John Hughes 1950-2009

If you are around my age (32), John Hughes probably had an impact on your life.  He died today.

I’ve been thinking about how our characters and personalities are formed by the movies we see as preteens and teens.  I mean, you’re impressionable. Trying to figure out who the hell you are. And then there are certain movies that seemed to explain it all.  They were comforting.

I was watching Reality Bites the other day…. I haven’t seen it since senior year of high school.  And yeah, it is dated and obviously full of cliches and Hollywood gloss.  And after all these years…I still fucking love it.  And I had a revelation while watching it…this was the movie that started me smoking.  ’Cause they all smoked in that movie, and I thought they were so fucking cool. So I started.  Just for show.  And then, just like that…one day I was addicted.

People a few years younger have said they feel the same way about Dazed and Confused.  And I’m shocked when my students tell me they have never seen The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink…and they are shocked when I tell them that Superbad didn’t really do it for me.

I mean, yeah, it would be nice to say Shakespeare or Whitman or Chekhov were the ones who formed us into the people we are today…but, c’mon, let’s be honest.  Judd Apatow and Molly Ringwald had a lot more to do with how the vast majority of us see the  world.

People all over the web are giving their favorite scenes from Hughes movies.  And it says a lot about you, which ones you picked.  Was it something from Ferris?  Did you wanna be that fuck-the-system live-in-the-moment kid who won’t let anyone tell him what to do and, in the end, gets his own parade for just bein’ himself? Which character were you in the Breakfast Club?  Ally Sheedy, making dandruff art, but (with a coat of lipstick and a comb) secretly gorgeous?  Or did you want to be Claire, the popular girl in the school…with a hidden reserve of depth and self-awareness?  I’ll bet it was Judd Nelson.  The bad boy druggie with the the abusive father, the guy who hated the world…and all it took was one kiss and a diamond earring for us to understand that  he had tenderness the whole damn time.

I loved these characters. I love how they made me feel.  John Hughes was there for me.  He told me it was okay to be the fat girl, the weird girl, one of those crazy kids from the theater crowd…’cause one day, someone would see I was so much more.

See, in Hughes world, the rich popular guy has the guts to shun his dipshit narcissistic friends and pick the freethinking edgy girl from the wrong side of town who is so talented she can make a prom dress in three hours and will probably go on to do great things in this world….and then he can kiss her so good she drops her purse in the parking lot: