Out of John Hughes’ classic teen '80s movies, Sixteen Candles takes the cake for aging the worst considering the offensive and toxic content it seems to condone. John Hughes teen movies are a staple of the '80s that still tend to hold up as analyses of the nuances of adolescence. He was a director who frequently used the same actors like Molly Ringwald, who is consistently referred to as his muse, Anthony Michael Hall, and the young actors of the Brat Pack. When reflecting on coming-of-age, suburban teenage life movies, John Hughes reigns king, even when certain elements in his movies like Sixteen Candles are completely unacceptable.
Sixteen Candles follows teenage outsider Samantha Baker (Ringwald) on the day of her sixteenth birthday. Sam pines after older jock Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), stops advances from geeky freshman Ted (Hall) and deals with her birthday being forgotten by her entire family as they worry about her older sister’s wedding. The story culminates at the dance and afterparty, where Jake finally leaves his girlfriend Caroline (Haviland Morris), Ted finds a new friendship with Jake, and Sam has a heartfelt conversation with her dad about love. The film ends with the iconic sequences of Sam and Jake sitting on a table as they kiss above a cake Jake got for Sam’s birthday.
In today’s day and age, John Hughes' Sixteen Candles never would have been greenlit with its insensitive and offensive bits, nor should it have. The movie works perfectly fine without Long Duk Dong’s racist Asian portrayal for comedic effect, and the Jake-Caroline-Ted-Sam connections don’t need to involve encouraging date rape and sexual harassment. Some movies can get away with including similar elements when it’s satire, such as Tropic Thunder’s parody blackface for Robert Downey Jr., but Sixteen Candles makes no attempt to imply the portrayals or immoral actions of its protagonists are wrong or deserve punishment.
The most problematic aspect of Sixteen Candles that was also criticized after its release is the offensive Asian stereotypes portrayed through the character of Long Duk Dong, Sam’s grandparents’ new foreign exchange student. The main comedic bit of the film plays off offensive Asian stereotypes with accents, strained English, hypersexuality, and exaggerated “exoticness” reminiscent of Mickey Rooney’s problematic Asian character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The character of Long Duk Dong has been studied by media and race theorists, and according to NPR, many Asian Americans were taunted by peers with Dong’s cliche lines from the movie.
Sixteen Candles’ second problematic storyline with Ted and his friends is also never discredited as wrong. The boys are creeps, harassing women with sexual advances, making inappropriate comments, and begging Sam to give him her panties so he can show them to all the other freshman boys. Ted is supposed to be a likable and sympathetic character, which makes it even worse that Sixteen Candles never poses his behavior as inherently wrong. Instead, Ted’s creepiness is typically blamed away as young boys being boys and his desperate nature of being a geek. To make matters worse, Ted has sex with Caroline in Jake’s car while she’s practically unconscious and beyond intoxicated, and Sixteen Candles plays it away as a success story for Ted and a possible future for the two.
Jake Ryan was a staple of 1980s movie heartthrobs, but he’s really not a great guy when seeing what he did to his girlfriend. Jake gives over an extremely intoxicated Caroline to Farmer Ted, and basically gives him the okay to sexually assault her because “she won’t know the difference.” He also abandons Caroline at his party and, even though their relationship was based on popularity and status instead of a real connection, his treatment of her is unforgivably wrong. Hughes notably includes criticism of upper-class society as undertones in his films, and some critics have attempted to explain Caroline’s date-rape and abandonment as a way to attack the rich, though the argument is dry considering Jake remains wealthy and ends up as Sixteen Candles’ male hero.