Refocus The Films of John Hughes Timothy Shary All Chapter
Refocus The Films of John Hughes Timothy Shary All Chapter
Refocus The Films of John Hughes Timothy Shary All Chapter
Timothy Shary
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ReFocus: The Films of John Hughes
© editorial matter and organisation Timothy Shary and Frances Smith, 2021
© the chapters their several authors, 2021
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
FIGURES
TA B L E S
3.1 Top five films targeting explicitly youth (children, teen and
young adult) audiences, 1980–83 51
We thank our series editors, Robert Singer and Gary Rhodes, for inviting us
to contribute this second volume to their ReFocus series, and for motivating
collaboration between us that has lasted almost a decade now. At Edinburgh
University Press, we once again give thanks to our commissioning editors
Gillian Leslie and Richard Strachan; our desk editor Eddie Clark; our cover
coordinator Bekah Day; and our copyeditor Anita Joseph. Thanks as well to
our anonymous reviewers, who obviously cannot be named but who none-
theless were quite helpful in guiding our production of this collection. And
naturally this would not be a collection without our great contributors, all
distinguished figures in the field, whom we thank for their insights and hard
work, as well as their patience through the unexpected delays we faced during
the global pandemic of 2020.
Frances would like to acknowledge the supportive colleagues in Film Stud-
ies at the University of Sussex, and students taking American Teen Cinema.
She thanks her family and the ever-enthusiastic Mr. Metcalf.
Tim acknowledges the teenage friends who accompanied him when he first
saw John Hughes movies over 35 years ago—David Amanullah, Paula Hostler,
and Paul Hawkins—as well as the friends who have since continued to discuss
the films herein, including Chris Boucher, Richard Brown, Devin Griffiths,
and Tom Scully. He dedicates this study to the most stylish and sophisticated
teenager in the world, whom no movie could endeavor to represent, his won-
derful daughter Olivia Xendolyn.
article in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on Hulk Hogan and profes-
sional wrestling stardom.
AS DIRECTOR
AS WRITER
C H A R A C T E R S C R E AT E D
POSTHUMOUS CREDITS
A S P RO D U C E R
HUGHES’S APPEARANCES
Introduction: Refocus on
John Hughes
Timothy Shary and Frances Smith
“It’s hard for me to understand how John [Hughes] was able to write with so
much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.”1 Thus considers
Molly Ringwald, one of the principal stars of John Hughes’s teen films in
the mid-1980s, and often credited as the writer-director-producer’s muse.2
It is precisely this question with which the various authors in this volume
have wrestled, wondering how exactly the soulful scribe of The Breakfast Club
(1985), which affirms that “when you grow up, your heart dies,” squares up
with the cynical humor he peddled elsewhere, often at the same time. Those
elements that Ringwald rather charitably describes as “blind spots” include
persistent undercurrents of sexism and racism. They also include the reifica-
tion of gender stereotypes and a blasé attitude toward sexual assault, often
directed towards Ringwald herself. For her part, Ringwald describes Hughes
as a highly supportive director and mentor, without whom her career would
never have taken off. At the same time, though, she paints a picture of a pow-
erful figure who was quick to take offense, and who harbored grudges. As
Ringwald herself explains, she came to experience Hughes’s wrath when she
suggested a rewrite of a prospective film project, after which the two never
spoke again. John Hughes, then, was undoubtedly a complex character, whose
highly popular work has yet to be fully reckoned with. Providing an interdis-
ciplinary assessment of a wide range of Hughes’s works, this volume demon-
strates the multiplicity and complexity of his well-known and much-admired
portrayals of childhood, adolescence, and family life.
Like many contemporary viewers, Molly Ringwald is struck by the dispar-
ity in cultural values between the mid-1980s, when she worked with Hughes,
and the present day. She cites scenes from Sixteen Candles (1984), in which
a male character boasts about the possibility of raping an unconscious girl,
and from The Breakfast Club, in which John Bender (Judd Nelson) harasses
and sexually assaults Ringwald’s character, Claire, in full view of the other
detentionees, who largely tolerate Bender’s behavior as a mild nuisance. While
Andrew (Emilio Estevez) provides some ineffective opposition to Bender in
the equally dubious name of chivalry, these actions go largely unchallenged.
On the contrary, Bender is rewarded with a romance with Claire in the film’s
closing scenes. To be sure, it’s highly unlikely that either of these scenes would
make it to the final cut of a teen film made today, at least not without pun-
ishment, or commentary from other characters within the diegesis. Yet in
reviews of the film from the 1980s, the incidents that Ringwald describes are
not mentioned, with critics preferring to dwell on the dialogue, and the per-
formances.3 These differences in norms are at the heart of Ringwald’s enquiry
into Hughes’s legacy, and questions of how we might evaluate his work in the
present day. As editors, we attempt to take Hughes’s works on their own terms,
and ground his representations of adolescence and family life within the peri-
ods in which they are set.
