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“When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies.”
The John Hughes Movies
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” wrote grouchy English poet, Philip Larkin. “They may not mean to, but they do.” John Hughes was not generous enough to add the qualifying suffix. The string of movies he variously wrote, produced and directed during the eighties were shot through with the explicit understanding that adolescence was too precious a time to be contaminated by the interference of The Enemy Within, a.k.a. Mom and Pop. All representatives of adult authority were characterized in the Hughes canon as cringing, vindictive, foul-smelling, prehistoric, bewildered and spiritually undernourished. But when it came to the progenitors of his protagonists, Hughes let loose the dogs of war. Parents were tyrannical in their expectations. They were criminal in their neglect. They were simpleminded. They were devious. They were archaic in their remove from modern times. They were pathetic in their attempts to acclimate themselves to the new age. In short, they were across-the-board unqualified to shepherd their offspring through the choppy waters of the teen years. That’s why Hughes felt justified stacking the deck in his characters’ favor. His teen leads were smarter, hipper, more sensitive, more articulate and, at all times, morally superior to their adult oppressors. They were also almost entirely denizens of an upper-middle-class white-bread world and the agonies which assailed them seemed tame even at the time—no drive-bys, no drug addiction, no physical abuse, no gangs—but the way they were magnified into melodrama made empathy inescapable.
John Hughes was the Phil Spector of the teen movie. He took a bubblegum genre and served it up on a silver platter. There were writers and directors who were responsible for better, funnier, sadder, sweeter and more deeply felt films during the era, but there were none whose signatures were more indelibly scrawled over their output (much as I revere Savage Steve Holland, I’m not about to make grandiose auteur claims on his behalf), there were none whose movies were such diabolical contraptions of contrivance and honest emotion, and there were none who went back to the well so many times.
“High school was not this key point in my life. It wasn’t traumatic. Basically, it was over real quick.” John Hughes made these statements which, for some reason, remind me of a river in Egypt. Someone who hadn’t devoted a few too many hours to brooding over the evil of the cliques separating him from his potential best bud/dream girl would not have made these movies. The series of films that started with Sixteen Candles and concluded with Some Kind of Wonderful are extended exercises in wound licking and “what if?” Maybe the adolescent Hughes never had to remove cleats from his butt or gum from his hair, but he made a tour of duty in the war zone we know as Outside Looking In. He also had no commercial need to churn out teen flicks; he had already earned his spurs penning two hits, Mr. Mom and National Lampoon’s Vacation, the latter being one of the handful of classic nonteen comedies of the last two decades (you’ve got ten fingers, start counting: Groundhog Day, A Fish Called Wanda, Spinal Tap … I bet you don’t need to pull the other hand out of your pants).
Hughes basically spent the eighties in the inner-demon cleansing business, continually replaying and refining that magical moment when the barriers were removed, the masks fell to the floor and social circumstances were no longer strong enough to separate teen soulmates. What spun his movies into a galaxy of their own was the way he was able to sugar his core of hurt with a variety of flavors culled from early adult life. From his days as a 100-jokes-a-day freelance gag writer came a repertoire that turned every script into a jack-in-the-box, spring loaded with enough zingers to make comparable comedies seem like speech therapy sessions for slow children. From his days as an advertising copywriter came a proficiency with a finely turned epigram. From his days as the editor of National Lampoon came a taste for mean-spirited sadism with particular emphasis on the aged, the infirm and anyone of other than American extraction. Add a glutinous dosage of sentimentality to the mix and you’ve got a combination guaranteed to induce heartburn and despair outside the target area.
Hughes’ unwieldy stew of influences made for some mood-swinging movies that occasionally defied both credulity and goodwill (what’s up with that Ferris Bueller scene where Cameron kicks his dad’s Ferrari out the window? And The Breakfast Club’s dance sequence?). Teen audiences, though, willingly spooned up the argot, the angst, the fluorescent checkerboard apparel and the wall-to-wall, every-second-blaring, Anglo synth-weenie dominated sound track. Above all, they went wild for the casts, many of whom were performing at the absolute pinnacle of what were often very limited capabilities. Most of these kids may have been self-regarding little monsters, they may have been pumped full of drugs and they may have deserved their subsequent rapid declines in popularity (speaking of which, if you factor in Macaulay Culkin’s personal problems and the premature death of John Candy, you could construct a serviceable Curse of Hughes conspiracy theory). But then you look at a dud romantic comedy like the 1995 remake of Sabrina, knowing it was made by consummate professionals, and you think, None of these people believe a word they’re saying. You go back to the Hughes movies and the actors are delivering his lines like they’re bringing the tablets down from the mountain.
