and put a pretty pink bow in your hair. Then you’ll get a cute, violent wrestler who, no, never will take his nasty daddy issue temper out on you, and the rest of your life will be dandy peaches.

And let’s not even talk Weird Science, cause, as the existence of mail-order-brides and Real Dolls and lame-o plastic porn can attest, lots of people really, really dig the notion of not-real, biddable, robot slave girls.

So no, Stephen, I actually don’t find Hughes’ body of work “gentle” or “entertaining”. I find it creepy, patriarchal, racist, (You know what’s hilarious? An Asian guy with a name that means penis!) and repugnant, and have since I was a child. Hughes was responsible for what I consider some of the most insidious lies and fucked-up mythologies ever perpetuated on youth by Hollywood film. I’m sure his friends and family mourn him, it’s always sad when a human dies early, but that guy put a lot of evil shit in the world.