by Pa Rock
Culture Vulture
It's been nearly forty years since young actress Molly Ringwald helped to define American teen angst through such film classics as "Sixteen Candles," "Pretty in Pink," and "The Breakfast Club," and no one should be surprised that Miss Ringwald, like the rest of us, has moved on. Today Molly Ringwald is experiencing another round of fame, this time portraying parents who help to create and sustain the teen angst.
Archie Andrews has been the American standard of a carefree, fun-loving teenager for more than eighty years, but in 2017 the CW television network reimagined Archie and his friends - Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, et al - into a darker and more sinister environment with a series called "Riverdale," which was named after the community that hd been home to the gang's adventures since the 1940's. To put it as charitably as possible, the new version and Archie and his friends is unsettling.
Remember, for instance, the spinsterly "Miss Grundy," the aging English teacher at Riverdale High who tried, continually in vain, to keep the high-spirited teens in line? In the television series, "Riverdale," Miss Grundy is the hot young music teacher who, in the very first episode of the show, is having sex with her student, Archie, in her Volkswagen Beetle. And the Riverdale that they inhabit is a bleak community awash in crime, drugs, gangs, and constantly changing sexual relationships.
The characters are all so contemporary as to be almost frightening. Betty bears a strong resemblance to the Betty in the comic books, with the major difference being that in the television series her father is a serial killer. Veronica is a Mafia princes, of sorts, in the television series, and her father Hiram is a mob boss who is intent on turning Riverdale into a crime Mecca. Jughead is a writer who sometimes doubles as the narrator in the television series, and Archie is a non-attentive student who has more interest in boxing, playing his guitar, and sex than he does in academics.
Part of Archie's problem is that his parents, Fred and Mary, have split up. In the comic version Fred was a construction worker and Mary was a sweet and passive housewife who eventually evolved into an office worker. The television version has Fred owning his own construction company and Mary is a lawyer. When they split Mary moved off to Chicago and Archie stayed behind with his dad and to be around his friends in Riverdale. Archie's missing mother is discussed during the early episodes of the show, but it is not until late in the first season - Episode 10 - when she actually makes an appearance.
Archie's absent mom, who had been off in Chicago reinventing herself as an independent professional, is Molly Ringwald - and for the next five seasons she drifts in and out of the program where she functions as a visiting parent and occasional legal counsel for her son. Ringwald's Mary Andrews is a person who parents at arm's-length and offers sage advice to Archie when she senses that he could use some direction. She is far from the more traditional parenting types with whom she interacted on-screen back during the 1980's - and she is certainly not the domestic mouse of a mother that Mary Andrews was in Archie Comics.
But being Mary Andrews was not destined to br Molly Ringwald's final film foray into nonstandard parenting. She also has a reoccurring role as the stepmother of the serial killer and cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, in the new Netflix series, "Dahmer."
Dahmer? Really, Molly?
One can't help but wonder if this deep dive into film darkness has something to do with her parents forgetting her sixteenth birthday!
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