Growing Up – Post-John Hughes

7th August 2009

It is a great loss to Hollywood that John Hughes, a truly gifted story-teller, has died. He created some of the finest movies of the 80s and made an incredible impression upon millions worldwide with films such as Weird Science, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off… just go to his IMDB page and stare in awe. But, I am not here to eulogise the man, a far better tribute, powerful and personal with insight into why he retired so early, can be found here:

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

I am here to contemplate life beyond those heady teenage days so perfectly captured by Hughes’ work. Everyone looks at new teen movies to see if they’ve managed to bottle that lightning that seemed to come so easily to Hughes, but I’ve always been intrigued – as someone who grew up in the eighties and early nineties- at life beyond the teen-movies. What happens to Molly Ringwald’s Samantha Baker on her 26th birthday? Are Gary and Wyatt still wearing bras on their head trying to conjure up wives?

What I’ve settled on is compiling a small list of 5 films that I feel best capture that sense of life beyond the John Hughes world of the teen:

1. Election (1999)

Alexander Payne’s off-beat comedy is, to me, an unofficial sequel to Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, with Matthew Broderick showing us what became of his iconic screen character under the pseudonymn Jim McAllister. Instead of becoming the incredibly successful hipster he seemed destined to be he has become a high school teacher, the irony! It almost seems inevitable that this ‘most popular kid in school’ would never leave school, finding himself doing the job he never expected. McAllister’s path is twisted even further with his own dissatisfaction at how his life has progressed (though note the Ferris-like fantasy where he drives a sports car into work), and the clear threat of one of his smartest students; Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon). McAllister’s attempts to sabotage Tracy’s campaign to be Class President go far beyond anything Jeffrey Jones’ malevolent principal Ed Rooney ever attempted.

Election is fascinating viewing when seen as this spirtual sister picture to Ferris, and a great film all of its own. Capturing the archetypes of Hughes’ teen movie-verse in a gloriously satirical way, so while in some aspects this still has many elements of the teen movie, it is Broderick’s subversion of his Ferris Bueller personality, and the view from behind the teacher’s desk, that truly make this a Post-Hughes picture.

2. BASEketball (1998)

Clearly a lot broader than most of Hughes’ output (this probably falls into a camp of comedy alongside the Vacation films), this David Zucker directed over-looked comedic classic stars South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone as two life-long friends who had big dreams and have grown up to realise they haven’t really achieved much. The opening party where they turn up uninvited perfectly captures their sense of dislocation from their former high-school crowd; ‘Hey Skidmark Steve, you still hangin’ out and playing Nintendo?’ In a way these two – Joe Cooper (Parker) and Matt Remer (Stone) – are what Weird Science‘s Gary and Wyatt may become, great friends, forged by a memorable experience, but ultimately still outcasts.

It’s not until the backyard game of BASEketball takes off that Cooper and Remer go through a similar transition to popularity and adoration, and though nobody turns into a talking turd here, there’s a similar anarchic sense of wish fullfilment and shenanigans.

3. Clerks II (2006)

Kevin Smith heavily references Hughes throughout a lot of his work, never more blatantly than in Dogma, to wit:

Jay: That fucking guy. Made this flick “16 Candles” right? Not bad it’s got tits in it, but no bush. Of course Ebert over here don’t give a shit about that stuff cause he’s all in love with this John Hughes guy and rents every one of his movies. Fucking “Breakfast Club” all these stupid kids actually show up to detention, fucking “Weird Science” where this one chick wants to take off her gear and get down, but aw, no she don’t cause it’s a PG movie, and then there’s “Pretty In Pink” which I can’t watch with this tubby muthafucker any more, because everytime we get to the part where the red head hooks up with her dream guy, he starts sobbin’ like a little eight-year-old with a skinned knee and shit. And nothing is worse then watching a fat man weep.

But it’s in the sequel to his indie debut where we really find him working in the Post-Hughes genre. Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randall (Jeff Anderson) are, again, life-long friends who have found themselves in a dead-end situation. They’ve graduated from their jobs working in a convenience store to jobs in a fast-food franchise, beyond that nothing’s changed. In essence their work day, as Dante begins to doubt his current relationship, is akin to being in a permanent detention, and Smith’s use of dance-number has very Hughesian overtones. What’s ultimately even more Hughesish is how the characters don’t so much leave their situation to a vastly improved one, instead they adapt their situation to make the most of it for themselves.

4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

If there’s one thing that bugged me about the films of John Hughes it’s how well off the kids in it were, and – in a material way – their neuroses seemed very selfish and spoilt. Here in Wes Anderson’s third feature film we find the children of a very privileged family struggling with similar anxieties well beyond their teenage years, in fact the children of the Tenenbaum clan seem stuck in their youthful idioms with little signs of escape.

This film is a cautionary tale for people with childhood and teenage hang-ups, that these neurotic tendencies can spill over into your adult life, and if you haven’t had your Breakfast Club break-down before graduating, you’ll probably have it belatedly as a mid-life crisis. Whether each member of the Tenenbaum family can easily be plucked into a Hughesesque cookie-cutter shape is rather moot, with a certain ammount of panel-beating sure, but the dramas the characters go through could so plausibly be fought and resolved in the rooms of a high school detention room.

On a side note, Hughes had intended to make sequels to The Breakfast Club every ten years, where the characters would continually be reunited; but it seems volatile relations with Judd Nelson – and possibly a falling out with Molly Ringwald – scuppered these plans.

5. High Fidelity (2000)

It was a bit of a tussle between this and Grosse Point Blank, though, in the end, I feel that High Fidelity is a better representation of what may come of Hughes character; as ‘tough’ as Judd Nelson was I couldn’t see him becoming an assassin.

Based on the novel by Brit Nick Hornby, this adaptation directed by Stephen Frears and co-written by star John Cusack and two of his Grosse Point… cohorts (along with Beautiful Girls scribe Scott Rosenberg) is cleverly adjusted to America without disrupting the heart behind the text. Cusack’s recently dumped Rob Gordon looks back on his previous relationships with the kind of rose-tinted nostalgia usually used by those remembering a John Hughes movie; he also talks directly to camera (and us) a la Ferris Bueller; not only that, but Cusack was one of the 80’s biggest teen stars and thusly – like Broderick in Election – seeing him take on this role further lends gravitas to the notion that he is coming to terms with his life in a Post-Hughes world.

Whilst the girlfriends he reflects on mainly come from his teenage and school-bound years he ultimately finds that the most important, the most affecting relationship was his grown-up one. Again, like Dante and Randall in Clerks II, his resolution as a character is to find a way to adapt his situation and not to leave it. Also, like in many Hughes stories, the misfits – in this case Jack Black’s Barry and Todd Louiso’ Dick – manage to find things to make them happy, be it Barry’s band or Dick’s girlfriend.

It interests me as a child of – though too young to really ‘be there’ as it happened – the John Hughes era to witness how contemporary film-makers reflect on this time in their own film-making, and it will continue to be fascinating to see how people of my age, going into film, look back on their own youth. It’s a strange thing to think of the teen movies of our current period and wonder how they’ll be perceived in years to come, but undoubtedly there has never been a name in Hollywood history who has ever captured that experience of growing up an outsider as uniquely, poignantly and with as much humour as the now, sadly, late, great John Hughes.

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