A decade after its release, you’ve got Courtney Love in Spin, trumpeting The Breakfast Club as “the defining moment of the ‘alternative’ generation.” You’ve got Sponge in the Buzz Bin with “Molly (Sixteen Candles)” (even though they swear it’s not about La Ringwald). You’ve got the novels Boy Culture (by Matthew Rettenmund) and Our Noise (by Jeff Gomez) referencing The Breakfast Club as a significant teenage touchstone (“Back then, it was the closest thing we had to Virtual Reality,” writes Gomez). You’ve even got the Weird Science syndicated TV show. Okay, I know it’s not a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy, but it’s something of an indication that the Hughes movies seeped into the consciousness of their intended audience and that their influence continues to be felt. The six films that follow contain moments of heart-pulping pathos, moments of pig-brained stupidity, moments of sniveling self-pity and moments of unmatchable cruelty, all of which often occur in the same scene. They also contain evocations of adolescence so affectionate that they cause to you to fall into step with their author’s view that the subsequent years are all downhill.
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How does Molly Ringwald express mortification? Let me count the ways. The rolling of the eyes. The chewing of the lips. The appalled exhalation. The jaw dropping in disbelief. The flinching. The lowering of the head signifying a wish to be swallowed up by the earth. Sixteen Candles (1984) martyred the flame-haired freckle-face many times over but it also acted as her coronation as Crown Princess of teen flicks.
In this first collaboration between director and muse, Ringwald stars as Samantha Baker, who wakes up on the morning of her 16th birthday dispirited to find that no major physical changes have transformed her into a big-boobed babe. “You need four inches of bod and a great birthday,” she mutters, descending the stairs to face her family and the fuss she’s sure they’re going to make of her on this, her special day. But Samantha’s birthday occurs the day before her sister Ginny’s wedding to Rudy the bohunk and the entire household is focused on the upcoming nuptials. Sam’s 16th causes not a ripple, not a mention. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip. She stares disbelievingly at her mother (Carlin Glynn), who’s packing her off to school without so much as a packed lunch, “Don’t give me that pouty look of yours,” sighs Mrs. Baker. Sam is appalled; “I can’t believe this. They fucking forgot my birthday.”
Her appalled disbelief will get an exhausting workout as the day wears on. First, she scrawls her desire for sensitive hunk Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling, kind of a marked-down Matt Dillon) on a confidential sex survey note, which will find its way into his possession. Turns out he’s noticed her interest in him and mentions to a gym colleague that he might reciprocate. “She’s obviously too young to party serious,” scoffs the jock. “Maybe I’m interested
in more than a party,” says Jake wistfully. Standing in the girls’ locker room, Sam stares miserably at the womanly fullness of Jake’s prom-queen girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), knowing she couldn’t come within the same universe of desirability. But, on the noxious voyage of misery that constitutes the school bus ride home, Sam attracts the unwanted attention of someone whose heart beats a little faster when he sees her flinch. The ominous four-note Dragnet theme acts as a stunning introduction to a character sometimes called Ted but universally renowned and reviled as the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall). Pint-sized and pale-faced, his barely-formed features dominated by a huge pair of sheepish eyes, the Geek plants himself in the seat next to hers and starts sniffing her. “What’s the story,” he attempts to drawl, “You got a guy?” She turns on him. “Three big ones and they lust wimp blood so quit bugging me or I’ll sic them all over your wienie ass.”
