If Michael Jackson wrote the soundtrack to my childhood, John Hughes captured the movie…or should that say, movies-with-an-S. From 1984 to 1990, John Hughes went hand-in-hand with the rising, mainstream juggernaut of VCR’s and VHS sell-through tapes. Not only did people see these films at the cinema, they watched them over and over again at home…the first generation of repeat viewers…and I was one of them. A truly remarkable, historical coincidence (nee…serendipity).
You can rhyme off his under-rated, pop culture commentaries — a litany of films that define a decade and its youth like no other: Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club…and at the very top of that pyramid, the genius that is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
These films weren’t simple teenage-angst films. These were films about the average suburban teenager, living the average suburuban life, and worried about what was to come when such a life eventually finished. In this way, the Hughes films are miles ahead of the currently in-favour ouvre, championed by people like Jud Apatow. In today’s films, from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to The Hangover, there is an obsession with the low-brow payoff of never growing up, and being trapped as an overgrown child in a world of adults…usually in a parent’s basement. Funny, if you like that sort of thing, but about as profound and meaningful as a bowl of plastic fruit.
Hughes tapped into something far more extraordinary: the fear, anguish, trepidation and bravado brought on by the realization that adulthood was going to happen, and nothing could be done to prevent it. You either faced it, embraced it…or you let it steam-roll right over you.
I’m going to leave the final word to Lynn Crosbie of The Globe and Mail, who sums up the Hughes legacy perfectly:
Think of The Breakfast Club again (my great favourite).
The high school kids’ anger, their snobishness and isolation, their crying jags, their solemnity (a juvenile Bowie quotation constitutes the film’s epigraph, portentously). All are repellent, self-indulgent, and cartoonishly-excessive; all are utterly authentic to the experience of being a teenager.
It’s not that Hughes kids are like real kids: it’s that they dramatize what it is to be that age, and seething with enormous, unwieldy, tempestuous emotion, arrogance, ignorance, and the first intimations — through lovely youth — of power.
As one ages, these films seem still more masterful, in their bravery, their ability to magnify the tiny dilemmas of teens, without ever intruding with impatience, or wisdom.
Thanks, John Hughes. You made my 1980s…and that non-intrusiveness was wisdom in its own right.
