“We all know that John Hughes is the one who taught us how to live,” says Tony Carey, a forty-one-year-old television executive. “That’s how we learned to function as people—you figured out how to live from Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. And now we’re messed up. We have no idea how to be adults,” because Hughes stopped making his youth films when he did. “We’re all flailing,” says Carey. “How the hell are we supposed to make it as adults? Thank God for St. Elmo’s Fire.”
For so many, the movies truly provided a blueprint for how to live life. A. O. Scott has written that he’s “aware of belonging to a generation that has yet to figure out adulthood, for whom life can feel like a long John Hughes movie.” The Huffington Post’s Kevin Smokler wrote, “What Hughes captured on-screen was an adolescence to be learned from…It’s an adolescence I wish I had. Thanks to John Hughes, it is an adulthood I can imagine and make real.” And, Tony Carey says with conviction in his voice, “It mattered—what they did on the screen. I lived my life by it. It gave us something to strive for. And it makes us proud when we get close to it.”
There was something in those movies that made you want to be a different, better version of yourself. It was a desire that film critic Robert Wilonsky felt as a teenager: “I vividly recall going to see these films, and walking out thinking, ‘I am going to act more like that character than this character.’ We learned from them, we laughed from them, and ultimately, we kept repeating them,” in the flesh-and-blood world. Films that really seep into our psyches, says Leonard Maltin, “solidify our own dreams of where we want to go in life, what path we want to follow.”
The path that writer Irena Medavoy wanted to follow became clear to her when she was watching The Breakfast Club in a movie theater as a young woman. Medavoy was under pressure from her family to become a doctor, but bolstered by The Breakfast Club and its empowering message, she worked up the courage to tell her parents that she didn’t want to pursue a career in medicine. To her great delight, Medavoy says, “they understood, and said, ‘We support you.’” She then followed her passion by attending USC’s School of Cinema on a writing scholarship. Another of these films had a similarly powerful impact upon the professional aspirations of Becky Sloviter, a vice president at MGM. “I moved to L.A. because I wanted to make [movies like] Say Anything,” a film she now references “five times a week in meetings with actors and directors.”
The films also helped shape our outlooks by suggesting we should embark on life’s journey with optimism even in the face of certain defeat. We believed that if we were admirable and loving and smart like our on-screen heroes, everything would work out for us, as it did for them. There was something in the structure of the films that, says Anthony Michael Hall, “leads you toward hope.”
The message to the teens watching in the dark theaters seemed to be this: Your loneliness is real, but through finding friendship and love like these characters on-screen, your happiness can be real, too, and you should fight to make it so. It was, says producer Michelle Manning, as if Hughes were telling his young audience, “Let me try to show you that it doesn’t have to be that tough.”
“I moved to a small town when I was in middle school,” says Omaha publicist Danelle Schlegelmilch. “It was the hardest time to transition, and I was the outsider for a very long time. So I would go home at night and watch these movies. And slowly they helped me get my self-confidence back. The movies told me to keep my chin up,” she says. “I related to Molly Ringwald’s characters—she had dysfunctional families and people would forget about her birthday, but she kept going. And in the end, she got what she wanted. It made me feel like there is hope for everyone.”
The filmmakers were savvy enough to know that teenagers desperately craved not just peer acceptance, but true friendship. The movies played into that wish fulfillment fantasy brilliantly, leaving us thinking that the rigid high-school social order was something we had control over. “I like the symbolic nature of it’we all come in [to detention] separately, and we all walk out together as a group,” says Judd Nelson of The Breakfast Club.
Sloviter says she learned much about friendship from the characters in St. Elmo’s Fire. “They would lie down in traffic for each other. You see Judd putting on his T-shirt at three in the morning to go save Demi. The lesson was, even if you don’t approve of what your friends are doing, you help them when they need you.” The film’s star Rob Lowe says that young people “come up to me all the time and say that they and their friends watch St. Elmo’s Fire, because what it says about the friendships that run so deeply at that time in your life is still true. I think people wish they could have friends like that.”
