I’m not especially interested in parsing out which of the fictional teenagers should have dated the other fictional teenagers in the movie Pretty in Pink; I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about who I should have dated in high school, and I see no reason not to apply the same general air of resignation to Andie, Blane, Steff, and Duckie. They’re all in high school! They can date everyone in a variety of constellations; they have time for whatever.
I don’t know if you care about John Hughes movies. You may not. It may interest you to know that almost every John Hughes movie is about lesbians except for, perhaps unsurprisingly, Some Kind of Wonderful. At any rate, Pretty in Pink is—correctly, I think—the most beloved of the second-tier Hughes. If you care about any ending to a John Hughes movie, it is probably this one. Here is how the movie ends: Andie (Molly Ringwald) gets together with Blane (Andrew McCarthy), supposedly because the original ending, where she gets together with Duckie (Jon Cryer), didn’t test well with audiences.
They would have been a nice couple in a lot of ways. Remarkably ill-suited in others. It would have made him very happy to get to kiss her, and I would have enjoyed seeing him become very happy. (I have no opinion whatsoever on Steff, the character played by James Spader, an insouciance that has always surprised me. I often feel like I ought to have more of a response to James Spader, especially 1980s-era James Spader, but I cannot help how I feel. I do like that he married William Shatner on Boston Legal, so I suppose I am inclined to be warmly disposed toward him as a result of the Shatner spillover. And yet.) My primary concern is rescuing Duckie from the slag heap of history, not in determining whether he “ought” to have dated Andie at the end. Most of the Duckie discourse in recent years has centered around whether he is an example of the Nice Guy™, and if so, whether we should all be mad at him for it. My answer is no, for at least two reasons:
Listen, having that one pompadour haircut with a forehead curl, relentless and furiously pining for your best friend, wearing circular sunglasses, hanging out at someone else’s job because you don’t have anywhere better to be, and being one of the poorest kids in school aren’t necessary preconditions for lesbianism, but, like, add ’em all up and, baby, you’ve got a stew going.
There are exactly two Modes of Gay Feeling, no more and no less. Mode of Gay Feeling the first is Total Domination, How Dare You, I Will Never Die, It Is Impossible for Me to Die, I Thrive On Being Misunderstood. It’s all carefully balanced hats and perfectly styled teddy boy hair and pastel lapels and either having no sex at all or the kind of sex you can’t tell your friends about because they’re going to get worried for you, and it’s wonderful and it’s exhausting, and you’re funnier than anybody else both because you have to be and because it makes sense and more than a little because you are firmly convinced that a movie crew is always just out of sight recording your entire life and you are playing to the cheap seats, every minute.
Here is the other Mode of Gay Feeling: You still look fantastic, but your stomach hurts and you will never get out of bed. You have learned that rolling your sleeves up over your forearms is very useful to you, sexually speaking, but the person you love and the people you sleep with have absolutely nothing in common, including what they think of your forearms.
I’m not suggesting that Duckie was a lesbian in order to justify whether it was right of him to assume that his being very in love with Andie in any way created an obligation in her to return his feelings; assuredly it wasn’t! Assuredly it isn’t! And yet: how many times in my own life have I thought, wrongly, The feelings I feel now toward the object of my affections are so blindingly obvious that it is as if I am carrying around the beaming lantern from a lighthouse inside of my chest. How could anyone not notice? When of course no one has noticed.
I’m not saying lesbians have a monopoly on silence, either, not even in the 1980s; there are straight boys who love straight women, probably, and are still reluctant to speak on the subject. But that would have been a good reason, I think, for Duckie not to say anything, yet to feel furious anyhow for not having been understood. It is a hard thing to want to be interpreted and not offer anyone a key to the translation.
Is there anything gayer than refusing to ask someone out, then holding them personally responsible for the silent, ever-increasing intensity of your feelings until they tell you casually they’re going on a date with someone who asked them out, then exploding with despair? Almost certainly, but no one will tell me what it is.
“I would’ve died for you” is a complete non sequitur of a response to the sentence “I am going on a date with a boy named Blane,” but it’s also the only honest thing one can say in response. I mean, one shouldn’t say it at all, but if one is going to, seventeen is the last acceptable age. This sentiment, by the way, is at least 25 percent of the reason why Bruno Mars is also a lesbian; if you are not a lesbian at the beginning of writing a song as histrionic and self-pitying as “Grenade,” you certainly are by the end of it. (I don’t know if Bruno Mars actually wrote the song “Grenade.” Don’t crowd me, kid, I’m just getting warmed up.)
The fact that Duckie’s most memorable scene involves fervent, furious lip-synching feels almost too on the nose. She bursts into the record store where Andie and the wonderful Iona (Annie Potts) work, disrupting everything, but she does so in perfect silence. It’s a beautiful performance of total frustration—she’s exhausted by the end of it, drooping and spent—and she doesn’t sing a single word, doesn’t make a single sound. She throws herself to the ground over and over, and she also wears a bolo tie. Of course one can certainly watch Duckie in that scene (and Andie’s resultant confusion and panic) as the tantrum of a boy who has mistaken owning a lot of hats for emotional sensitivity, who demands too much time and energy and attention from the women around him, you absolutely can. Probably John Hughes did.
You can also watch that scene as the tantrum of a lesbian who has mistaken owning a lot of hats for emotional sensitivity, who demands too much from others; just because I think Duckie is a lesbian doesn’t mean that she is making excellent and healthy choices. Duckie twitches around afterward like a hummingbird, as if her hands stopped moving around in emphatic gestures for even a second they might betray her into giving something away. But I recommend watching that scene, focusing as much as you can on Iona’s face throughout. She sees something she recognizes, wants to hail in direct acknowledgment, and also challenge. I think that thing she recognizes is a particular sort of lesbian sadness, and I want to recognize it, too, even though it’s not exactly mine.
Before I started testosterone I bought myself a lot of cheap accessories, both as a distraction and at least partly in the hope they would weigh me down and provide me with an actual, physical sense of being grounded. I went into a secondhand store on my way to the supermarket and I hailed the woman behind the front desk. “I want to buy at least eight silver rings from you,” I said, and did exactly that. It was absolutely wonderful, and she was as happy for me as I was.
There was a ninth ring that I did not buy, because things were getting a little ridiculous, and the woman behind the counter said, “Tell you what. I’ll put it to the side, and if you can’t stop thinking about it, you come back.” There are so many things I can’t stop thinking about! And so many places I find myself going back to! Aren’t things getting a little ridiculous?
My girlfriend, Grace, before she was my girlfriend, was working on an article about George Eliot and texted me something Jane Carlyle once wrote about Eliot:
I hope to know someday if the person I am addressing bears any resemblance in external things to the idea I have conceived of [them] in my mind.… How ridiculous all this may read beside the reality.
I texted back, “I identify strongly with ending the description of a fervent, cherished wish with ‘how ridiculous.’ I love you, Jane Carlyle. Also I just bought eight rings.”
“It really is pretty sweet,” my friend texted back, “given how awful she was.”
Duckie might have been awful but I can forgive her, because she was awfully sweet, too, and I wish I could do more to help her.