Just as the Dragnet theme heralded the approach of the Geek, once Samantha gets home, the familiar tinkling tones of the Twilight Zone signature tune indicate that the comfortable and familiar is about to get uncomfortable and strange. Grandparents! Two sets of grandparents have occupied the Baker home for the wedding. The first set are unsightly in their underwear and their litany of ailments. They show no sign of remembering her birthday. As they’re sleeping in her room, she flees to be assailed by the second set. “She’s gotten her boobies … and they are so perky!” exults her grandmother, reaching out a grasping pair of hands to meet the new arrivals. Sheltering in her brother Mike’s room, she moans, “I can’t believe my grandmother actually felt me up.” Suddenly, an Asian head looks down from the bed above. It’s Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe). You may think this Chinese exchange student with his decimated English is the most disgraceful stereotype perpetrated since the days of Stepin Fetchit, or you may reason that Hughes deals with many other Caucasian characters—the grandparents, Sam’s narcissistic sister Ginny (Blanche Baker), her bohunk fiancé and his seemingly Mob-tied family, the girl in the neck brace (Joan Cusack) and the Geek’s techno-loser buddies—with equal malevolence. Whichever side you take, there’s no denying that moments like the one where a grandparent is gleefully recounting Dong’s many uses as an indentured servant, the one where the suburban Baker kids are openly giggling at the foreigner’s attempt to enunciate and the one where little brother Mike (Justin Henry) tells his mother to boil the sheets and the mattress after Dong’s gone, grace the film like melanomas on an otherwise unmarked visage.
Sam’s unhappy birthday continues to get worse. At a school dance, the Geek tells his bizarre friends Bryce (John Cusack) and Cliff (Darren Harris) that by the time the night is over, he and Sam will interface. Oblivious to his machinations, Sam gazes mistily at Jake who is slow-dancing with Caroline to Spandau Ballet’s “True.” Suddenly, shockingly, he looks up from the goddess in his arms; staring straight into Sam’s eyes, his lips form something of a smile. That’s the exact moment the Geek chooses to make his move. Throwing himself in front of Sam, he launches into a hip-shaking, crotch-thrusting frenzy. She withstands a few seconds of his convulsions then, overcome with mortification, rushes off and slumps down in the school corridors, overcome with sobs. Bryce and Cliff mock the Geek’s rejection but he’s cool: “Don’t spazz out … the situation’ll come online.” They demand proof that he can get even the time of day from Sam. They demand underpants. He takes their challenge and saunters off, his confidence shattered by their specification: “Girl’s underpants.” His confidence is further eroded when he is approached by Jake who, as a jock, is known to pound nerds like him. But Jake wants to know about the girl the Geek was dancing with. Reverting to professional evaluator of female potential, the Geek sums up Sam: “Smallish tits, decent voice, smells pretty good, she drives me crazy.”
Sam sits disconsolately in the body of a car in the school workshop. The Geek shatters her solitude and attempts to apologize for humiliating her (“I had no idea you couldn’t dance”). She finds herself confiding in him about her birthday. He’s sympathetic: “I’d freak if my family forgot my birthday.” Touched by her vulnerability and willingness to interact with him on a sort of human level, he says, “Would you feel better if you knew one of my secrets?” She looks dubious, but he carries on, “This information can not leave this room, ok? It would devastate my reputation as a dude.” He pauses before delivering the astonishing truth: “I’ve never bagged a babe. I’m not a stud.” She shrieks with laughter, then shows him a little sympathy. He takes the opportunity to attempt to mount her. She swats him away and when he asks if it would be totally off the wall for her to have sex with him, she flushes and confides in him. “Your asking me is not as off the wall as why I won’t.” She explains she’s saving herself for Jake. The Geek freaks: “Jake’s my boy!… He asked me about you.” Sam explodes with happiness. She can’t believe it. She’s about to rush off and put herself in his line of vision when the Geek asks to borrow her panties, so he can hold his head up around his dipshit friends. Seconds later, freshmen are paying a buck a shot to get a peek at her undies.
While the lovely Caroline is rounding up a posse of favored seniors for a party at Jake’s place—his parents are away for the weekend—Sam is working up the nerve to talk to him. Just as he notices her, she crumbles and melts away. “I can’t believe I’m such a jerk,” she berates herself. “I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek.” That night, while she’s trying to sleep on the sofa, her father (Paul Dooley) comes down to apologize for missing her birthday. Seeing something else is wrong, he presses her to unburden herself. She wails out her misery over Jake. “It just hurts,” she wails. “That’s why they call them crushes,” he reasons. At the same time, Jake, while sifting through the wreckage of his party-strafed home, finds the Geek stored under a glass coffee table. They talk jock-to-dweeb about his disaffection with Caroline: “She’s beautiful and she’s built and all that but I’m not interested anymore … I want a serious girlfriend, somebody I can love that’s gonna love me back.” They make a swap, Jake gets Sam’s panties, the Geek gets to drive Caroline home in Jake’s dad’s Rolls Royce. She’s so blitzed she doesn’t know where she is, but suddenly turns playful, and after stuffing birth-control pills down his throat drops her head down into the Geek’s lap and breathes “I love you.” He stares straight at us: “This is getting good.”
