Weird Science (1985)
and the Woman Built to Make Him a Man
Two teenage boys build the perfect woman. She can bend reality, and she spends every bit of that power on their confidence. What it taught a generation of girls about what a powerful woman is for.
Weird Science (1985). Written and directed by John Hughes. Anthony Michael Hall as Gary, Ilan Mitchell-Smith as Wyatt, Kelly LeBrock as Lisa.
She can conjure a car out of thin air and bend a whole house to her will. She uses all of it to give two boys their confidence.
They get the girls. Then she vanishes.
This page belongs to On Screen, and it follows Mannequin, and the Girl Who Only Comes Alive for Him. Like every entry there, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Gary and Wyatt are two lonely, bullied kids, and the film is a comedy. That is exactly why its lesson went in so easily.
The Story
Gary and Wyatt are high school outcasts, humiliated by the popular boys and ignored by the girls they admire. One weekend, inspired by the 1931 Frankenstein on television, they decide to make a woman. They hook electrodes to a doll, hack into a government computer for the power, and in a surge of electricity Lisa appears.
Lisa is everything they asked for: beautiful, grown, brilliant, and able to change reality at will. She takes them to a Chicago blues bar on fake IDs. She conjures a pink Cadillac and a Porsche. She throws a wild party at Wyatt’s house, and when the boys are still too scared to act, she arranges for a gang of mutant bikers to crash it, so that Gary and Wyatt have to stand up to them in front of everyone. When Wyatt’s older brother Chet bullies them, she turns him into a foul, toad-like creature until he apologizes.
It works. The boys stand up to the bikers and win over Deb and Hilly, the girls they had been admiring all along. Lisa hugs them both, tearfully, and dematerializes. In the last scene she reappears at their school as the new gym teacher.
When it came out, The Washington Post‘s Rita Kempley called the role demeaning: a “love slave to a pair of 15-year-olds.”
What It Teaches
1. A woman can be made to order
The film’s first act is two boys deciding what a woman should be, and getting it. Lisa has no childhood, no family, no history and no life before the moment they need her. She arrives finished, to specification.
The Mannequin piece traced this story back to Pygmalion, who carved his wife out of ivory. Weird Science swaps the chisel for a computer and keeps everything else. A girl watching learns that the ideal woman is designed from the outside, by what someone else wants.
2. All of her power is for his becoming
Here is where Weird Science goes further than Mannequin. Emmy was silent and powerless. Lisa is neither. She is the most capable person in the film by a wide margin: she can create cars, summon bikers and transform a grown man into a creature.
She uses none of it on her own life. Every trick serves the boys’ confidence. She takes them out, stages their tests, handles their bully and sets up the moment where they finally get to be brave. The Glossary names this position: the Rescuer, the role that “requires someone below it.” Lisa’s whole existence is the Rescuer’s, and it is filmed as a fantasy.
The lesson for a girl is subtle and lasting. Being powerful does not change the job. Even a woman who can bend reality spends it on building up a man.
3. She builds him up, and someone else gets him
The boys’ reward is Deb and Hilly. Lisa is the tool that gets them there. The woman who did all the work is never the one they end up with; she is the stage they pass through on the way to the girls they wanted before she arrived.
Many women know this story from their own lives. She got him through the degree, the sobriety, the divorce, the career change. She believed in him before anyone else did. And when he was finally the man she had helped him become, he became it with someone else.
4. She wants nothing for herself
In the whole film we never learn what Lisa wants. She has no goal, no errand and no plan of her own. The only feeling she is given that belongs to her is the tears at the end, and they are about leaving the boys.
That is the quietest lesson in the film and the deepest one. A woman whose only wants are his wants is the easiest person in the world to take from, because she will never ask for anything back. The Decoder Series calls what she gives narcissistic supply. Lisa is supply with legs: attention, admiration and endless effort, on tap.
5. When he is finished, she disappears, and she does it again
Once the boys have grown, Lisa’s reason to exist is over, so she ceases to exist. The film treats this as a bittersweet goodbye.
Then comes the joke at the very end: she reappears as the school’s new gym teacher, ready to make men out of the next group of boys. The film’s final beat is the pattern repeating. For a girl who sees herself in Lisa, that is the whole cycle in one closing shot: make yourself useful, disappear when you are no longer needed, start over with someone new.
Mannequin and Weird Science, Side by Side
The two films arrived two years apart and teach the same lesson from opposite ends.
| Mannequin (1987) | Weird Science (1985) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who made her | A lonely artist, with his hands | Two lonely boys, with a computer |
| Her power | None. She freezes when anyone else looks | Nearly unlimited |
| What she uses it for | Helping him make windows that go out under his name | Making them into men |
| What she wants | We are told: true love | We are never told |
| How it ends | She becomes fully real as his reward | She disappears once they no longer need her |
A girl who watched both learned that it made no difference whether she was weak or strong. Either way, her life was about him.
If You Grew Up on This
You may have loved this film. Lisa was glamorous and funny and completely in charge, and plenty of girls wanted to be her. Nothing on this page asks you to stop enjoying it. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.
Some questions to sit with:
- Who have you built up? Where did they go once they were built?
- If you could bend reality for one weekend, whose life would you spend it on?
- What do you want that has nothing to do with anyone else’s growth?
- When did someone last set up a moment for you to be brave?
Lisa never got an answer to any of these. You can.
You’re the audience now. You can see who the magic was for.
Related: Mannequin → · Resources →