But as hopeful a portrait of teenage friendship as the films portrayed, they packed their biggest emotional punch with their anything-is-possible depictions of teenage romance. The storylines made a deep cine-sociological impact on impressionable young hearts at just the age when they were forming their feelings about love. Now many Gen Xers still pine for the Brat Pack actors and characters. “Just typing the name ‘Andrew McCarthy’ still makes me tremble,” wrote Paige Smoron of the Chicago Sun-Times. “I loved that man like no other. He was the embodiment of all that an adolescent girl could dream of.” An earlier generation could tell volumes about someone by what Beatle she crushed on or admired the most; Gen Xers can appraise each other by which romantic character in the Brat Pack canon means the most to them.
Of Allison, Ally Sheedy’s poetic recluse in The Breakfast Club, Lewis Robinson once wrote, “Her beauty and her recalcitrance made me understand why pursuing the opposite sex would be a top priority for the next few decades. After seeing the movie, I devoted my life to finding a girl like her.” After watching Mary Stuart Masterson portray the passionate tomboy Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful, writer Ben Schrank knew that “from then on I would sing the song of Mary Stuart Masterson. I wanted a girl like Mary, and I found that girl. She stared at me the way Mary Stuart Masterson stares at Eric Stoltz in Some Kind Of Wonderful.” Author T Cooper, who explores gender identity issues in her work, credits her disinterest in the movies’ conventional studs (Emilio Estevez, Michael Schoeffling) and her affection for the films’ differently adorable male characters such as Duckie in Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club’s geeky Brian, for teaching her a valuable lesson about her own sexuality. “I just assumed I had weird taste because I liked these nontraditionally hot boys instead of the more obvious heartthrobs my friends pined for,” Cooper has written, “but as I moved into my twenties and started to figure out my own gender identity, I realized that what I really wanted was to be one of those fey boys—as opposed to being with them in any sort of romantic way.”
Sometimes the films taught us about love by showing us what to avoid romantically. St. Elmo’s Fire set forth themes that made us explicitly ponder the construct of marriage, and the moral implications of infidelity. In the film, Nelson’s character tries to force an engagement upon Sheedy’s character in an attempt to restrain his unfaithfulness. “I still think of Judd Nelson and Andrew McCarthy in St. Elmo’s Fire as being the two poles of how a man can deal with a woman,” says Mark Feuerstein. “There’s that true, passionate, burning love like Andrew McCarthy feels for Ally Sheedy, and then there’s the guy who can actually fuck the woman at the lingerie store.” The fact that the film raises such questions, says Feuerstein, makes it “almost like a Neil LaBute play.”
The characters in the Brat Pack canon generally aren’t seen having sex (and many of them are still virgins). Instead, the films boasted sensually charged scenes in which the characters do nothing but talk (or, at most, kiss) that seemed more erotic to the young audience than any explicit sex scene or cheap shot of a naked girl in a locker room. In The Breakfast Club, Judd Nelson’s rebel softly growls into the ear of Ringwald’s virginal prom queen, calling to mind Eve and the serpent: “Have you ever been felt up? Over the bra, under the blouse, shoes off, hoping to God your parents don’t walk in? Over the panties…no
bra…blouse unbuttoned, Calvins in a ball on the front seat, past eleven on a school night?” Nobody’s naked in this scene—in fact, the two characters don’t even touch—and yet you could cut the sexual tension with a knife. Usually, we saw sexual attraction expressed on-screen in the Brat Pack films only in kisses—but oh, what kisses! Passionate and promising, furious and urgent, these on-screen liplocks, for all their tenderness, also seemed like some alluring erotic foreshadowing. They helped shape the sexual perspectives we’d maintain all our lives.
