A Few Words about John Hughes

First Michael Jackson, now John Hughes. The icons of my early years are dropping like flies. Eep. I feel old. Cue more rampant nostalgia and retrospective montages.

Honestly, after the Month of MJ, I’m a little celebrity-mortality-ed out. But all the retrospectives have this going for them: they sure do show off what people did. To see a full list of films John Hughes was involved in as writer, director, or what have you (and not just the “big” ones like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Home Alone) is to realize that this guy had his hand in a lot of successful stuff.

Though for people of my generation and thereabouts, he is best remembered for his 1980s teenager comedies. Titles like “the Bard of Adolescent Angst” kept cropping up in Hughes-related headlines this week, and no one really complained. Ask anyone who was any age of teenager in the ‘80s, and they have a favorite Hughes teen film. Not just one they like—one they have watched over and over again. My wife suggested we should watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off this week in tribute to the late Mr. Hughes. I told her that back in high school, I could have recited the thing for her. It’s just a good movie, we agreed. A good movie.

That, I think, is the secret to Hughes’s success. His movies were good movies first, that just happened to have teen protagonists. The fact that his heroes were teens was not the joke; the jokes occurred because the heroes had real adventures, real foibles, and real interior lives. Hughes seemed to like teenagers. Roger Ebert quotes Hughes as saying in an interview, “People forget that when you’re 16, you’re probably more serious than you’ll ever be again. You think seriously about the big questions.” Teens in Hughes movies actually thought. He didn’t fetishize them or talk down to them. He wrote teen characters as people, which is why his films appealed not only to the teenage demographic but also beyond it. When you see smart, complicated teens onscreen these days—from Kevin Smith’s raunchy clerks to Joss Whedon’s snappy Buffy to Diablo Cody’s pop-poetic Juno—it’s a safe bet you have John Hughes to thank (Smith, actually, happily owns up to the influence in interviews).

It’s not all snappy words, though. Above all, Hughes knew a good story when he saw one. I’ve read that he saw his high school stereotypes as archetypes. Maybe. But I think it was story archetypes, not people archetypes, he went after. Home Alone is Robinson Crusoe in the suburbs: the resourceful castaway fending off loneliness and some mean interlopers. And how about the one where a cross-section of social classes are all exiled to a neutral space where they question each other and learn some lessons? Yeah, that’s the plot of The Breakfast Club. It’s also essentially the plot of As You Like It. And Ferris Bueller, who subverts authority and asks you to look around at life, because time is short? He’d fit right into the carnival-before-it’s-too-late atmosphere of Twelfth Night. Surely, as comic humiliations go, Bueller and company’s treatment of pompous principal Ed Rooney is right up there with the going-over pompous Puritan Malvolio gets from Toby Belch and his crew in that play.

None of this, of course, is meant to suggest that Hughes was in anything like Shakespeare’s league—just that the Bard of Avon and the Bard of Adolescent Angst sipped from the same inspirational coffee cup now and again. After all, Romeo and Juliet, the lovers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, Twelfth Night’s Viola—we’re so used to BBC stars playing these folks that we forget they were probably supposed to be teenagers, or not much older. Hughes didn’t discover that idea that we’re our most serious in our youth, or that that’s when we ask the big questions—he just reminded us of it. And that’s why people will keep watching, re-watching, and endlessly quoting his movies: exactly to keep from forgetting what it was like to be so serious so young, and to realize how laughable it is as we look back. And we have to look back because that time only comes around once. I’m pretty sure Ferris Bueller would have grown into an insufferable adult. But then, we wouldn’t want to see Romeo and Juliet as an old married couple, either. “Youth’s a stuff will not endure,” says a line from Twelfth Night. Of course. But thanks to Hughes, stories about it will.