celebrity gossip, academic style

John Hughes: Voice of Our Pre-Post Generation?

John Hughes meant a lot of things to a lot of people. Revision: movies directed and/or written by John Hughes, and then associated with him, meant a lot of things to a lot of people. I was not one of those people — and that has nothing to do with his movies, per se, but my lack of exposure to them. For whatever reason — because they were all checked out of the Lewiston TR Video, or because we didn’t have cable for long periods of time, maybe my mom had an aversion to Molly Ringwald, or maybe just the fact that I wasn’t allowed to watch most PG-13 movies without approval throughout junior high, I didn’t see any of the ‘classics’ — no Breakfast Club, no Pretty in Pink, no Sixteen Candles. I finally saw Ferris Bueller when I was college and it was like a revelation: so THIS is where that “Bueller? Bueller?” comes from! (And I liked it — but mostly I liked Matthew Broderick.) I remember liking Uncle Buck, Curly Sue, and Home Alone, but all of those films also kind of gave me the willies — there was something that made me feel funny, or embarrassed, and it was probably the issue of class, or just the way that Macaulay Caulkin’s brother ate all that cheese pizza, but ask me the movies that defined my childhood, and they were Star Wars, Ski Patrol, Big, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Little Mermaid. As for movies that nurtured my teen self — my friends and I were far more drawn to Empire Records and Reality Bites than the ’80s and Hughes-fest. I know I’m evoking sighs and gasps here, but part of my task with this post is to demythologize, or at least complicate: Hughes was behind some of the most successful teen- and family- directed films of all time, but he was not everyone’s ‘bard,’ nor the voice of Generation X.

I’m not trying to insult Hughes or those fans who loved him — I am, however, trying to point to the ways that a star, whether a president or a producer, a director or a pop star, whether Ronald Reagan, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, or John Hughes — is made to speak for his particular generation, but only posthumously.

But John Hughes didn’t act in his movies, you say — apart from a chance cameo, his artistry was completely behind the camera. His relationships didn’t get paparazzied; no one know what he was doing anymore. He didn’t fit any of the descriptions of stars that I’ve been citing throughout this blog. But because his films involved ensemble casts, had little overlap in casting (save Molly Ringwald), and covered diverse topics, the John Hughes movie, similar to, say, the Jerry Bruckheimer movie, or a Joss Whedon series, or a J.J. Abrams product, is figured as jumping out of his head, fully formed, onto the screen. He is the persona behind the films; the traceable element, the person people want to read about, hear their thoughts on the creative process. Forget about the fact that he was well-known for having no idea how to actually piece his films together, often sending hours and hours of footage to the studio in order to salvage some sort of narrative. The auteur as star. We love it.

Tim Corrigan has an excellent essay on The Commerce of Auteurism, available here . He asserts that the new auteur — the auteur who knows he’s an auteur and self-fashions his auteurism — is in some ways cultivating his brand, making himself a pre-sold product. He traces the phenomenon back to the movie brats — Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas in particular — but it’s only more true today. Once you realize that Wes Anderson is an auteur (and the type of films to expect from him), and if you decide you like his films, your film attendance is assured. It’s basically a savvy strategy for survival in the blockbuster-dependent, risk-adverse market: you make your name into something that audiences already know about. Just like I’ll go see the next George Clooney movie, because I know the certain quality and type of film to expect from his star, or I’ll go see The Time Traveler’s Wife, because I know what to expect from that book, I’ll also go see the next Coen Brothers movie, because I know, through their oeuvre and the construction of their identity, what to expect from them. Etc. etc.

The Coen Brothers are odd non-star auteurs….who are nonetheless quasi-celebrities. They rarely grant interviews, pose for pictures, or offer any information about themselves. In fact, they offer so little information that there’s all sorts of mis-information circulating about them — some of which was generated by them to screw with the media. They also do little to differentiate one brother from the other, thus encouraging the conflation of the two into “The Coen Brothers” and further reifying their identity. They cultivate an image just the way that Jennifer Aniston does. They’re just a bit less obnoxious about it — and do their cultivating behind the camera instead of in front of it.

