When is 2009 Gonna Stop Taking People I Love?
By Lisa Fary
2009 just can’t get its fill of icons. Today was John Hughes.
My favorite Hughes film has always been Some Kind of Wonderful. I’m probably in the minority on this one because it’s widely considered an inverted Pretty in Pink, but it’s sooo much more than that.
Art boy (Eric Stoltz – yum) pines for the most popular girl in school, whose boyfriend personifies everything bad about affluence, while his tom boy best friend pines for him. There’s conflict about college and who your friends really are and the price of popularity.
And everyone wins (except the rich kid, but who cares about him, anyway?).
But, there is one Hughes film that seems to cut across generational lines. I have the following conversation every single school year:
Student: I saw the most amazing movie, Miss.
Me: What movie?
Student: You probably don’t know about it.
ME: Try me.
Student: It’s called The Breakfast Club.
The kids always think they’re the first to discover something, even if it’s been around for 20+ years. What’s odd to me is that it’s almost never the kid’s parents who introduced the movie; it’s usually a friend or cousin or an aunt. Sometimes they find it on their own.
Regardless, The Breakfast Club is always a revelation, now and back then, even though parents all over the 1980s swore it was just kids sitting around whining (because watching Baby Boomers do the EXACT SAME THING in The Big Chill was waaaay more legitimate).
There was a truth to those movies that just doesn’t exist in many teen-targeted movies today. Hughes gave us the beautiful people, but he also gave us basket cases, brains, and criminals. He gave us antics and shenanigans, but he also gave us a picture of the middle-class American family that wasn’t perfect: parents with problems, parents who abandon physically or emotionally, parents who use or abuse their kids, and parents who are totally clueless. (GenX rage activate!)
Hughes spoke to something that many of us felt – something that many kids still feel – and no one was really giving voice to. His movies had a tremendous impact on the way I see the world and see other people, and because of his movies, I didn’t feel so alone as a teenager.
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
Thank, Mr. Hughes.
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Thanks for the kind words about John Hughes and especially for the love for Some Kind of Wonderful. One of my top 20 favorite films, my favorite MSM role, one of the great endings and the most excellent cover of one of my favorite Elvis songs.
PS. Vampire Cowboys rock!
16 Candles will always be my top fave I think (although Some Kind of Wonderful comes pretty damn close–Watts was the coolest girl ever). Weirdly, I never really connected too much with The Breakfast Club, even though everyone around my age set seems to count that as their fave.
Have you ever read Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers On The Films of John Hughes? It's a great collection of essays by Generation X-er's reflecting on Hughes teen films. Worth checking out (and worshipping, like I do).
I'm so glad that you did a John Hughes tribute. It's funny, though…while I LOVE The Breakfast Club, as well as his other movies, the one that stands out to me most and spoke to me when I was a kid is Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Yes, Ferris was "living the dream" and outsmarting EVERYONE as he successfully navigated a day of cutting school, but it was about more than that. It was about getting what you want out of life. It was about being your own person and having a spine. The defining moment for me was when Cameron decides to wreck his dad's car. That was the feeling I identified with most. The feeling that you've always been living to please or impress your parents, and then there's that moment where you stop and say "Not anymore." So powerful. It was years before I could step out from under my parents' expectations myself, but that movie helped me realize that I WOULD be able to do it eventually, in my own time.
Tell me about it! Very upset at this loss, and of Mrs Slocumbe as well. ;_;
There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Ferris Bueller (I think I love it as much as Star Wars!) and the first Home Alone (he wrote & produced that). But of course I love other films he's had a hand in as well, particularly the Breakfast Club & the Vacation movies ….