Hughes’s “blind spots” have been especially glaring in the wake of the
#MeToo and #TimesUp online movements, which themselves took off after
the arrest and subsequent conviction of the influential film producer Harvey
Weinstein for sexual assault in 2017. These movements aimed to demonstrate
the extent of sexual harassment in a variety of environments, both within and
that would factor into his teen films, though he still ventured as far as the
University of Arizona in the late 1960s for two years of college. As Honeycutt
claims, Hughes left his heart back in Illinois, where he had fallen in love with
classmate Nancy Ludwig before graduating from high school, and he returned
to marry her in 1970 at the wise old age of 20.5
In this new decade, Hughes rose through the ranks of advertising agen-
cies but soon enough grew disenchanted with the business, and by 1979 he had
become an editor at National Lampoon magazine, pursuing his interests in com-
edy writing. After writing a few TV episodes of Delta House, a series based on
the Lampoon hit Animal House (1978), Hughes wrote his first Lampoon screen-
play, Class Reunion (1982), which reflected on high school experiences from a
decade into adulthood. That film was a failed comedy/thriller hybrid that indi-
cated little of the depth he would soon bring to more appealing scripts in Mr.
Mom and National Lampoon’s Vacation, which both appeared the next year.
Hughes was thus well into his thirties when he started writing and directing
the films that would later make him famous, and unlike the “film school brats”
of the ’70s—Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas—who had gained notoriety for award-
winning fare that pleased both audiences and critics, Hughes did not progress
into the industry with great ambitions. Rather than chronicles of mean city
streets or spectacles of outer space, Hughes was captivated by the quotidian
delights of suburban families, which he had come to know well from his youth
in the Chicago suburbs of the ’60s.
The success of Mr. Mom and Vacation in 1983 gave Universal Pictures the
confidence to allow Hughes to direct his script for Sixteen Candles the next
year, which wrestled with teenage torments beyond the prevailing pabulum
of the time, using both crass humor and sincere characterizations. This well-
received debut further augmented Hughes’s notoriety, and he quickly devel-
oped and directed an earlier script meant to be an exposé of the high school
caste system, The Breakfast Club, as well as an absurdly riotous fusion of teen
sex and science fiction, Weird Science, both of which came out in 1985. By
this point, his recurring actors were cynically labeled the “Brat Pack” in press
coverage, and became the most recognizable young stars of the decade: Molly
Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy.
Hughes continued to pound out scripts with remarkable efficiency even
though he could not direct them all into features. His next script, Pretty in
Pink, debuted in the spring of 1986 to warm praise under the direction of his
protégé Howard Deutch, while Hughes was himself busy directing an even
bigger hit that would appear a few months later, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (by
which point he had already abandoned his recurring troupe of young perform-
ers). After the Paramount studio ordered Deutch to recut the ending of Pretty
in Pink to please test audiences—so that the heroine ends up with the rich boy
rather than her quirky friend—Hughes soon responded with the corrective
Figure 1.2 Autographed picture of John Hughes with the cast of Pretty in Pink (1986).
write and/or direct featured younger children in prominent roles, such as Uncle
Buck (1989), Curly Sue (1991), Dennis the Menace (directed by Nick Castle, 1993),
and the comedy phenomenon Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990). Despite the
occasional success of some of his later scripts, such as 101 Dalmatians (Stephen
Herek, 1996) and Flubber (Les Mayfield, 1997), Hughes never regained his previ-
ous fame; the cloying nature of Beethoven (Brian Levant, 1992) had even moti-
vated him to write under a pseudonym borrowed from The Count of Monte Cristo
(1844), Edmond Dantès. In 2001, he produced New Port South with a script by his
son James, yet even its teenage characters and suburban Chicago setting generated
scant attention for the erstwhile auteur of ’80s teen cinema. The same indiffer-
ence befell other films he worked on at the turn of the century, which included
his writing of Reach the Rock (William Ryan, 1998), a low-budget flop that only
played in three theaters, and his script assist on Just Visiting (Jean-Marie Gaubert,
2001), an American remake of a French comedy to which Hughes applied some
comic elements for its Chicago setting.
He did have mild success with the story for one more film, Maid in Manhattan
(Wayne Wang, 2002), and had only one more story turned into a movie thereafter,
Drillbit Taylor (Steven Brill, 2008), both of which he wrote as Edmond Dantès.
