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JOHN HUGHES MISREMEMBERED
by Daren Foster

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DAREN FOSTER PODCAST August 18 2009 - PRESS PLAY TO LISTEN

JOHN HUGHES MISREMEMBERED
by Daren Foster

***A mere mortal is immortalized.***

A pop quiz, class.

Compare the following two lists and see if you can spot the link between them.

1) Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, She’s Having a Baby, Uncle Buck, Curly Sue, Home Alone, The Great Outdoors.

2) Tolstoy of American Teenagers, Our Generation’s J.D. Salinger, A Canon of Classics, Creative Genius, Masterpieces, Frank Capra of Gen X.

OK. If you said John Hughes, please stand on that side of the room. If you failed to come up with an answer or said, John Hughes?!?!!?, join me on this side of the room with all the other head-scratchers with baffled looks on our faces.

Writer-director-producer John Hughes died a couple weeks ago and the hyperbolic outpouring of grief was in full force not seen since, well, a month or so earlier when the King of Pop©® slipped his mortal coil. Then, at least, there was a modicum of reasoning behind it as Jackson could legitimately lay claim to some of the superlatives being hurled in his wake. But, John Hughes? Seriously?! Creative genius? Tolstoy?! Salinger?! Masterpieces?!?! Really?

While recognizing society’s tendency to not speak ill of the dead, especially the recently dead, I think there should be some happy medium that doesn’t overcompensate by tossing around completely unwarranted overstatements. For me, the movies of John Hughes represent everything that went wrong with Hollywood in the 80s. With the exception of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the ones that aren’t just outright terrible are nothing more than dated period pieces with little intrinsic value outside of providing a window to the styles and music of the time. I leave it up to you to decide which movies fit into which category.

It’s not just a generational thing. I wasn’t that far removed from high school when The Breakfast Club broke large. Nothing about the movie smacked of a realistic portrayal of teenagers or the troubles and turmoil they endured. It was all stock caricatures and pat generalizations that blithely evaporated when it came time to wrap it up with an absurdly simplistic ending that told us that we’re not that different after all and deep down everyone wants the same things. And I wouldn’t even call The Breakfast Club one of his bad movies although it’s mostly memorable because it featured a great tune from the Simple Minds.

Yet as the tributes flowed, I came across such natterings as: In this series of high-profile deaths over the last few months, this is the only one that truly, truly hurts. Talk about the end of an era. The John Hughes Era?! What!? Or how about this one? Like Orson Welles, he was a boy wonder, a director's director, a writer's writer, a filmmaker's filmmaker. Like Orson Welles?!? Are you sure you want to be quoted saying that? Hughes leaves behind a legacy of incredible, game changing films…Has any one filmmaker ever directed such a string of instant classics? He defined an entire generation and today film fans everywhere mourn… the passing of a giant. Egads and gadzooks!! The Breakfast Club as a game changing film?! By what definition of ‘classic’ did John Hughes direct a string of? A filmmaking giant? Please. You’re killing my soul with such baseless, empty, clichéd rhetoric.

Now, I’m not unaware or immune to the power of nostalgia. We all bear the indelible marks left upon us by certain songs or movies from our youth. They are formative years as the experts say. But honestly, are we at our most discerning or are our teenage critical faculties so well honed that we actually trust them as valid markers of artistic merit? Everyone has their personal favourite films that oftentimes reside outside the realm of great cinematic achievements. As a 15 year-old and barely average little league baseball player, I thought The (original) Bad News Bears was hilarious and spoke directly to my diamond anguish. A masterpiece or game changer? Hardly.

Yet, I posit that The Bad News Bears was more truthful in its dealings with being a youthful outsider or parental-child alienation than any movie John Hughes ever had his hand in. A John Hughes teenage archetype, whether a jock, a hood, dork or beauty queen was a Hollywood version that never came close to resembling the real thing. Jon Cryer’s Duckie from Pretty in Pink wouldn’t even register on the geek radar in my high school days. He would’ve had no problem snagging a girl like Molly Ringwald. In fact, it would’ve been surprising if he didn’t. Dorks in my day would’ve died to be like Duckie. They didn’t dance to Otis Redding. They listened to Beethoven or, worse yet, Chick Corea, and dressed like their dads. And got beat up a lot.

I’ll take it one step further. If I’m looking for films that depicted what it was like to be a young person who didn’t have their shit together in the 1980s, I’d give more credence to Michael O’Keefe’s Danny Noonan in Caddyshack than anything in Hughes’s oeuvre. Despite the ever-increasing comic anarchy swirling around him, O’Keefe crafted a character from the wrong side of the tracks who didn’t have the money to go to university and wasn’t even sure that’s what he wanted to do. He was impulsive, duty bound, a manifestly bad ass-kisser, and ultimately, a free spirit putting off finding his place in the world for as long as possible. I defy you to name as complex a character in any John Hughes film.

None of this means you can’t hold the likes of Christmas Vacation or Dutch close to your broken heart. Movies are visceral and subjective, working their magic best when you’re not analyzing them. It’s perfectly fine to unashamedly proclaim that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off helped you make it through the terrible beauty that was your 11th grade. Just don’t conflate that infatuation with talk of greatness or a masterpiece.

John Hughes may’ve had a genius for what sells but so does Michael Bay. If he were to die tomorrow (fingers crossed), I’m fairly certain no one except 12 year-old boys and the seriously deranged would be talking in reverent tones about the Transformers franchise. All the accolades flowing in since Hughes’s death attest to him being a nice man who was fun to work with. That’s nothing to sneeze at and in most walks of life would qualify as the highest of praise. So let’s leave it at that and cease with all the genius giant talk. It’s simply not true and diminishes all those who are actually doing groundbreaking, innovative films.

Leaving behind a filmography consisting of one good movie and a whack of others that ranged from forgettable to lamentable, the John Hughes legacy is also responsible for at least one other crime against cinema. In the tributes that came out after he died, filmmaker Kevin Smith said that if it weren’t for Hughes, he wouldn’t be making films. That is a heavy, sad burden to bear. Thank you very much, John Hughes, for inflicting Kevin Smith on the world of cinema.