The Gen X Love/Hate Relationship with '80s Teen Comedies
As adults, we find them as problematic as they are funny
When I was 9 or 10 years old, my best friend J.J. rented the movie Revenge of the Nerds. She was also 9 or 10 and the video store thought nothing of letting her rent an R-rated sex comedy. It was 1984 so, perfectly normal.
She was home alone for the afternoon and invited me over to watch it with her. We laughed hysterically over the ridiculous characters and the outrageous antics, cheered for the nerds when they got their revenge. Who doesn’t love an old-fashioned tale of bullies getting their comeuppance?
Sixteen Candles was rated PG so my video store coworkers and I thought nothing of popping it into the store’s VCR on a busy Saturday night, sometime in the mid-’90s. The company’s policy was that employees were only allowed to play films in the store that were rated G or PG. Then a steamy scene with a topless high school girl showering popped up on all the screens in the store and one of us scrambled to stop the movie, lest we get into trouble for showing an inappropriate film. Clearly, we’d all forgotten about that part in the movie. Needless to say, Sixteen Candles should be on the list of movies people reference as the reason the Motion Picture Association of America later created the PG-13 rating.
For the life of me, I still don’t know what an “oily bohunk” is
Weird Science was another personal favorite. The absurdist story had everything: nerds, bullies, nerds getting revenge on said bullies, a drop-dead gorgeous woman with supernatural powers, hilarious hijinks, and mutant biker gangs crashing parties. You know, a typical high school orgy type of thing with “chips, dips, chains, and whips”. I still laugh remembering that scene. “Oh, Gary—you told me you were combing your hair!”
Sure, the boys made her for horny boy reasons, but Lisa was an empowered woman who made Chet’s outside match his shitty personality
Gen-Xers grew up during the era of the Teen Comedy, a sub-genre of film that began in the ’70s with movies like Animal House and American Graffiti. Those movies are okay, but the teen comedy was perfected in the ‘80s. That’s when the Boomers who made them pushed the envelope with raunchy sex jokes, nudity, and immature potty humor. It’s like their oppressive, WASPy home environments made them grow up itching to give the old Hays Code the middle finger.
The most memorable teen films, the ones Gen X is sentimentally attached to, also have heart—the stories contain enough truth of the American teenage experience to resonate for decades. Fast Times At Ridgmont High addressed teen pregnancy and abortion, The Breakfast Club explored the high school caste system, Pretty In Pink was about class differences, unrequited love, and heartbreak.
But watching the movies that defined our childhoods decades later is…something else.
Like, I don’t even know where to start.
I guess I’ll start with the first movie I mentioned, Revenge of the Nerds. In the age of violent misogynistic incels (the self-named “involuntarily celibate”) like Isla Vista shooter Rodger Elliot, watching the nerds gleefully commit numerous sexual offenses against the hot cheerleaders takes on a whole new tone. When I was a kid, I saw it the way the movie wants us to: they deserved it. After all, the cheerleaders were bullies, too. But the protagonist’s methods of revenge reveal the true reasons why they see the sorority women as their enemies: they reject the nerds romantically and sexually. Rodger Elliot felt like a nerd too, but instead of installing secret cameras to watch women undress in their bedrooms, stealing their panties, and selling nude photos of them, he went on a murder spree. If our “heroes” didn’t hate the women for rejecting them, they would’ve gotten revenge in nonsexual ways, not through methods that essentially steal from the women what the women won’t freely give to them. The perfect example of this occurs near the end, when Lewis sneakily wears the Darth Vader costume to trick Betty into having sex with him because she assumes it’s her boyfriend. Even if this wasn’t legally considered sexual assault, it’s so sleazy that it’s stunning we all shrugged our shoulders just because she enjoyed the sex more with Lewis. It’s a dangerous message to send to young men that if you just force a woman to give you a chance, she’ll pick you.
What woman wouldn’t happily be with the creep who broke into her dorm, surprised her in the shower, and chased her while snapping pictures of her naked
But wait—there’s more! There’s the racist stereotypical Japanese character Toshiro, the gay stereotype with Lamar, and it made me cringe when the nerds let Wormser, the genius 12 year old, spy on the naked women, too. Illinois attorney Michael Helfand wrote a piece titled “So Many Crimes In Revenge of the Nerds” that’s worth a gander.
Most of the ‘80s teen films we cherish repeat these tropes. Guys committing sexual offenses or simply being creeps who still “win” the girl is one of them, as well as racist characters like Long Duc Dong who made every Asian boy’s life hell when his peers called him “The Donger” and yelled “Hey sexy girlfrieeeend!”
It’s like the Boomers who felt like geeks in high school wanted to write stories where their fantasy of getting revenge on the brutes of their day comes to life, but they simultaneously became the bullies by punching down on Asians, immigrants, disabled people, LGBTQ people, and obese people.
My son is only 13 years old so I haven’t watched most of these beloved films with him (the made-for-tv version of Weird Science is an exception), but one thing that makes us all cringe when we watch ‘80s movies together is the casual use of “f*g” as an insult. It happens even in the most family-friendly films of our youth. The first time we heard it in a movie our son raised his eyebrows and said “Wow… that’s crazy”, a good sign it’s not much of a thing anymore among the youngest generations.
Boomers couldn’t help but leave signs (literally) that it was still the ‘50s in their minds
I was curious what the stars and filmmakers have to say about these movies now and discovered an essay Molly Ringwald wrote for The New Yorker in 2018. In it, she describes the eye-opening experience of watching The Breakfast Club with one of her daughters. She encapsulates my mixed feelings perfectly when she says, “It’s hard for me to understand how John Hughes was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.”
It's so wild how many of the movies of our youth have offensive words and disturbing tropes. It was accepted back then; even though we knew it was "bad", we didn't have the same push for education about such things as we do now.
One of my favorites in this type of genre was Real Genius. The character Mitch is 15 years old and a much older woman tries to seduce him before he ends up kissing a college aged Jordan. It is one of those moments I didn’t really think about, but in retrospect it was very creepy.
I should mention that RotN was filmed in Tucson, Arizona where I currently reside. I had a number of friends who lived near some of the “house” locations. https://youtu.be/At_l8CHvde4?si=wrygJvkR3EqpHpZj