[quote] Claire wants Bender in the end???
FWIW, Ringwald interestingly disagreed with this decision and vocally opposed it. She vehemently maintained, even to Hughes in 1-1 talks, that Brian would have been the better and more realistic endgame for Claire, and that it made no sense and had no payoff for Claire to choose Bender.
It’s generally accepted that Molly wanted this outcome (or at least, she campaigned for it) because she was dating Anthony Michael-Hall at the time of filming, and she wanted to maintain the integrity or keep the peace in that relationship. Outside of that, tho ugh, I think her idea makes more sense to progress the story and change the characters on their trajectory, and seems more in-keeping with the general message—I think she had a very good point.
As another poster pointed out; for Claire, dating Bender is a cliché shock-the-proles move, to scare her parents a little and to impress her friends with a bit of calculated risk-taking for cool points. It’s not about her liking much less loving Bender for who he is—and why would she? Bender spent the better part of a weekend belittling, insulting, minimising, and shaming/judging Claire, often for things beyond her control, and never once apologised or showed remorse. He even badmouths and mocks her behind her back to other characters. Any moves he makes toward ameliorating himself to her come transparently from his desire to have sex with her, and nothing more. Claire for her part is shown to be intelligent and aware as popular bitches go, and she sees through Bender. So the only reason for her to accept his advances must have been strategic or purely sexual. She goes with him for reasons of popularity and social status, just in a different way for her. There’s still cachet going with a bad boy, even if he does look like a homeless thirty-year old.
To date Brian the Brain, however, would have entailed Claire ceding a good part of her popularity and curated image, for no obvious gain to herself. Overlooking the troubling revelation of the gun in his locker, Brian might be considered a very good long-term prospect as a dating partner, given his conscientiousness and his predicted career track and his loyalty among other qualities. But teens by their nature only think in the short-term (they haven’t the lived experience to do anything else), and it is sadly undeniable that in the short-term, the middle-class socially-inept dweeb Brian would have meant social suicide for Claire. So to date Brian therefore would have proved that she truly believed in a new concept of social equality and acceptance beyond her class status; that she liked and cared for someone beyond what they could do for her image (or her pussy).
This argument for Brian also goes for Allison, but there’s no way any mid-80s popcorn flick would ever have featured a couple of lesbians as the main characters with a real plausible story arc, so we must sadly put that possibility aside as well.
[quote] Under all those clothes - black coat and sweater - Alison has on a frilly white shirt?
Forcing Allison into that people-pleasing princess getup was nothing more than lesbian futch erasure, to make the conformist straights more comfortable at the end.
Allison & Andrew were clearly both unconventional babygays still coming to terms with themselves and their emergent sexualities, which is likely why they found so much comfort in each other’s company. If you watch both characters with a close eye, there’s very little that may be construed as sexual or romantic about their friendship. They like one another and are slightly fascinated by one another in a mirror-image sort of way, but there’s no spark there.
