RIP John Hughes

Bad principal

So I’m taking time out from being completely enraged today (not really – my car got broken into last night and I’m apoplectic over Sarah Palin’s completely fabricated “death panel” bullshit – but whatevs) and instead I want to talk briefly about John Hughes.

There’s been a lot of John Hughes memorializing (my favorite is here). I’m going to add to the noise. The thing is, John Hughes, for me, almost perfectly described the arc of my growth from child to angry adolescent to mind-bogglingly galled and furious adult.

In the beginning there was Breakfast Club. I watched this movie over and over and over and then again for good measure with my best friend Sarah after school. The movie captivated me by displaying teenagers and all of their angst. I wasn’t yet a teen, but I wanted desperately to be one and to have my angst really mean something, man. And the music – that movie’s soundtrack – you can’t fault it. I still, when I dance, think of Molly Ringwald’s boots and her fancy footwork at the end of that movie.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink – all of these were home videos I owned and watched regularly. They all had a hand in shaping me. Most importantly, they were around at a time when I was extremely innocent. I didn’t mind stereotypes. I didn’t mind having my heartstrings tugged at. And, even though I know I couldn’t have stayed that way, I’m glad to know that I was once so open and unskeptical. Those are good things for a child  to be.

When I revisited the movies as a teenager I started to see what many Hughes critics see. The rampant racism (Long Duk Dong? Do we really need to hear a gong every time he’s on screen? And wasn’t the actor who played him – Gary Wantonabe – Japanese? I guess they all look the same to John), the broad characters, the stereotypes, the generic plot devices, the tropes. They’re actually pretty easy to see. As a teenager I saw all of these things, but I still liked his films. They became a guilty pleasure.

Now, as an adult, I actively revile most of John Hughes’ work. I wrote a paper as an undergraduate Political Science major about Hughes’ movie Curly Sue and his decision to cast actual homeless people in the roles of homeless people (and then later to fire them and use actors because the actual homeless people didn’t look “homeless enough” – Baudrillard’s head probably exploded).

Watching Ferris Beuller’s Day Off (a film I never liked) has me invariably yelling at the screen the whole time. Beuller is a bully, psychopathically self-obsessed. To steal from the AVC:  here’s Eric Cartman misquoting Ferris on South Park:  “Life goes pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while and do whatever you want all the time, you could miss it.”’

Home Alone is a horrible, morally reprehensible, shitty film. In the beginning of the film, Macaulay Caulkin’s parents and family are borderline abusive. The film sets you up to identify with the kid – but it goes so over the top that it left me thinking that he would be better off with social services. It certainly didn’t set me up to feel good about mother and son reuniting in the end. This is all not to even mention the tortures Joe Pecsi goes through. I was rooting for the bad guys in this movie like a lot of people I know.

That’s the problem with Hughes’ films. They go so far out of their way to manipulate your emotions that when it’s time for the sickeningly sweet ending where all is forgiven, I’m still hating, not just the villains, but everyone on camera. Which brings me here to my adult form where I am snotty and dismissive of John Hughes’ work and his crappy suburban values.

Here’s a secret though (and it may well be the secret to Hughes’ success in general): Whenever I see someone with a mole on their face I still say “It’s Mole-y Russell’s wart” – quoting Uncle Buck. I and everyone else you know still incessantly quotes Jeffrey Jones in Ferris Beuller saying “nine times“. There’s always an applicable Planes, Trains and Automobiles quote handy – like “Those aren’t pillows!”. Meaning that, in the end, Hughes’ films are part of our pop-culture landscape.

I can rail against Hughes’ disgusting racism in Family Vacation, and every other movie he’s ever made. I can barf blood and blab about Hughes’ spirited defense of the status quo. I can even write all this crap on my blog about how, as soon as I grew a brain, I realized John Hughes was lame. But I’m still quoting him, I’m still thinking about his movies. And what I think is that anyone who’s not moved when Steve Martin brings John Candy home for Christmas, and anyone who doesn’t hate Paul Gleason when he threatens to hit Judd Nealson is a person I don’t want to know.