Will there ever be another John Hughes?

Robbie Collin

8 May 2015 / 8:14 pm

Who’s the new John Hughes? The question has been bobbing around since the mid-2000s, when Mean Girls reminded us, following the rise of the American Pie films and their imitators, that the teen-movie genre had more to offer than nostalgia, bad behaviour and moderate nudity.

Since then, a handful of great films have emerged about what it means to be beached on the bank between childhood and adulthood – Jason Reitman’s Juno, Greg Mottola’s Superbad and Adventureland, Will Gluck’s Easy A, and Drew Barrymore’s Whip It foremost among them. But they’re all the work of people dipping a toe into the genre before moving on – whereas Hughes committed himself, over a four-year period in the mid-Eighties, to articulating what it meant to be teenage more acutely than any single writer or director had done before or has since.

Which is why it’s tempting to say our John Hughes is nobody else than John Hughes: still is; always will be. Between 1984 and 1987, Hughes wrote six teen movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful. The first four of those he also directed; the other two were by Howard Deutch, although behind-the-scenes tales from Pretty in Pink suggest Hughes was still the primary guiding influence on set.

Together, these six films make up just a fraction of his life’s work. Between his first screenplay, for 1982’s National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, and his death in 2009, Hughes directed eight features and had writing credits on 25 more, plus a handful of other projects that went direct to video or were made for television, and countless more that were left unmade. But those half-dozen high-school films are his legacy.

Though they’re unmistakably set in the suburban, Midwestern America of the Eighties, with its deeply specific set of hormone-addled social anxieties, they feel as brightly relevant now as ever.

That’s partly because, unlike many teen movies, their scripts aren’t filled with references to contemporary TV shows and trends. (A John Hughes film doesn’t have time to look sideways at pop culture: it’s too busy being it.) Instead, the humour is rooted in Hughes’s characters’ sarcasm-tipped speech patterns, which didn’t come from the playground but right out of their creator’s head.

The only real school children who ever sounded like they were in a John Hughes film were trying to. And of course, thousands upon thousands did

What sounded like slang in context was a language of Hughes’s own creation. “This is a really volcanic ensemble you’re wearing,” says Duckie, the lovelorn best friend of Andie Walsh in Pretty in Pink – perhaps the first recorded usage of the word “volcanic” as a compliment. The only real schoolchildren who ever sounded like they were in a John Hughes film were trying to. And of course, thousands upon thousands did.

Even the plaintive, synth-laden songs, which now seem completely inseparable from the Eighties high-school experience – Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), Spandau Ballet’s True, OMD’s If You Leave – crept into teenage culture via John Hughes films. American kids in the Eighties were listening to Michael Jackson, Madonna and hair metal. But Hughes, a devotee of British New Wave pop, conspired to give their lives a richer, more finely shaded soundtrack.

More than all of the above, though, Hughes’s teen films haven’t dated for the same reason films by F W Murnau and Buster Keaton and Billy Wilder haven’t either: the astonishing quality of the work. Hughes’s entire output is explored in detail in an excellent new book by Kirk Honeycutt, John Hughes: a Life in Film – and what strikes you more than anything is how much the film-maker’s own high-school experiences fed into his work.

He spent his childhood in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, but his family moved to Northbrook, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, when he was 12 years old. He entered his teenage years with a blank social slate, and had trouble filling it. The Hugheses were less well-off than many of the families in Northbrook, and John was sharply aware of the difference. He saw himself as an outsider, and took an interest in art, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. He grew his hair until it touched his collar.

Teachers antagonised him – it may have been a two-way thing, of course – and he fostered deep-hewn grudges against a handful of them that would later surface in his scripts. A PE teacher who failed him in his senior year turned into Richard Vernon, the tyrannical vice-principal in The Breakfast Club. His own vice-principal, in turn, became the inspiration for Principal Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Before filming began, Hughes took the actor Jeffrey Jones on a tour of his high school and made a point of introducing him to his old VP, who welcomed the men into his office in a sharp suit and with a holstered pistol fastened to his belt.

That’s why you’re unlikely to find a Dead Poets Society, or a Mr Holland, beetling away behind the classroom doors in a John Hughes film. Hughesian teachers can be many things – petty, sadistic, ineffectual – but they’re never inspirational. Instead, the teenagers have to come to terms with growing older on their own.