After relative seclusion for over a decade, John Hughes died in Manhattan on
August 6, 2009, from a sudden heart attack, at just 59 years old. He was buried
in Chicago soon thereafter, and despite a very rare honor at the Academy Awards
telecast in 2010 (for a man who never earned a single Oscar nomination), he was
otherwise denied the reflective celebration of his influential work that most long-
term industry artists enjoy in their waning years.
Whatever the merits or flaws of his work, John Hughes was undeniably
prolific. He took on various roles in the filmmaking process, sometimes writ-
ing, other times writing and directing, writing and producing, or in some cases
writing, producing, and directing, altogether some 33 films between 1980 and
2008. Reportedly, Hughes would work on up to ten scripts at a time, and could
churn out a screenplay in the space of a weekend.6 While he was a writer first
and foremost, Hughes was not at all keen on editing his work, relying instead
on his instinctively crafted first drafts. This is not to say that Hughes was not
conscious of the quality of his scripts. Rather than edit them, Hughes pre-
ferred instead to foist what he determined to be lower-quality scripts onto
other, less-tested directors, as he did with his scripts for Pretty in Pink and
Some Kind of Wonderful, which are otherwise two of Hughes’s best treatments
of social class difference in teen cinema. Another such script was for Home
Alone; though directed by Chris Columbus, it became Hughes’s most commer-
cially successful film. By the time he wrote Beethoven in 1992, portraying the
effect of a lovably massive St. Bernard on ordinary family life, he had stopped
directing films altogether.7 These often curious decisions paint a picture of a
creative professional who took decisive action alone, without the consultation
Such ready classifications of teenagers and high school tribes has become a
staple of the genre, coalescing, in cinematic terms, in what has become termed
the “anthropology shot,” wherein these different groups of students, and the
rules of engagement with each, are explained to a neophyte student who stands
in for the audience.19 The anthropology shot is found notably in Clueless (1995),
Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), Mean Girls (2004), and The DUFF (2015)
among others, attesting to its longevity. The resulting description of various
teenage tribes had the canny effect of introducing the audience to its particular
set of characters, as well as contributing to the sense that the film tapped into
the everyday lives of contemporary teenagers.
Hughes’s innovations were not confined to his mobilization of teen
archetypes. Perhaps surprisingly, given Ringwald’s comments earlier in the
chapter, Hughes’s films were novel in regard to their representation of girl-
hood. As Jonathan Bernstein points out, girls in Hughes’s 1980s teen films
were the exception to the norm. The majority of girls in teen films were
tasked with displaying “good-natured tolerance in the face of stalking, voy-
eurism, or fumbled attempts at seduction.”20 Ringwald rightly notes that
some of these elements remain present in Hughes’s films. Yet it should be
acknowledged that Hughes also, especially in those films in which Ringwald
starred, positioned teenage girls, and their concerns, front and center. What
is more, when Hughes examined social class in his teen films, arguably one
of his most significant contributions to the genre, it was teenage girls who
provided the point of identification for the audience, and who served as that
central lightning rod for the rapidly evolving disparity in social class and
wealth that occurred during the Reaganite 1980s.
Teenage girls, and Ringwald in particular, were central to Hughes’s articula-
tion of class-consciousness in the 1980s teen film. The “charismatic normality”
that Ringwald brought to her roles allowed her to embody the conflicted class-
based feelings and vulnerability of teenage girls.21 Anthony C. Bleach describes
the films that Ringwald and Hughes made together in the mid-1980s, that is, Six-
teen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink, as the “Ringwald–Hughes
cycle.”22 While Sixteen Candles does not especially dwell on the social class of
Ringwald’s character, Samantha, it is central to the articulation of prospec-
tive prom queen Claire Standish in The Breakfast Club. In both cases, Hughes
makes telling use of consumer goods as his camera cranes from the BMW logo
of her father’s car and notices his Burberry patterned scarf when he drops off
his daughter for detention. Claire, of course, is the consumer par excellence, pun-
ished for skipping class in favor of shopping, while Bender revels in informing
Claire that he can see her growing into a fat adult, a physical embodiment of
her tendency towards consumption and excess. This is not to say that Claire is
solely portrayed as a vapid shopper. Hughes and Ringwald together succeed in
demonstrating Claire’s vulnerability, not only in terms of parental neglect, but
also in her evident reliance on peer approval at the expense of her own judgment
and agency.
