John Hughes: Remembrance of Things Past

If I was going to select a moment that signaled a tectonic shift in the lives of Generation X, the death of director John Hughes wouldn’t have been it.

I mean, it’s not like he was Orson Wells or Francis Ford Coppola. While Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club might have been good films, I wouldn’t have hardly pegged them as epochal events. But, still, there it was. The news of Hughes’ death was like a wound on my soul. Why?

I almost didn’t write anything about because others have written about it so much better. Unlike some, I certainly didn’t know the man personally. But as A.O. Scott put it in The New York Times this week when discussing the deaths of both Hughes and fellow ’80s icon Michael Jackson, “Their deaths make me feel old.”

In the case of Jackson, his work had ceased to be a factor on my life since the mid-1980s. I would have thought the same thing about Hughes, except for the fact that movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club have become favorites of my now pre-teen daughter. She’s not that much younger now than I was when I first watched these movies. And when she talks about how awesome it must have been to grow up in the Eighties, I’m thinking, “Really?”

But there it is. Matthew Broderick is now like me, doughy and middle-aged, but his Ferris Bueller stands for time immemorial like James Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause or Peter Fonda’s Wyatt in Easy Rider as a generational archetype. Trust me, I’m as shocked as you are. A.O. Scott breaks it down for us:

It is true that while his heroes, most notably Ferris Bueller and the members of the Breakfast Club, are in conflict with authority, they are also stubborn in their individualism and often unapologetically materialistic. Which is part of what makes them authentic, and authentically confused. The unspecified North Shore Chicago suburb where most of these stories take place is, at first glance and in its own mind, a paradise of uniformity and privilege. And this setting, rather than being the facile hell imagined in movies like “American Beauty,” is shown as a genuine expression of the American utopian ideal, a pastoral city on a hill where everyone is comfortable and everyone’s the same.

The paradox is that most people feel, and want to be, different. Not to smash the system or flee its clutches, but rather to find a place within it where they can be themselves, even if they like strange music, come from a poorer family or favor eccentric styles of dress. That desire is what motivates Sam, the birthday girl in “Sixteen Candles,” and it also drives both the cocky Ferris Bueller and his nervous buddy Cameron. The great, paradoxical insight of “The Breakfast Club” is that alienation is the norm, that nerds, jocks, stoners, popular girls and weirdos are all, in their own ways, outsiders.

Of course, to quote another pop culture phenom, Bart Simpson, “Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in barrel.” True. But back in 1985, that sense of universal alienation certainly resonated with me and my friends. That and the appreciation of music the films all shared in common. For kids in Dallas, Fort Worth and points in between who secretly listened to George Gimarc’s Rock and Roll Alternative on Sunday nights, hearing the Psychedelic Furs, New Order and The Smiths seemed like a antidote to a steady diet of Night Ranger and Bon Jovi fed to us every other day of the week. It was an affirmation that we weren’t crazy.

And maybe that is all there is to Gen X. We didn’t want to change the world like the Baby Boomers. We just wanted to be left alone to do our own thing. No, it’s not an epic poem, but at least it’s an ethos.

And now, after many years, here I am on the other side. I’m no longer the teen struggling to forge an identity and figure out what’s cool. I’m the thick-around-the-middle Dad left to console a moody young daughter as she experiences the ups and downs of life and struggles to find about life for herself. If life is anything like the movies, maybe I’ll find a way to say the right thing.

Funny thing is, I don’t feel any different. Like an artfully constructed tracking shot, say the opening scene from Touch of Evil, my life feels like one continuous sequence. However, something has changed, and I was much more comfortable ignoring it. Put on the right song and it still feels like 1985 to me, but I know it isn’t and never will be again. That’s cool. Maybe I don’t have as much insight as I thought I would by the time I was 40, but I remember pretty well how I felt when I was 16. If I can hang on to that, at least for a few more years, maybe I can help my daughter navigate the shoals of adolescence.

But a Dad can’t do everything. As you grow, the friends, movies, music and experience play a bigger role, and some are better than others and some of these last longer than others. I hope my daughter is able to find some that have staying power as I have. I’ve got the memories, the old albums and the friends. Some of the people I knew back then I still see, and I’m glad for their presence. In spite of gray hair and wrinkles, their friendship peels back the years and makes life a little sweeter.

And I think that’s the best thing I can say about John Hughes. His work helps me remember, and I’m grateful for that.