There’s no better way of summing it up than the quote from David Bowie’s Changes that opens The Breakfast Club. On a black screen, we see the following words in white type: “…And these children that you spit on / as they try to change their worlds / are immune to your consultations. / They’re quite aware / of what they’re going through…” Then the screen itself shatters, revealing the grey exterior of Shermer High School, where the film’s all-day detention is about to take place.

Hughes never patronised his characters; he treated teenage trauma with gravity

“You see us as you want to see us,” runs the opening monologue – which we later discover is part of the essay written by the five students from different backgrounds, played by Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall, who learn that they have more in common than they first thought. “In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.”

Before Hughes, teen movies had almost exclusively trafficked in stereotypes – the jock, the geek, the virgin, the stoner, the slut and so on – and The Breakfast Club was his wholesale rejection of those worn-out tropes. Hughes establishes the differences between these five characters so nimbly you barely notice it happening: in their clothes; their parents’ parting words to them at the school gates; the different cars in which four of the five arrive; even where in the library they choose to sit.

But as the detention runs its course, our easy assumptions about them are turned on their head. None of them fits the role into which they’ve been forced by high-school life. “What we’ve found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess and a criminal,” runs the film’s closing monologue, which is shared by all five of the leads. This realisation is treated, rightly, as life-changing. Hughes never patronised his characters, and treated teenage traumas with far more gravity than those his adult characters suffered through.

Even today, that feels revolutionary – and shows Hughes’s commitment to treating his young audience with the utmost respect, however outlandish the on-screen action got. (Honeycutt writes that Hughes suspected most teen films, with their booze and drugs and shower-room nudity, were actually aimed at adult men.)

It’s also the common feature of the great recent teen films listed above. Drew Barrymore told an interviewer that, while she was making Whip It, she was determined it would be “a teen movie, but… like John Hughes’s movies, where it stars teens, and is about teen issues, but takes them seriously”. Will Gluck, when he was promoting Easy A, said he had tried to make “a movie that [Hughes] wouldn’t be embarrassed to watch”.

It would be fascinating to know what Hughes would make of today’s teen-movie landscape, with young-adult fantasy and science fiction in the ascendancy, and straightforward high-school movies thin on the ground. One of the great strengths of a series such as The Hunger Games, and the reason it’s connected with millions of young cinemagoers around the world, is that it finds a way to turn the tribulations of modern teenage life into life-and-death drama. But the genius of Hughes is that he was able to do exactly the same thing in an overcast, present-day American suburb on a sub-$5 million budget.

So perhaps to find today’s John Hughes we need to look elsewhere. The only recently successful young-adult film that doesn’t fit the sci-fi template is Josh Boone’s The Fault in Our Stars, starring Shailene Woodley as a high-school pupil with thyroid cancer and Ansel Elgort as the charismatic young hunk of boyfriend material she meets at a patients’ support group.

The characters talk about novels and dream of visiting Europe – and Elgort’s character has the Hughesian tic of keeping an unlit cigarette clamped between his teeth. “They don’t kill you unless you light them,” he says, “And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see? You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”

That dialogue came directly from the pen of John Green, who wrote the book on which the film’s script was (very closely) based. Just as Hughes did in the Eighties, Green credits his young characters with enough intelligence to play with ideas like this, and an appetite for unpicking life’s mysteries.

He has an abiding sympathy and respect for them, which Green has found reflected back at him by his young readership. Green’s original novel of The Fault in Our Stars has sold 10.7 million copies since it was published in 2012. Along with his three other novels plus various side projects, it’s helped him amass a passionate fan base known as “nerdfighters” – a term Hughes himself might have coined.

If Hughes were around today, would we find him on YouTube, laughing and joking with the young cinemagoers who’d found encouragement and hope in his work? Or would this self-styled outsider remain off the grid with his wife and two sons in a quiet Chicagoan suburb? There’s no way to know – and, of course, no need to either. His films speak for him, articulately and at length, whenever your inner teenager might want to hear a friendly voice.

DMU Timestamp: March 07, 2019 02:52

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