In Pretty in Pink, arguably a star vehicle for Ringwald, she portrays a
working-class girl, Andie, positioned literally at the wrong side of the tracks
in the film’s opening scenes. She rightly objects to the obnoxious “richies” at
her school, best embodied by a fabulously oleaginous Steff (James Spader). Yet
at the same time, she develops a romance with Steff ’s friend, Blane (Andrew
McCarthy), and drives around the wealthy suburbs fantasizing about living in
such luxury herself. Andie’s conflicted feelings about class are perhaps best
encapsulated by her “volcanic” dress sense, which sees the character don the
norms of upper-class femininity of the past, such as pearls and floral prints,
though she does so in excess. As Frances Smith has argued, such an invocation
of respectability is intended to have the effect of ironic mimicry that “denatu-
ralizes norms of middle-class dress” rather than straightforward imitation.23
Andie is at once ashamed of her working-class status, and certainly desires to
improve her circumstances. But at the same time, she is contemptuous and
mocking of the upper-class mores to which she ostensibly aspires. Hughes
was not only unusual in exploring social divisions within and outside the high
school but in choosing a teenage girl to represent these concerns. His decision
to do so arguably presages the more recent cycle of dystopian teen films, the
majority of which center around a teenage girl.24
Figure 1.3 Six teen films that Hughes wrote and/or directed in the 1980s, which became
epochal for a generation of youth.
There is no doubt that John Hughes’s films changed the teen film category.
What is more, though, in taking teenagers seriously, he unwittingly set the
stage for the development of the genre’s academic study. With Hughes center-
ing on concerns of “coming of age” that are distinct to teenagers, no longer
could it be claimed that teen film merely provided established film genres in
a teenage guise. Rather, Hughes became readily identifiable as an auteur, the
resulting cachet conferred by the label transferred at least in part to the genre
with which he is most associated. Many histories of the teen film consequently
begin in the 1980s, coinciding with Hughes’s films.25
Hughes’s legacy is certainly substantially associated with the teen film. It
is the teen film on which the New York Times obituary of the filmmaker lin-
gers, suggesting that this is the category for which Hughes is best remem-
bered, with his ability to “capture the lives of 1980s teenagers.”26 Nonetheless,
he did not remain long in the genre, and it was in fact the films made in the
1990s that scored his biggest commercial, if not always critical, successes. So
it was that following Some Kind of Wonderful in 1987, Hughes returned to his
original preoccupations with masculinity and its fallibilities. His early screen-
play for National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) had seen those weaknesses cheer-
fully embodied by comic actor Chevy Chase. In Planes, Trains and Automobiles
(1987), Hughes employed John Candy’s and Steve Martin’s considerable tal-
ents in the service of portraying uptight Neal (Martin) whose journey home
for Thanksgiving is marred by boisterous salesman Del (Candy). Candy was
to become a recurring presence in Hughes’s films, notably in his star vehicle,
Uncle Buck (1989), in which Candy served as the eponymous stand-in parent.
As in his teen films, Hughes demonstrated a considerable talent for casting,
and working with the established personae of comic actors.
Hughes’s films were able to tap into the sense that, in the 1980s and 1990s,
models of masculinity were in flux. Stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis appeared to embody the body-building
culture and increased valorization of muscularity in blockbuster action films.
These figures served to reify the physical differences between men and women.
In contrast, that same era also celebrated the so-called New Man, who sought
greater participation in traditionally feminine-coded childcare roles, and took
more command of the domestic sphere. Hughes’s antiheroes are everyday men
grappling with these competing expectations of masculinity; they at once strive
to embody patriarchal dominance, and yet, in their various forms of ineptitude,
demonstrate that they were never well suited to those roles themselves, and
also betray the very absurdity of the expectations that propel them in the first
place. In these ways, Hughes’s characters raise questions as to the changing
roles of the male breadwinner, and of fatherhood, that were well underway in
the aftermath of second-wave feminism.
As Deborah Lupton and Lesley Barclay note in their book-length study
of mediated fatherhood, fathers are portrayed as nurturing and emotional,
Figure 1.4 Family matters in Hughes’s stories, as in Vacation (1983) and the sequels that followed.
be, as Stella Dallas put it, “something else besides a mother.” Tincknell iden-
tifies two principal responses to men’s newfound familial role. In “laddism”
she sees the rejection of traditional masculine responsibilities and the resulting
prioritization of male friendships, and patterns of behavior previously befitting
much younger men. The New Man, by contrast, challenged traditional forms
of masculinity by affirming his own abilities to be nurturing. However, in so
doing, the New Man paradoxically demonstrates that those abilities are not a
conventional part of the masculine arsenal. Hughes’s films about families can
be regarded as representative of this conflicted era in rethinking and reaffirm-
ing the nuclear family in American culture.
John Candy is a key figure in the articulation of caring masculinities in John
Hughes’s films. Though Canadian, Candy often stands in for a sympathetic
American everyman in Hughes’s works. As Del Griffith in Planes, Trains and
Automobiles, he is the antidote to Neal’s uptightness. Likewise, in Uncle Buck,
the straight-talking Buck is able to get to the heart of the issues encountered by
the children for whom he is caring, despite his unconventional parenting style.
