Do You Know How Popular I Am?

The big story of 2009 is not health-care reform. Celebrity death is
getting complex, the feelings it arouses harder to parse. Because our
relation to the world and one another is so tempered by imaginary
relations to deceased strangers, public discourse on the subject can
feel like a competition between people jockeying to have been the most
or least affected by a dead person’s legacy. The resulting tone is a
mixture of inappropriate joke telling and confessional sentimentality
that verges on bathos.

It turns out those were also two of the chief characteristics in the
work of the late John Hughes, who died last week of a heart attack at
age 59. This is not a coincidence.

As a writer/director/producer, Hughes was one of the few mainstream
filmmakers who earned the term “auteur.” His oeuvre, driven by language
but visually commanding, was unmistakably distinctive. There were three
distinct periods in his career, each successful—one obscenely so.
But his middle years, between 1984 and 1987, are what made him the kind
of artist people argue over having cared the most about.

After his early screenwriting years (Mr. Mom, National
Lampoon’s Vacation), before the phenomenal success of Home
Alone and its clones, John Hughes was, notoriously, the laureate of
white suburban adolescence. His métier wasn’t merely teen angst,
as is usually reported, but teen-ness: teen mischief, teen
self-determination, teen longing, teen betrayal, teen loyalty, and
caustic teen one-liners. The films he wrote and/or directed during this
period—Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and lesser works Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful (which he may as well have
directed)—have had a more lasting cultural influence than any
number of ostensibly more serious ’80s films. Matthew Broderick
addressing the camera with a shampoo Mohawk, Molly Ringwald practicing
what she’ll say if Jake ever notices her (“D’you have a cigarette?”),
Anthony Michael Hall crying over his F in shop—these are not just
iconic moments. They’re almost a paradigm. For teenagers, and,
crucially, preteens, Hughes films were more than escapist
wish-fulfillment, class-conscious romances, and existential Skinner
boxes. They were instruction manuals for people trying to learn how to
be young.

Earlier youth movies like Rebel Without a Cause, Easy
Rider, Saturday Night Fever, even Risky Business,
offered a more or less binary system for
audience identification.
You were a straight or a rebel, a conformist or an original, an us or a
them. Hughes’s works expanded the language of youthful alienation. His
social cosmology was infinitely more elaborate and self-aware. The
hyperarticulate, culturally plugged-in kids in his films understood
that the identities available to them were merely arbitrary roles, each
burnout as predetermined as every jock—all equally subject to
ridicule by rich, beautiful jerks who lived to make you feel unpopular,
uncool, unloved. The finales were uplifting, but finales weren’t the
point (sometimes they sold us out, like Allison’s makeover and Andie
choosing Blane). The twin suns of the Hughes galaxy were shame and
dread. Funny, cute, and underdoggy as they were, his characters were
gripped by terror that they might fail to choose a viable self.

The films and the real-life anxiety interacted in unique and
intriguing ways. Obviously, John Hughes didn’t invent peer pressure.
But he distilled, articulated, and dramatized it better than any other
filmmaker. My fellow eighth graders sneaked into The Breakfast
Club the day it came out and walked out shattered. We were too
young to identify with the characters, but exactly the right age to
recognize that we were about to learn whether we were the brain, the
athlete, the basket case, the princess, or the criminal. The future was
coming. Don’t you forget about it. Fear of the pressure predated the
experience of it. Pre-pressure pressure. What better definition of
anxiety? What better cinematic representation of it than a pill sugared
with laughs, tears, bizarre slang, Molly’s lips, and a fashionable
soundtrack? We saw it 500 times. We saw them all 500 times, quoted the
lines incessantly. Hughes talk remains a ready lingua franca 25 years
later. The Brat Pack fretting over the futility of cultural signifiers
became the ultimate cultural signifier of its time.

That time passed, as times do, and Hughes went on to make
less-memorable, more-successful films—some funny, some schlocky,
most both. On the sad occasion of his untimely death, it’s worth
considering how rare it is for an artist to simultaneously depict and
invent his audience, even for just a few years. If you’re the right
age, watching Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (and maybe Pretty in Pink if you
can stand Jon Cryer) can be like watching your own memory. Which is
kind of funny, a little bittersweet, and probably deeply sad. A little
like a John Hughes film.