Analysis Of Sixteen Candles

After reading the directions and topic for this paper, I was extremely eager to get started. Adolescence is a stage of life that is very critical for a person. Speaking from my own experience, I know that the teenage years are a difficult part of life and during these years, one experiences a rollercoaster of different emotions, obstacles, and decision-making. Aside from the topic of Adolescence, I was glad that I could choose which movie I wanted to watch, and that was an easy decision. I decided to watch Sixteen Candles. The last time I watched this movie was when I received the DVD as a gift, which was when I turned sixteen. Watching the movie then, I obviously did not realize that most of the problems and events that occurred in the movie

This ties into the topic of dating relationships. There were also family influences shown in Sixteen Candles. Molly Ringwald’s character, Sam felt as though she was not important in her own household. Everyone in Sam’s household was caught up on her sister’s wedding and completely disregarded that it was Sam’s birthday. This affected her emotions and identity because she continued her day believing that no one cared about her or her birthday. During the beginning scenes of the movie, development of sexual behavior was shown. Sam filled out a questionnaire that was written inside of a note that was passed to her. Inside the note read sexual questions such as, “Have you ever touched it? Have you ever done it?”. Questions like these show how sexual interests and desires arise during these years of adolescence. Nationally, 47.5 percent of twelfth-graders, 39 percent of eleventh-graders, 30 percent of tenth-graders, and 21 percent of ninth-graders reported that they were currently sexually active (Eaton & others, 2012). Therefore, it was not surprising to me that questions like these were being asked in high

Sam goes through a different array of moodiness and it was evident throughout the entire movie; all of which is completely understandable for a sixteen-year-old. One of the quotes she stated was, “I’m sixteen, everything is platinum, and I should be happy. It is physically impossible for me to be happy”. This quote was directly related to the video for Week 6’s discussion post, Inside the Teenage Brain. The reasoning behind Sam’s unexplainable array of emotions were her changes in the frontal cortex of her brain. The effects that followed these changes were the mood changes and feelings of unexplainable