We see how the softness connoted by Candy’s oversized frame allows him to
embody the focus on care embodied by the New Man figure. At the same time
though, that large size allows him nevertheless to present a credible, physical
threat, as he does to Tia’s (Jean Louisa Kelly) boyfriend Bug (Jay Underwood),
whom he threatens with a small axe and the possibility of abduction. Buck is
not presented as an attractive figure recuperating the hegemonic role of mas-
culine fatherhood, in the same way that, say, Bruce Willis is in Die Hard (1988),
but it is striking how frequently Candy serves in these similar roles for Hughes,
as an embodiment of likeable, everyday masculinity who embodies the changes
underway in male roles.
While the changing role of the father is undeniably key to understand-
ing Hughes’s family films, his most commercially successful films place the
role of the mother as paramount. In both Home Alone and its sequel, Home
Alone 2: Lost in New York (1991), the father, Peter McCallister (John Heard),
barely features in the stories, except as an absent-minded income source for
his young son, Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), who is left to fend for himself.
Instead it is Kate (Catherine O’Hara), Kevin’s mother, who first realizes
that her son is not present, and makes every effort to return to the family
home in Chicago (in the first installment), and to locate him in the streets
of Manhattan (in the second). What is more, on both occasions, Kate relies
not on rational calculation, but on gut instinct, and on appealing to others
to help her in her quest to return to Chicago not out of mere altruism but
“as a mother.” It is also by her instinctive understanding of her son that she
intuits that Kevin will have headed for Rockefeller Center as the location of
the city’s largest Christmas tree, and secures the aid of Gus (Candy again)
who transports her home. Even in Hughes’s script of the much later sequel,
Figure 1.5 Home Alone (1990) was Hughes’s biggest financial success, but his subsequent
projects yielded diminishing returns.
The third section expands upon themes about youth by considering how
Hughes represented the American family. Here we open with a chapter by
Leah Shafer, which details how Hughes used props in his family films in the
service of his commentary on cultural conditions. The subsequent chapters
focus more on fatherhood, as Holly Chard surveys the many male comedians
who embodied the domestic tensions that Hughes so often mined for humor,
and Alice Leppert follows with a study of the many failed or failing fathers
across Hughes’s films.
The closing section is perhaps our most confrontational, tackling more
knotty aspects of Hughes’s stories and characters such as sexuality, class, and
race. The first entry is Andrew Scahill’s close look at one of Hughes’s most
outrageous comedies, Weird Science, to consider how its myriad messages
about masculinity are manifested. Robert Bulman then reflects on social con-
ditions in the Hughes films set around high schools, calling attention to a dis-
tinct working-class sensitivity. The concluding chapter in the collection is by
Frances Smith, who takes Hughes to task for the racial representations within
his films, which were supported by a problematic construction of dominant
White culture.
The book concludes with a filmography and bibliography to facilitate fur-
ther studies of Hughes, because this slim volume is certainly not comprehen-
sive. We are aware that the chapters here say little about his work after the early
1990s, and that numerous other nuances of his stories and characters are wor-
thy of further examination. For an artist who remains remembered primarily
for his work within a mere decade, John Hughes is nonetheless an enduring fig-
ure in cinema history, one whose films brought numerous insights to a culture
in need of being entertained about its own insecurities, whether about child-
hood, fatherhood, or familyhood. We hope that further academic work will
yield additional critical perspectives on his films, and that future audiences will
continue to appreciate how those films helped us to understand—and laugh
at—some of American life in the late twentieth century.
NOTES
1. Molly Ringwald, “What about The Breakfast Club? Revisiting the Movies of My Youth
in the Age of #MeToo,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/
culture/personal-history/what-about-the-breakfast-club-molly-ringwald-metoo-john-
hughes-pretty-in-pink.
2. See Hadley Freeman, Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies
(and Why We Don’t Learn Them from Movies Any More) (London: Simon and Schuster,
2015), 81. Freeman quotes New York Times film critic A. O. Scott: “Molly Ringwald was
for Mr. Hughes what Jimmy Stewart was for Frank Capra: an emblem, a muse, a poster-
child and an alter-ego,” 81.
3. See for instance, Janet Maslin, “John Hughes’s Breakfast Club,” New York Times, February
15, 1985; Roger Ebert, “The Breakfast Club,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 15, 1985.
4. Kirk Honeycutt, John Hughes: A Life in Film (New York: Race Point, 2015), 26.
5. Honeycutt, 29.
6. See Richard Lalich, “Big Baby,” Spy, January 1993, 66–73.
7. There are as many films in the Beethoven film series (nine including the spin-off television
series) as there are symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven.