Virtually all of the Brat Pack movies got us thinking about class distinction in teendom, and in terms of politics, the gang in St. Elmo’s Fire got us thinking about Democrats and Republicans. But another character in the Brat canon inspired us to ponder the idea of personal freedom, about standing up to authority, about nothing less than revolution. One of cinema’s great libertarians, Ferris Bueller changed the way one could think about social conformity. Bueller was not so much a rebel without a cause as the rebel next door, the one you could take home to meet Grandma. “He engages in open revolt against the system,” wrote The Huffington Post’s Mike Miley of Bueller, with tongue planted partially in cheek. “Ferris Bueller is taking a day off from adolescent serfdom, and he wants all of us to join him.” Mark Hemingway of the conservative National Review Online wrote: “If there’s a better celluloid expression of ordinary American freedom than Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I have yet to see it.” Says sociologist Joshua Gamson, movies such as Ferris Bueller presented “a fantasy of being able to break the rules, and be celebrated for it rather than punished.” The films, says Gamson, show us “how to be an individual in a very conformity-oriented environment.”
When the Dean Rooneys of the world told us to shut up and take our seats, Ferris Bueller told us to stand up and take our own lives in our hands. It’s no accident that Ferris dons a beret as something of a cheeky nod to Che Guevara. The stylistic accessory was Matthew Broderick’s idea. “I knew a person in high school who we all looked up to who had a poster of Che on his wall,” says Broderick. “He really did fancy himself as a revolutionary, up at Walden High School on Eighty-eighth Street and Central Park West. So I definitely thought Ferris had a touch of him.”
Through Ferris Bueller, Hughes was, as Ben Stein has said, “writing about a human need as basic as Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence—the need to be free and to pursue happiness.” Of course Ferris Bueller is not supposed to literally represent any specific political party or ideology, and he tells us that early in the film: “A person shouldn’t believe in isms, a person should believe in himself.” He then quotes not Lenin but Lennon—John Lennon, that is: “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” But in his own way, Ferris taught us all something about a basic tenet of political ideology—the idea that personal freedom is worth pursuing, and must not be constrained. It all seemed to say, suggests sociologist Robert Bulman, “that no teacher, no parent, no authority figure—is going to get in their way.”
At least, says Bulman, that’s how it is for “these white, middle-class students.” Ah yes—those white, middle-, and upper-class students, the ones who populate all of the Brat Pack movies, with nary a significant nonwhite character in sight. “I very much doubt,” says sociologist Joshua Gamson, “that black urban kids were watching those movies, and going, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’” How could they have? In these stories, there were no black kids, no Hispanic kids, no Indian kids’no one but white teenagers.
“The movies are just so white,” says Ringwald. But she’s also quick to point out that considering where these movies were set, their all-white storylines are a nod to reality. “For that time in the suburbs of Chicago,” says Ringwald, “it’s pretty accurate.” And indeed the world Hughes understood and set his films in was overwhelmingly white, more accurately so than, for example, the oddly Caucasian New York of Woody Allen’s movies. “I’m not going to pretend I know the black experience,” Hughes told the New York Times in 1991.
Whatever the reasoning behind it, says sociologist Bulman, “nonwhite depictions in these films tend to be caricatures.” In fact, the only significant non-white character in any of these films is also the basest caricature of all: Long Duk Dong, the wacky Asian exchange student played by Gedde Watanabe in Sixteen Candles. On NPR, Dong was described as “one of the most offensive Asian stereotypes Hollywood ever gave America.” Dong was a walking punch line, an impossibly uncool teen with a thick indeterminate Asian accent who tries out his English by exclaiming such now well-worn phrases as “Whass happenin’, haahtstuff?” He uses a fork and spoon as chopsticks, gets drunk at the party at Jake Ryan’s house (where he frolics with his newfound “sexy American GIRL-friend!”), and ends up passed out on a front lawn pleading, “No more yanky my wanky—the Donger need FOOD!” And for those viewers for whom this humor was too subtle, a loud gong sounds every time Dong enters a scene.
“For every Asian American kid growing up in the eighties, that character was how a lot of people saw you,” says Martin Wong, the thirty-nine-year-old cofounder and coeditor of the Asian American culture magazine Giant Robot. Before that movie, Wong says kids connected him with another on-screen Asian: “We were identified with Bruce Lee, and that wasn’t so bad. Nobody minds being associated with an ass-kicker.” But then Sixteen Candles hit theaters, and everything changed.
