Philadelphia Weekly

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Can't we all just get along? "The Breakfast Club" offered angsty teens hope they could connect with each other.

If you were in your single digits during the 1980s, the last vestiges of your childhood died Thursday, when producer/writer/director John Hughes, 59, suffered a fatal heart attack. Okay, maybe not the LAST vestiges: the Ghostbusters are still alive and well and, hopefully, reteaming, while Bobcat Goldthwait is now a justly acclaimed writer-director. But to some, the teen movie maven was as intregal to their formative years as MJ.

Kevin Smith once dubbed Hughes -- whom he credits for getting him into filmmaking in the first place (yeah, thanks, dude) -- his “generation's J.D. Salinger.” Hyperbole, sure, but Hughes had at least gone Salingeresque. In 1994, just three years after the last film he himself directed, the bomb Curly Sue, Hughes retired to the Midwest and cryptically refused interviews. (Guess that leaves the in-the-works doc Don’t You Forget About Me, about four filmmakers’ search for the elusive titan, with a bittersweet ending.) He continued to write, sometimes under the Dumasian pseudonym Edmond Dantés; his last credited work was for the story of the Owen Wilson vehicle Drillbit Taylor. But it was generally agreed upon that Hughes, like so many, had by then lost it -- namely around the time his attention switched from teens to adults then, finally, kids. (Among his credits include all three Home Alones, one Beethoven, 101 Dalmatians, Baby’s Day Out and Flubber. Also, Maid in Manhattan.)

But it’s Sixteen Candles et al. that have dominated most memoriams and Twitter Trending Topics lists, and rightly so. I myself wasn’t the same age as the stars of his Illinois-set high school films when I first watched them (and watched them, and watched them, and watched them). I didn’t understand certain aspects, including major plot developments. At 6, I couldn’t quite grok the allure of Molly Ringwald’s borrowed panties, and I had no clue what had drunkenly transpired between Anthony Michael Hall and the school hottie in the parking lot.

But that was the John Hughes Touch. Arriving in an age of interchangeable teensplotation and slasher pics, Hughes' films were genuinely novel, taking rambunctious teen behavior -- wild parties, fucking in cars, playing hooky, Saturday detention, nerds lusting for future Steven Seagal wives -- and softening them until, at least in my experience, most parents wouldn’t only let their young children watch them, but would even join in as part of big family movie night. They were, after all, education.

The films worked in reverse: they didn’t capture how teens acted but taught them how to act. In high school if you said something was “right out of a John Hughes movie,” that’s because his films, in a sense, inspired whatever it was to happen. Amy Heckerling, who helped pave the way for Hughes with the far raunchier Fast Times at Ridgemont High, made fun of this trend -- how it’s adults, not teens, who come up with what teens say -- in I Could Never Be Your Woman, based on her experiences, at 40, of making Clueless.

Michael Weiss also argued that Hughes’ films also served as part of the ‘80s assault on ‘60s values. Hughes and P.J. O’Rourke were the token Midwestern conservatives at National Lampoon in the mid-’70s. Hughes' films, Weiss claims, tried to subtly evoke conservative values. Even in Pretty in Pink, you root for Ringwald less out of class conscious than because she’s that Republican ideal, the underdog. James Spader is hissable because he’s elitist scum, not rich. This reading doesn’t quite jibe with smirking rich kid Ferris Bueller, though at least he’s not totally spoiled: his parents did deny him a car (though they did give him a computer, and in 1986). Still, critic David Denby reputedly crowed at the time, “What is Ferris Bueller if not a junior George Bush? He can screw around because he knows he will soon own everything.” See if you’ll ever see Bueller the same way, Obama Nation. (The film also helped popularize Nixon apologist and evolution “critic” Ben Stein, which fuck that.)

Regardless, Hughes was mostly an agent for good. After a rocky start, and despite the occasional urine sandwich and incest gag, National Lampoon’s Vacation -- his first produced script -- offers a Sturgesian satire on the Reagan-era family unit. Chevy Chase’s need for over-idealized family fun-time drives him to crazed rants, near-trysts (with supermodels, natch) and finally a comically sociopathic reign of terror. Later, Hughes took the moony, end-of-the-world hyper-emotions of teens seriously, but without tumbling into full-on emo-Twilight territory. He was clearly a smart and clever guy; the films he directed are energetically and inventively constructed. The teen films of today are clearly in his debt -- and yet how many would feature a sequence where S&M-clad bikers, one right out of The Hills Have Eyes, terrorize a party? Or cast a character actor like Harry Dean Stanton as the dad? Hughes, like MJ, will only look better -- and worse -- the more he’s examined.