8. Lalich provides a number of examples, among which Hughes’s spurning of John Candy’s
friendship, and another that recalls Kevin McCallister’s (Macaulay Culkin) tantrum when
he wishes his family would disappear, in which Hughes’s beloved “plain cheese” pizza is
unexpectedly substituted for one containing sausage, 70.
9. Bill Carter, “Him Alone,” New York Times, August 4, 1991, 31.
10. See Timothy Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema Since
1980, 2nd edn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).
11. Shary, 6.
12. Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” in Film Genre III, ed.
Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 27–41.
13. Adrian Martin, Phantasms: The Dreams and Desires at the Heart of our Popular Culture
(Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994), 14.
14. Elissa Nelson, The Breakfast Club: John Hughes, Hollywood and the Golden Age of the Teen
Film (London: Routledge, 2019).
15. Freeman, 66.
16. Hughes quoted in Carter, 34.
17. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the
1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
18. Ann De Vaney, “John Hughes Reinscribes Daddy’s Girl in Homes and Schools,” in Sugar,
Spice and Everything Nice, eds Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2002), 204.
19. For further delineation of the anthropology shot, see Roz Kaveney, Teen Dreams: From
Heathers to Veronica Mars (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 56.
20. Jonathan Bernstein, Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teen Movies (New York: St.
Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 173.
21. Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker, 1986, 73.
22. Anthony C. Bleach, “Postfeminist Cliques? Class, Postfeminism and the Molly Ringwald-
John Hughes Films,” Cinema Journal, 49, no. 3 (2010), 24.
23. Frances Smith, Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender Genre, Identity (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 74.
24. These include The Host (2013), Warm Bodies (2013), Tomorrowland (2015), The 5th Wave
(2016), The Darkest Minds (2018), and both The Hunger Games (2012–15) and Divergent
(2014–19) franchises.
25. One such example is Roz Kaveney’s Teen Dreams. Though Kaveney’s book appears to
begin with Heathers (1989), which follows Hughes’s teen films, she rightly identifies
Lehmann’s film as a reaction to the sentimentality of Hughes’s work. Bernstein’s Pretty
in Pink makes the bold case that the 1980s were the “golden age” of the genre, and at
least two other books argue for the epoch-making nature of the decade’s cinema: Brat
Pack America: A Love Letter to ’80s Teen Movies by Kevin Smokler (Los Angeles: Vireo,
2016) and The Ultimate History of the ’80s Teen Movie by James King (New York:
Diversion, 2019).
26. Michael Cieply, “John Hughes obituary,” New York Times, August 4, 2009, 20.
27. See Deborah Lupton and Lesley Barclay, Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and
Experiences (London: Sage, 1997).
28. In her review of Uncle Buck, Rita Kempley adroitly assessed how “the paterfamiliarization
of 20th-century man” was evident in the “pop cycle” of the time that contained many
films by Hughes: Washington Post, August 16, 1989, https://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/unclebuckpgkempley_a0c9a1.htm.
29. Estella Tincknell, Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation (London: Hodder
Arnold, 2005).
30. One of his less notable scripts of the ’90s, Baby’s Day Out (Patrick Read Johnson, 1994), also
focused on the mother’s role as the caregiver and primary parent to the child of the title.
31. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age
(London: Routledge, 1991).
32. Lalich, 70.
it was first introduced.1 As Nelson goes on to point out, the increasingly self-
critical ’90s would not offer the same opportunities for Hughes, and his star
indeed lost its luster.
The subsequent chapter by Yannis Tzioumakis, “‘Becoming John
Hughes’: Regional Production, Hyphenate Filmmaking, and Indepen-
dence within Hollywood,” takes an even closer look at Hughes within the
movie industry, evaluating the place of his modest hits within the scope
of ’80s cinema. Tzioumakis finds that Hughes’s independence as a film-
maker—before the model of “indie cinema” would emerge more promi-
nently in the early ’90s—effectively positioned him against the Hollywood
machinery of the era, allowing him to advance his modestly quirky projects
that may have otherwise been overlooked for their lack of “high concept”
credentials. Working with producer Ned Tanen, the writer Hughes became
the director Hughes, developing his scripts with increasing creative con-
trol despite his unusual shooting methods and insistence on filming in the
Chicago area. This latter aspect not only afforded Hughes a certain amount
of regional expertise, it led to an association of Hughes with his home city
that further distinguished his stories.
