That was one of the many things about this movie that bugged me. It's not like she's living in some trailer park, she's living in a nice little house, albeit a tiny bit run down but not that bad. And come on, she even has a car, but oh no she's poor because -gasp- it has a DENT in it. It seems to me like Andie was just a brat, she had a fine life, she just always wanted more.
I guess in this movie if you don't live in a mansion, you're poor. Weird logic.
It is something that always bug me in these films of American teens, is how the poor are never really poor. in my country they would be considered middle class. they always have a house with two stories and some of them even have a small pool. I think poor in the first world country are the middle class in countries of second or third world.
shareSo true. As an American, I learned what poor/desperate people REALLY look like when I visited Tijuana. A couple of hours spent there will give any American a newfound perspective on how good we have it in the US--even our "poor."
shareShe seemed utterly loaded in comparison to Duckie. His bedroom with the peeling walls and his bed being just a mattress on the floor? No car for Duckie, either. But as someone else said, if you spend your life comparing yourself to one-percenters, you're gonna be disappointed. My sister and her husband do quite well, beautiful house, BMW and Audi in the garage, but they know so many people who are ten times wealthier than they are that they feel like they're middle class. My sister always insists that they are not rich, but income-wise they are in the top 5% in the U.S. So I guess it's all relative.
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.
I agree, Duckie is portrayed as way poorer than Andi. If memory serves correctly, his room looked nearly bare except for a mattress tossed on the floor. That was far from Andi's bedroom that was furnished with all frills and girly things imaginable.
shareExactly! I wondered if anyone would mention Duckie' s room.
shareLove John Hughes but that's the one thing he goes too far with. A pretty girl or a pretty boy: don't matter in high school if they have millions or nothing. They will be noticed, and popular, if they choose.
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She didn't seem bratty to me i mean she was a little bit of a sad sack about it but she wasn't constantly making it other peoples problem or being abusive to her dad about it when in fact she could have. I mean it is kind of pathetic that the teenage daughter was working and the father wasn't. Andie did have a nice enough house thats true it didn't look like crap but that doesn't mean they had much money coming in. At the time her father had no employment so they couldn't have had too much money and he may not have had a good job before that. I don't think she ever lived in poverty but if they had to scrape by and most of the other kids in her school were wealthy then she had a lot of reason to feel left out. Duckie sure did look like he was living in poverty though. I was just like umm what is up with that? I couldn't believe his situation. I mean even if it was just second hand furniture you would think he would have more than a mattress on the floor and an old arm chair in his room. I wonder if maybe his parents were alcoholics or junkies or something.
shareShe had tons of clothes/accessories too. Much more than i ever had. Didnt seem poor to me!
shareNo one thought she was poor when the movie was first released in the theaters, either. All these John Hughes movie kids were annoying.
shareOne point that I think is getting somewhat lost here is that it doesn't matter what we, the viewers, perceive as relative poverty: the fact is that Andie & her friends were actively & viciously bullied, mocked, & put down by the "richies" because of being from the wrong side of the tracks. We are shown several instances of this, Steff even going so far as calling her a "piece of low-grade ass." This type of classist tyranny, which seems to have been condoned by school authorities, goes very far in affecting any self-esteem that the poorer kids would have.
We should rather be celebrating Andie's valiantly brave efforts to rise above her environment.
Poor meant something very different in the 1980's. Most poor white people owned a house and had the basics. While the was in the Reagan era, Reagan's cuts mainly affected blacks first and the mentally ill (threw them on the street). Only in more recent decades has white America really began to suffer. Entire families get put on the street now because of job loss or eviction. Hardly any poor people own a house these days.
While Reaganomics played a roll in this problem I think even his policies didn't produce the poverty we see today. The poverty we see today is mostly post the 2008 recession.
Every John Hughes movie seems to fetishize the rich. It's formulaic, cookie cutter and eye-roll-inducing.
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