Life Moves Pretty Fast: A John Hughes Memorial
A Look at Some of the Best Teen Films of the 1980s
“Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and take a look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller
If you’re of a certain age, John Hughes’s films were a formative experience. How many poor girls longed for a rich Romeo like Pretty In Pink’s Andie? How many nerds felt crushing pressure, like The Breakfast Club’s Brian? How many wished that all life’s problems could be solved by gullible parents, a beautiful girlfriend, a rich best friend and a classic Ferrari, like Ferris Bueller?
John Hughes didn’t invent the teen film. Rebel Without a Cause and Grease, to name but two, brought to the silver screen the themes of adolescent angst, parental indifference and stultifying social strata, not to mention fast cars, cute girls and sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. But Hughes’s films took these themes to a higher, and infinitely more quotable, level.
High School Is Society: Social Class in Teen Flicks
The American Film Institute, in the throes of list-mania, once created a list of the best teen films in Hollywood history. The AIF chose the Amy Heckerling/Cameron Crowe collaboration Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) as number one, no doubt in part because of the pedigrees of Heckerling, Crowe, and the presence of future Oscar winners like Sean Penn and Forest Whitaker. Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985) was number two. But, insomuch as lists like these matter at all, there’s an argument to be made for reversing those spots.
Hughes’s biggest strength was to illuminate the class divisions in high school life. This theme appeared most strongly in the Molly Ringwald trifecta of Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink (1986), but was also the central conflict in Some Kind Of Wonderful (1987). Other teen films explored this theme, notably Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), and its apotheosis was reached in Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1988), in which a sociopathic character declaims, “High school is society!”
But they, and all the other teen films since, owe a great debt to Hughes, particularly to The Breakfast Club, wherein over the course of one day a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal throw off those convenient labels and realize what they have in common: school sucks, their parents are imbeciles, and all of them are “bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.” Race and gender do not play a huge role in Hughes’s conception of high school, and adults are either dictatorial or completely ineffectual. But it’s not a stretch to see the social strata in Hughes’s films as being as important as the class differences in British comedies, from Austen to Wodehouse to Rowling.
John Hughes: Father of the Teen Flick, and a Gen-X Icon
Like the detainees in The Breakfast Club running through the school, like Ferris and his friends playing hooky, Hughes eventually broke free from the classroom. He went on to write the hugely successful Home Alone films (yet another story about a young one running amok without adult supervision) and direct Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which contains some of the finest work John Candy ever did. And some comedy lovers will always remember him as the mastermind behind the National Lampoon series. But it’s as the father of the modern teen flick that Hughes will likely be best remembered. Gen-Xers, having had to live through two decades of boomer nostalgia, are mourning the loss of one of their icons today. Rest in peace, Mr. Hughes, and thanks for getting us.
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