The closing chapter in this section, “Ferris Bueller vs. Parker Lewis:
‘Adapting’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for Television” by Stephen Tropiano, takes
us from the broader evaluations of Hughes to the specific, and across media
from film to television. The hit 1986 film featuring Matthew Broderick as
the title character marked a departure for Hughes, being the last film focused
on teenagers that he would direct (the fourth in two years), and without any
of the original Brat Pack cast that he had brought to fame in the previous
three. Aside from writing a handful of TV episodes for the Animal House
spin-off Delta House in 1979 and creating the military sitcom At Ease in 1983,
both short-lived series were Hughes’s only forays into the television medium,
though that industry would attempt to exploit some of his film projects. After
an oddly duplicative TV movie of Mr. Mom was made in 1984, producers in
1990 took up both Uncle Buck (1989) and Ferris Bueller as episodic series, and
neither lasted beyond their initial season. As Tropiano points out through a
comparison with the more successful series Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (1990–93),
which was essentially an imitation of Ferris Bueller, the duality of high school
as a site of teenage oppression and a site of teenage rebellion against adult
authority figures only made for sustained comedy when the characters could
evolve beyond their initial incarnations.
Perhaps like the other characters Hughes created during the ’80s, Ferris
Bueller and his cohort were fixed in time, and could not adapt to the ’90s youth
who would be branded Generation X as they embraced skepticism beyond
their years. Indeed, aside from a few obscure made-for-TV movies based on
characters in his Vacation and Home Alone films, the small-screen industry
only pursued one other Hughes concept, the Weird Science cable sitcom, which
was surprisingly durable on the USA Network for five seasons (1994–98), per-
haps owing to the channel’s small quirky market. Hughes himself stayed away
from television and focused instead on adapting previous family hits (Miracle
on 34th Street [1994], 101 Dalmatians [1996], Flubber [1997]) into reliable studio
features. The adolescent sensibilities of Hughes’s ’80s teens were sorely dated
by the ’90s, and their films were destined to remain beloved relics of a less-
critical and cynical era.
NOTE
1. The original Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), written by Alice Paul in 1921, was
proposed as House Joint Resolution 75 to Congress on December 13, 1923, reading in
its entirety: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and
every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by
appropriate legislation.” Despite reintroduction of the ERA over the next five decades,
Congress did not approve voting on ratification until 1972. Though 35 of the 38 states
required to amend the Constitution voted to approve, by 1982 the deadline for ratification
passed and thus nullified the effort. Recently, three more states have voted to ratify, yet
these results are resisted by conservative forces. See Lila Thulin, “The 97-Year-History of
the Equal Rights Amendment,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 13, 2019, https://www.
smithsonianmag.com/history/equal-rights-amendment-96-years-old-and-still-not-part-
constitution-heres-why-180973548/.
John Hughes quickly earned his reputation as a filmmaker in tune with the
popular and profitable youth market. Soon after coming to Hollywood, Hughes
became known as an auteur for the teen films he made in the 1980s. Indeed, a
New York Times article in 1986 (O’Connor),1 released just two years after his
directorial feature film debut, bestowed the “auteur” label upon him. Although
Hughes wrote over 30 films, produced over 20, and directed eight, he is most
widely known for the six teen films he wrote and produced in rapid succession
(the last two of which were directed by Howard Deutch): Sixteen Candles (1984),
The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986),
Pretty in Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987). His auteur status was
cemented by his easily recognizable style of writing, seemingly from a teen per-
spective, that connected with youth audiences, as well as by his frequently cast
young stars like Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, and by the similar
stories he tackled about social hierarchies in American high schools.
Hughes and his teen films have gone through a number of critical reassess-
ments since the 1980s. Most of his films were successful at the box office upon
release and in the home entertainment market soon thereafter. The response
from critics, however, was more mixed. For example, reviews of The Breakfast
Club, one of his most celebrated films, either praised the film as “a breath of
cinematic fresh air”2 (from fellow Chicagoan Gene Siskel) or skewered it by say-
ing “the movie is about a bunch of stereotypes who complain that other people
see them as stereotypes”3 (from New Yorker critic Pauline Kael). In the 1990s,
after Hughes’s popularity waned, historian Robert Sklar questioned whether
his status as a filmmaker would rise as more time passed.4 After Hughes died
in 2009, there were outpourings of articles and interviews, as well as a special
(and highly rare) Oscar tribute to him, lauding the influence he had on teens
and teen films, on popular culture more generally, and on individual lives more
specifically. Subsequently, in 2018, Molly Ringwald wrote an editorial for The
New Yorker in the wake of #MeToo, a movement that brought to light rampant
and pervasive sexual harassment.5 Reflecting on her past work with Hughes, she
questioned some of the more troubling relationships depicted in his teen films,
including the particularly abusive way her character was treated by Bender (Judd
Nelson), her presumed love interest in The Breakfast Club, and how Jake Ryan
(Michael Schoeffling), her supposed dreamboat crush in Sixteen Candles, let his
incapacitated girlfriend be raped by a virtual stranger. While Hughes’s films have
variously been praised for their depictions of teen life and for addressing class
differences, they have similarly been derided for the way they deal with diversity,
sexuality, and gender (as other chapters in this collection demonstrate).