Now, since I wasn’t conscious of film marketing during Hughes’ greatest period of success — the 1980s through early ’90s — I’m going to stay away from how he, himself, may have fashioned an identity. But I want to call attention to the very explicit ways that the press over the last week has crafted an identity for him — adding one last nuance to the memory of his films, which have already been cited and re-cited as the films of that defined gen-x.

I’m speaking specifically about a blogpost that has been circulating heavily in social media (and other media) circles: The “I Was John Hughes’ Penpal” story. I read about it on Anne Thompson, Nikki Finke, The Los Angeles Times, Facebook, Twitter, and even heard it — and an interview with the author herself — on NPR. Briefly, a young girl who really loved The Breakfast Club wrote Hughes, received a form letter, she wrote back angry, and he agreed to be her pen-pal. They corresponded over the next several years, sometimes sporadically, but she made sure to let him know how she ended up. I’d very much recommend reading the blog post, as it is geniunely touching. Hughes comes off as genuinely interested and invested in the life of a theretofore unknown girl — simply because she asked him to be. And he shared parts of his life, and his own frustrations, which gave her solace and understanding during the years when most of us need those feelings most.

I want to underline, then, the HUGE importance that the disclosure of this relationship will have on the memory of Hughes as Auteur/Star. For what it — and its reproduction across media — accomplishes is quite simple: it establishes that Hughes was NOT just the creator of movies that voiced the sentiments of the generation, but that he was genuinely in tune, and cared, about that very same generation. He didn’t exploit teenage indecision, angst, social frustration, and ennui — he wanted to make those feelings into something that people could take into their hearts and care about. Foucault said that we feel that we’ve gotten to the ‘real’ truth about someone when we find out about their sex lives/sexuality. And while I agree that that might be the last layer of ‘truth,’ disclosures like this one — in which we see, or at least think that we see, the authentic, emotional self….this is what convinces of us what Hughes was ‘really’ like.

I’m sure that John Hughes said things to that effect when he was alive. I’m sure that there were other people in his life that could attest to that. Or maybe he didn’t, and this is all a crock. I do SERIOUSLY doubt that he was hoping to bolster his image by writing this girl back, but we’ll never know his motivations, just as we’ll never *really* know him. But this relationship — in all its low-profile, hand-written, ‘realness’ — authenticates what people wanted to much to believe: that John Hughes cared about you, and your problems, and that’s not only why he wrote back to this angsty young girl, but why he made movies. You could easily insert yourself, and your fandom, into the place of this random young angsty woman, writing on yellow legal paper all those years ago, thrilled to receive his replies in the snailmail.

Why does this matter? Because no one likes to look back on their childhood (or any period of their lives, for that matter) and feel that they were being exploited. Part of my extreme vitriol and distaste for Disney can be directly traced to the feeling that they duped me — and all my little friends — with movies like The Little Mermaid, encouraging me to consume, be spunky, but lose my voice (literally! Ariel LITERALLY LOSES HER VOICE, people) to win a handsome man. My mom tried to talk to me about it, but I didn’t listen. Or learning that the people on The Mickey Mouse Club aren’t really friends. Or that on Car Talk they tape record their laughter and just press play. I even hate it when something like A Walk to Remember takes advantage of me and makes me cry, even though it’s clearly manipulating my emotions. We hate being duped. But learning that John Hughes was a good guy — that he cared about teenagers, and just coincidentally happened to make very large amounts of money as a result of that empathy — it makes us feel like the industry, or at least this one influential cog within it, had our best interests at heart.

I can believe that. But don’t, for even one second, think that Disney cares about you, your kids, the kids on their shows, or the future of America, democracy, small town values, or any of the other shill that they’re selling with each fake Disneyland storefront. Disney cares about massive profits. I’m just sayin’. I realize this is the comps-studying talking. But Michael Eisner and Bob Iger are no John Hughes. They’d only let you be their penpal if they could turn it into a Disney series starring the Jonas Brothers as your brothers. Again, I’m just sayin’.