{"id":1774,"date":"2009-08-08T12:46:50","date_gmt":"2009-08-08T12:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1774"},"modified":"2009-08-08T12:46:50","modified_gmt":"2009-08-08T12:46:50","slug":"in_memoriam_john_hughes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2009\/08\/08\/in_memoriam_john_hughes\/","title":{"rendered":"In Memoriam: John Hughes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Mr. Vernon,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make use write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain… and an athlete… and a basket case… a princess… and a criminal. Does that answer your question?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sincerely yours,
\nThe Breakfast Club<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To those of us who were teenagers in the 1980s, John Hughes was a spiritual big brother. Not a father figure with the accompanying implications of authority, because fatherhood was usually represented in his movies as benign indifference, if not outright absenteeism, and authority figures in general were foolish and petty. No, he was our buddy, the cool grown-up guy who was still close enough to us in sensibility, if not actual age, to talk to us about things that mattered without bullshitting us. In a decade filled with dumb movies populated by ersatz teens who were some corporate cigar-chomper’s idea of what we were like, Hughes’ flicks stood out because he knew what teens were really<\/i> like. Sure, Sixteen Candles<\/i> is a farcical cartoon, and Sam, Farmer Ted, and Jake Ryan<\/a> are broad caricatures intended to represent different high school cliques, but they all have a spark of authenticity at their core. They’re all volatile mixtures of bravado and vulnerability. Everyone in the movie is desperate to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing. Even the cool kid, Jake, is unsure of his place within his particular clique, and he’s tired of the games he’s forced to play by the cultural stratum in which he exists. They’re all striving to fit in, to gain approval and validation, to experience something genuine instead of just going through the motions. I knew kids just like them; I was<\/i> a kid just like them. We all were.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As for Hughes’ best-known character, the immortal Ferris Bueller, well, nobody<\/i> knew a kid like Ferris… but we all wanted to. Through Ferris, an idealized, superhero version of everyone’s best friend, the guy whose advice was actually worth listening to, Hughes accomplished the unlikely task of slipping my generation a powerful “seize the day” message without arousing our natural teenage cynicism (unlike, say, Dead Poets Society<\/i>, a movie I like but which is So Very Serious and Self-Important that it ultimately seems more phony than all of Ferris’ improbable adventures). And of course Ferris Bueller’s Day Off<\/i> is a damn funny movie.<\/p>\n

If Hughes’ movies were nothing more than funny<\/i>, though, I don’t think anyone would be thinking of them of classics today. His real talent was combining various forms of comedy — farce, one-liners, and absurdity — with a deep sentimental streak. This is evident even in one of his earliest film, National Lampoon’s Vacation<\/i>, which Hughes wrote but did not direct. The whole movie is driven by Clark Griswold’s determination to simply spend some quality time with his family, before the kids are grown and it’s too late. Another writer may have taken Vacation<\/i>‘s premise — a disastrous family road trip — and just strung together a bunch of gags, resulting in an entertaining movie that no one remembered five minutes after leaving the theater. But what makes Vacation<\/i> more than it probably should have been is the moments between the gags, when Clark expresses regrets and frustrations that his plans just aren’t working out. And those moments of course feed into the movie’s hysterical conclusion, when he completely loses it and forces his way into a closed-for-renovation Wally World at gunpoint. (As much as I love Vacation<\/i>, I think one of its sequels, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation<\/i>, was actually a more perfect blending of the pathos and silliness; again, it was a Hughes script directed by someone else.)<\/p>\n

Planes, Trains and Automobiles<\/i> is another fine example of Hughes balancing opposing emotional forces. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as funny as Steve Martin’s obscene breakdown<\/a> in front of a less-than-helpful car-rental clerk (played by the sublime Edie McClure, a regular fixture in Hughes’ work), but the revelation of the sad truth of John Candy’s life at the end makes the movie into something much more valuable and enduring than a mere laugh-a-thon. This is one of my favorite holiday-season films, and one of my all-time favorite comedies.<\/p>\n

Hughes made his share of less-than-successful projects. Curly Sue<\/i> was a treacly flop, Some Kind of Wonderful<\/i> felt like a retread of Sixteen Candles<\/i>, and She’s Having a Baby<\/i> didn’t quite manage the Hughesian emotional balancing act, resulting in a wildly uneven experience for the audience. Also, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of Pretty in Pink<\/i> — another variant of Sixteen Candles<\/i> — and, despite its popularity, I think Home Alone<\/i> is an abomination. Still, between 1983, when he wrote Vacation<\/i> and the Michael Keaton vehicle Mr. Mom<\/i>, and 1990, when Home Alone<\/i> was released, Hughes had an impressive run, writing and\/or directing no less than 15 movies that people still remember with varying degrees of fondness.<\/p>\n

His masterpiece, though, must surely be The Breakfast Club<\/i>, a movie that encapsulates pretty much the entire experience of being a teenager in a perceptive, funny, accessible, and above all genuine<\/i> package. I know this movie has its detractors, people for whom the premise was too contrived or the characters too obnoxious, but for me at least, seeing The Breakfast Club<\/i> for the first time was a profound and highly moving experience.<\/p>\n

I was 15 at the time, and didn’t yet have my driver’s license. My friend Chad Skinner, who was a year and a half older than me, had already seen it and he thought I ought to see it as well. So he drove us in his ’56 Ford pickup to the Sandy Starships, a strip-mall fourplex that had seen its better days but was still a going concern. I was expecting something along the lines of Sixteen Candles<\/i>, a lightweight, funny, feel-good flick. What I got instead was a revelation of something that should have been obvious, but somehow wasn’t, because no one I knew dared to talk about this stuff. Namely, that we weren’t alone in our angst, that everybody<\/i>, no matter what clique we belonged to, or how pretty or cool we were, or what our talents and interests may have been, were all struggling with the same insecurities and fears. Learning this was deeply reassuring, and even liberating.<\/p>\n

Oh, and for the record, The Breakfast Club<\/i> was the first R-rated movie I saw in a theater without my parents. You always remember your first, as they say.<\/p>\n

John Hughes became something of a recluse after the release of the final movie he directed, Curly Sue<\/i>, in 1991. I understand that he left Hollywood and moved back to his native Chicago, although he continued to write screenplays and produce, mostly projects for the family-friendly backwaters of Disney. As I’m sure everyone has heard by now, he died unexpectedly on Thursday<\/a>, stricken by a heart attack while visiting family in Manhattan. He was only 59 years old, which doesn’t seem all that old to me from the precipice that overlooks 40.<\/p>\n

I always hoped he would someday return and direct a movie that does for thirtysomething (and now fortysomething) Gen-Xers what The Breakfast Club<\/i> did for us when we were kids. That’s no longer possible, obviously… but movies endure, and I suspect teens are going to be identifying with The Breakfast Club<\/i> for a long time to come. And Ferris Bueller’s observation about how quickly life moves has never seemed more relevant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Mr. Vernon,   We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make use write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}