There are filmmakers, and then there are TRENDSETTERS. John Hughes was both. He tapped into the cynical, yet secretly hopeful hearts of young Gen X-ers: the latchkey kids, the forgotten ones—the generation that started to notice the stitching was breaking apart, but we had skateboards to ride and malls to linger in. So, like, really? Who had time to make protest signs?
You could almost say that, if a spiritual movement could be applied to a generation, we were the Buddhists, letting the mistakes of our elders float right by, like literal trash in an ocean, without judgment. But most of all, we just wanted to have a good time in the midst of our angst.
John Hughes understood that better than almost any writer/director around. And one of the reasons he brought so much optimism to tweens and teens of the 80s is that he was a hopeless romantic himself. He lived in an affluent neighborhood, married his high school sweetheart, had two kids, and stayed with her until he passed in 2009. It seems he wanted to instill that optimism into every adorable, jaded kid he could find.
Curated Our Soundtracks
One of the most important elements in any John Hughes film was the music. You kind of can’t think of the movie Pretty in Pink without its counterpart song by The Psychedelic Furs. Or how can one hear OMD's If You Leave without it conjuring up images of Duckie and Blane competing at the prom?
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Hughes found the music and brought it to us. Songs like "(Don't You) Forget About Me" by Simple Minds, which was written for his film The Breakfast Club (though it was first offered to Bryan Ferry, Billy Idol, and Corey Hart before Jim Kerr decided to do it).
But those are just the top 40 hits that got tons of radio play. Kate Bush's This Woman's Work (She's Having a Baby), The Thompson Twins' If You Were Here (Sixteen Candles), Flesh for Lulu's I Go Crazy (Some Kind of Wonderful). He didn’t wait for us to decide if we were gonna like Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, or New Order—he gave us reasons to like them.
Tore Down the Walls
The entire premise of The Breakfast Club is that a bunch of Gen-X kids from different walks of life and popularity statuses could be thrown together for a day and learn that they're really not all that different. These invisible walls that divide us are made-up constructs, and at the end of the day, yep... a jock, a rebel, a princess, a brain, a criminal, and a basket case could respect and even, (gasp) like one another.
This was far from the only time Hughes explored this theme. In Pretty in Pink, star-crossed lovers played by Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy fall hard, despite living on (literal) opposite sides of the tracks. Even in cameos, Ferris Bueller's sister (played by Jennifer Grey) falls hard for rebel Charlie Sheen.
And it's not just the teens. In Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Hughes stuck snobby Steve Martin and lovable, goofy John Candy together, and in the end, they found a friendship never thought possible.
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Made Crushes Attainable
Move over, Taylor Swift. John Hughes was there first, writing about dreamy crushes who seemed just out of reach but really weren’t. The teenage crush anxiety was never better exemplified than it was in Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, or even Some Kind of Wonderful. It usually involved a love triangle centered around our relatable "everyday" person (like the aforementioned Molly Ringwald or Eric Stoltz), an adorable alternative kid or nerd (like, say, Jon Cryer's Duckie or Anthony Michael Hall as Farmer Ted), and the object of desire, whomever that might have been.
Whether Blane, Jake Ryan, or Amanda Jones, what these characters had in common was their kindness. It would have been easy to vilify them, but John found that their humanity was just as important as any other character's. They were "so real," it maybe why a lot of Gen-Xers might find sitting at a table over birthday candles and/or kissing in the rain the only TRUE expression of romance.
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Cool to be Weird
Most of John Hughes's characters were the epitome of self-actualization. Ferris Bueller, as played by Matthew Broderick, had the soul of an 80-year-old trapped in the body of the coolest high school kid ever. (Many believe Hughes saw himself as more of a Cameron than a Ferris.) None of Ringwald's characters shied away from being unique, wearing funky hats, and standing up for what she believed in. And Duckie. If Duckie could slide into a record store singing "Try a Little Tenderness," there's nothing we high school freshmen couldn’t do either. It was cool to be weird. It was okay to be popular. And it was inspiring to redefine what being popular even meant.
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All Hail John Candy
And lastly—and maybe most importantly—John Hughes reminded us that John Candy was a national treasure and we should celebrate him daily!
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