The day of the wedding arrives. Sam’s sister Ginny gets her monthly bill a little early and has sedated herself with several fistfuls of muscle relaxants, thus reducing her to a limbless, giggling, uncoordinated mass of Jell-O. Caroline wakes up in Jake’s car outside the church and next to a freshman wearing head gear the size of a TV aerial. It seems they did it. But did she enjoy it? “I have this weird feeling I did.” Jake races to the Baker household where the hungover Long Duk Dong tells him Sam’s marrying an oily bohunk. At the church, Ginny can’t even make it down the aisle. “You know what I liked best,” Caroline tells the Geek, “waking up in your arms.” They kiss at the very moment Jake appears outside the church. He makes a clean break with Caroline and is there to pick up Sam and give her back her panties. That night, sitting on the dining table, a birthday cake between them, they celebrate Sam’s Sweet 16th. “Make a wish,” he tells her. “It already came true,” she whispers.
Not until Natural Born Killers came along did a movie devote so much open affection to its central characters while being so consistently contemptuous of all those around them. John Hughes leads Molly Ringwald through Sixteen Candles like a devoted dad proudly but protectively displaying his daughter. He treats Anthony Michael Hall like a freak until the moment his character and Ringwald’s bond in the body of a car. Thereafter, Hughes switches gears, bundling up the rest of the film in a pink ribbon and gifting it to Hall. Despite the Long Duk Dong dilemma and Hughes’ inability to provide a big rousing laugh-packed climax—the wedding scene should go off all-guns-blazing, instead it barely raises a titter—the movie confirms its creator as a Spy in the House of Teen. Its finest
scene—the Ringwald/Hall bonding session—also paved the way for the enforced social intercourse that would characterize his next feature.
Saturday, March 24, 1984,
Shermer High School
Shermer, Illinois 60062
Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong—and what we did was wrong—but we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basketcase, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7 o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.”
The portentous boom of Simple Minds’ bass drum over the Universal logo, followed by the introductory quote from eminent philosopher David Bowie (“… and these children that you spit on/as they try to change their worlds/are immune to your consultation./They’re quite aware what they’re going through”) tipped cinemagoers the wink that what was to follow was not another soundtrack-shilling bout of high school high jinks but Something Special. In Sixteen Candles, Hughes displayed a David Attenborough–style delight in excavating and exhibiting the teen tribes secreted in suburbia. In The Breakfast Club (1985) he continued his anthropological theme, this time enclosing a quintet of representatives from disparate social groupings in a controlled environment, delving beneath the tribal markings in search of an underlying common humanity. In his choice of lab rats, he was well served. Anthony Michael Hall is Brian, the nervous, pale, gangly (Hall had sprouted a good three inches since Sixteen Candles) anal brain. Molly Ringwald, fetching in a soft leather and suede ensemble, is Claire, the envied, despised and desired, popular, privileged Daddy’s girl with a repressed yearning to Be Bad. Emilio Estevez is Andrew, the buff, baffled varsity wrestler. Ally Sheedy is Alison, witchily sexy in a grunge-prescient bundle of baggy, shapeless sweaters and scarves, face obscured by a collapsed spiderweb of hair, almost autistic in her repertoire of tics and unfathomable actions. Then there’s Judd Nelson as John Bender, the Iceman, the antagonist, the instigator, the agent provocateur, the swaggering, sneering bad boy “full of dick and penis and scrotum and testicle” (Courtney Love again) who masks his vulnerability by lashing out at others before they can pour scorn on his innate sensitivity. Their captor for this nine-hour sentence of educational servitude is Dean of Students Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), the embodiment of all that is rotten, decaying and worthless in adulthood.
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