Molly Ringwald ponders the pendulum swing of the #MeToo movement

Molly Ringwald is still best known for being John Hughes’ leading lady, but she’s also a singer, writer, Riverdale mom, real mom, and a French translator. Her latest work is translating My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider. Inevitably, that’s led to Ringwald contemplating the violation Schneider experienced on the set of Last Tango In Paris and how their parallel roles as highly visible film stars differed.

“In a way, my experience was the opposite of Maria’s,” she tells The Guardian in a new interview. “The way she was thought of, this wanton muse, this louche character; that’s what was expected of her. It was the very opposite of me: I was projected as this perfect, sweet American girl next door. Which wasn’t me, but I was figuring out who I was, too. I was pretty young.”

Nevertheless, Ringwald’s famous movies were not free of misogyny and sexualization of female characters (as she thoughtfully wrestles with in a 2018 New Yorker essay), and behind the scenes, she also experienced unwelcome advances from older men (as she details in another New Yorker essay in 2017). Attitudes have changed in the years since, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement, but Ringwald wonders now if the industry has really undergone true, systemic change. “It’s like bullying in schools. They say: ‘We have a zero-tolerance policy.’ After that, it still exists, but it goes a little bit underground,” she says. “It’s a bit harder to get caught. It gets harder to say: ‘Is this bullying or not?’ It’s a bit like that with #MeToo.”

“I don’t think a Harvey Weinstein situation could exist now. But, again, a lot of people have gotten swept up in ‘cancellation’, and I worry about that; it’s unsustainable, in a way,” Ringwald asserts. “Some people have been unfairly canceled and they don’t belong in the same category as somebody like Harvey Weinstein.”

Before we get bogged down in the mire of “cancel culture,” a nebulous concept often leveled in bad faith to spur disingenuous “culture wars,” Ringwald makes a fair point that the notion itself is a distraction from real issues. “What it ends up doing is make people roll their eyes. That’s my worry,” she says. “I do want things to change, for real. Workplaces should be places where everyone can feel safe—not just in Hollywood, but everywhere. Particularly Americans. We can never do things incrementally; we’re so binary, so all or nothing. We’re basically a bunch of puritans.”