We'll Miss You John Hughes

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

--Ferris Bueller's Day Off

I keep trying to write about all the Vietnam War protesters. Honestly. I want to defend Robert McNamara, even if he never bothered to do it himself. For some reason though, I keep getting sidetracked writing about The Newlywed Game and Match Game '75. Typical.

But the Summer of Death keeps rolling on, claiming another victim far too soon. Today we learned of John Hughes' untimely passing.

He may never have been confused with Spielberg or Coppola, but John Hughes' run of 80s classics probably affected and influenced more people than the big-shot "artists." Hughes had a run in the 80s like almost no one else: Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, She's Having a Baby, and Uncle Buck. He wrote and directed those movies, and wrote other classics, like Pretty in Pink, the Home Alone movies and Vacation.

Those movies may not have been the Godfather or Citizen Kane, but its unfair to denigrate them as just fluff or teen movies. Hughes was a latter-day Capra, with a light, friendly touch that masked a deeper examination of the American psyche. Any charge that his movies were just light fun misses the deeper complexities deceptively woven into his scripts.

The suburbs were his milieu, and while contemporary pundits and elitists dismiss the suburbs as homogeneous and stifling, Hughes showed that more goes on than New York and LA notice. Hughes explored many complex themes within the suburban context. Families and their inner workings and shifting relationships were at the forefront. Every John Hughes movie displayed the main characters' relationships with their families, showing not only the kind and loving side of family life, but the darker and more troubling aspects. Think of the sadistic brother in Weird Science, the angry resentful daughter in Uncle Buck, or the reluctant husband and soon-to-be father in She's Having a Baby. The Breakfast Club was the most obvious example of this theme of frustration with family and adolescents coping within that structure.

Hughes explored other compelling subjects as well, mostly relating to teenagers and then later young adults. He showed the workings of friendships (Cameron and Ferris in Ferris Bueller, or Gary and Wyatt in Weird Science), the often deceptive quality of image vs. reality (the Nerd in Sixteen Candles who was "King of the Dipshits" or Alec Baldwin's turn in She's Having a Baby), and the consequence of choices (each of the Breakfast Club stories, and Uncle Buck).

Mostly Hughes will be remembered for his portraits of teenage life. Hughes' characters are thought of as nerds and geeks, not the sort of truly troubled youths facing gangs and drugs in inner city schools. Though true, that didn't mean he failed to connect with the more typical teen of the 1980s. Like life, his teenagers sometimes had loving, supportive parents (Sixteen Candles) or unloving, indifferent, or even abusive parents (Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club). Many of his characters were geeks and freaks of course (Anthony Michael Hall had an entire career playing the geek as John Wayne to Hughes' John Ford), though many were troubled, and often deeply so (Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, or the oldest daughter in Uncle Buck). He connected to young people in such a profound way because most of us are not juvenile delinquents or abused. Most of us had troubles on a less dramatic scale, but troubles nonetheless. Average 1980s American teenagers could watch a John Hughes movie and see characters doing and going through some of the same things happening in their lives.

Hughes' writing was both devastatingly witty and insightful all at once. His movies are littered with classic quotes. Indeed, the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin routinely holds a Ferris Bueller "Quote-a-thon" in which famous quotes are flashed on screen as the movie plays so that the audience can say them along with the character. Like, "If you say 'Ferris Bueller,' you lose a testicle." The writing gets overlooked for the odd characters, music, and erstwhile fluffy situations. Read the cathartic scene in the Breakfast Club, where the characters all sit in a circle and share their innermost demons, and one will immediately see Hughes' writing brilliance. As I recall, that scene lasted almost 10 minutes, and was nothing more than kids sitting around talking about their problems. Yet it was riveting and unquestionably the highlight of the movie, if not Hughes' career.

But Hughes was a story-teller too. He had an overlooked ability to create profound moments, that spoke volumes beyond just the characters' words. Think of the moment where Steve Martin sees John Candy in the train station after having left him near the end, just realizing that Candy's wife had died many years before. Or in the same movie, when he finally comes home and his wife sees him from the top of the stairs. Or in She's Having a Baby, when Kevin Bacon, a reluctant father throughout, sheepishly enters his wife's hospital room gripped with fear that she was near death. Or even in Sixteen Candles, in the ending scene with the birthday cake on top of the dining room table. Those and many other scenes spoke volumes.

Nothing is wrong or lightweight about these stories. Just because they were funny, and none of the characters whacked anyone or made crack deals, didn't mean they didn't have social relevance and importance. Put it this way, they show Planes, Trains and Automobiles on TV every holiday, not Raging Bull or Bonnie and Clyde, for a reason. Those movies meant something to millions. Hughes made his mark, and we were all made better off for his doing so.