“I went to see it in fifth grade with all my friends,” says Wong, “and my friends who weren’t Asian thought it was so funny. They were just cracking up during those scenes. And it hits you—Oh, my God, that’s the joke I am going to be living with for the rest of my life as a student.” Soon enough, says Wong, “the jocks or the rockers or whoever—‘no more yanky my wanky’ is what they say when they see you. And the gong is what they hear in their head when you walk up. It sucks.”
A heightened national sense of cultural sensitivity (or political correctness, depending on how you look at it) swept America and the movie studios in the early nineties, and so the 1980s were, in many ways, the last moment when racially questionable jokes regularly found their place in mainstream comedies. Says Molly Ringwald, “There wasn’t the same atmosphere back then…everything was fair game.” (Long Duk Dong was a joke, but at least he wasn’t a criminal. The black characters stealing the hubcaps off the Griswolds’ car in Vacation are the African Americans who “enjoy” some of the most screen time in any Hughes-written film.)
Some time after Candles hit theaters, it became clear to Gedde Watanabe just how many people were upset by his character. “One day, I was walking in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” he recalls, “and this Asian woman came up to me and said, ‘How could you do that?’ She was really upset over the movie.” When he later read an article about the racial implications of Long Duk Dong, he says, “I kind of understood, and I reasoned with it. But at the same time, I didn’t really think of it that way…Back then I didn’t understand as much as I do now. I was a little bit ignorant, too, because I grew up in Utah. I had a very strange upbringing where I didn’t experience that much racism. I just thought I was a part of everybody else.”
“Gedde was a victim of circumstance,” says Martin Wong, “because there were no jobs out there for Asians [in Hollywood], and you get what you can.” Watanabe, who did a number of accented roles in the years after Sixteen Candles, has, for the most part, stopped using exaggerated Asian accents in his work. People still call asking him to audition for something “with an accent,” and Watanabe has found a way around that: “I go for a British accent,” he says, smiling.
The eighties youth movies left much to be desired in terms of providing young viewers with racially diverse screen heroes. But at least, in sharp contrast to movies such as Porky’s and Animal House, Brat Pack films boasted many strong female characters—the kind of girls whom girls everywhere could aspire to be like. The films’ heroines were so much more than perpetually undressing cheerleaders or nagging nerds. Say Anything’s Diane Court is an intellectual sup
erstar with a boyfriend who loves her for her mind. Some Kind of Wonderful’s bold Watts takes feminine strength to new levels. And Pretty in Pink’s Andie Walsh, who gets her father out of bed every morning and works an after-school job to support the two of them, has an intellect and drive that would have led her to a better life even if Blane, “the heir to McDonnagh Electric,” hadn’t fallen for her.
The Brat Pack movies have greatly influenced many artists, particularly those working in film and television. The narrative formulas set forth by the movies were taken in many different directions, ushering in the youth-centered entertainment era we’ve been immersed in ever since. Nineties youth television sprang directly from the artistic loins of the eighties youth films, starting in 1990 with Beverly Hills 90210, which borrowed heavily from Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club’s unconventional telling of teen stories in melodramatic, dead-serious tones, and from the groundbreaking glamour St. Elmo’s Fire gave young people on-screen. The tenderness of films such as Sixteen Candles and Say Anything translated into later nineties shows like My So Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, and Dawson’s Creek.
Intelligent 1990s comedies such as Clueless (directed by Amy Heckerling), Election, Rushmore, and Can’t Hardly Wait cemented that the teen genre was here to stay. Wrote film critic Elvis Mitchell, “If Godard doesn’t turn out to be the most influential filmmaker of [1999], then John Hughes will. Even American Beauty is staged like a John Hughes film.” The influence continued throughout the early 2000s and well into the present day, with the success of recent teen melodramas such as Gossip Girl, The O.C., Veronica Mars, and even reality-ish shows like Laguna Beach and The Hills. “It’s like a family tree,” says Etan Frankel, a staff writer on Gossip Girl.
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 40