This chapter proceeds by looking at John Hughes and his films in three
different time periods. The first section, “History,” roughly corresponds to
his time making teen films in the 1980s. The analysis in this part considers
the content of the teen films he made and their context of production, as well
as some of the discourse surrounding them, borne out in reviews and articles
that were written at and about that time. The next, “Hagiography,” approx-
imately matches the period when he stopped making teen films and subse-
quently started to retreat from Hollywood. Certain articles written during this
period illustrate how people were wondering why and to where he disappeared
and were pining for the types of films that he made. This time is replete with
accolades and mentions of his far-reaching influence even in his absence, but a
few noticeable queries were also starting to arise about some of the problematic
content in his films. The following section, “Historiography,” begins a few
years after his death. It deals with more contemporary readings of Hughes and
his films, especially in light of the current political and social landscape that
raises awareness of racist and misogynistic behavior and calls it out as such.
Conduct that was once deemed par for the course and even humorous has since
become more widely understood as inappropriate and injurious.
One of the interesting features of this periodization structure is that it also
has a corresponding relationship to different facets of the auteur theory. When
the French critics of Cahiers du Cinéma first came up with the politique des
auteurs6 after World War II, and when Andrew Sarris adapted it as the auteur
theory for American readers in the 1960s, 7 they were trying to accomplish
more than just the bestowing of a label. One of the aspects that led these critics
to develop the auteur theory is that they noticed recurring styles and themes
in certain filmmakers’ work. They realized that regardless of the subject mat-
ter, an auteur was someone who made his (the directors glorified were almost
always male) discrete mark. As such, in this chapter’s history section, we can
look at Hughes films and discern what those recurring elements are, and what
they might mean. Another motivating force of the critics was to lionize the
status of the newly deemed auteur filmmakers, thereby extolling their films as
well. These filmmakers were not just turning out assembly-line products from
a factory. Rather, saying they were auteurs elevated the status of their films to
the level of art. Indeed, as evident in the hagiography portion, John Hughes
helped advance the idea that teens and teen stories were important and should
be taken seriously, and should not just be tossed aside as insignificant because
of the characters’ and the primary audience members’ youth. Still another
position of the auteur theory was to re-evaluate and reassess films from the
recent past. The French Cahiers du Cinéma critics had been restricted from
seeing Hollywood films during World War II embargoes, so when they were
finally able to view them, they noticed patterns and artistry that many other
audiences without sufficient critical distance had missed. Hence, the histori-
ography segment looks at how certain elements of the past are more clearly
visible with the passage of time and are highlighted depending on concerns in
the present. As a celebrated filmmaker who tapped into contemporary culture,
Hughes and his films are thus subject to continuing review and are worthy of
serious study.
This research seeks to interrogate how auteur status is granted, how it can
have multiple connotations, how it can hide troubling issues behind the veil of
talent, and how even important work for which we hold tender memories needs
to be re-examined. The implications of these reassessments speak to larger con-
cerns about how we can analyze the oeuvre of lauded yet problematic art and
artists by focusing specifically on Hughes as a teen film auteur and on the ways
valuations of him and his films have changed over time. It would be remiss to
diminish the way Hughes has influenced the teen film genre, just as it would be
remiss to ignore the troubling cultural and personal politics of his films. Con-
siderations and judgments of him and his films, as well as a discourse analysis of
these evaluations, need to be historically contextualized with attention to ideo-
logical shifts. What emerges from these analyses is a more nuanced overview of
his films, their varying interpretations, and Hughes as a filmmaker.
H I S T O RY
Studying history is not simply the recalling of facts, but concerns learning about
the past; it is about “making meaning of historical events . . . suggest[ing] the
possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by understanding
the forces, choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situa-
tion.”8 Reviewing Hughes’s films, as well as the context of their production and
how they were received, offers a textual analysis of content in conjunction with
insight into the films’ contemporary environment. As some of the established
cultural anthropological foundations of film and media studies posit, because
films represent ideology, or the ideas and beliefs of the time and place they are
made, we can look at the films and the discourse surrounding them to learn
about contemporary culture. Moreover, as these analyses reveal ideological
beliefs, we can also look to the films to say something about the author who cre-
ated them. In this way, by examining some of the recurring styles and themes in
Hughes’s work, predominantly the teen films that were responsible for bestow-
ing upon him the status of auteur, we can start to get a sense of what his work
reveals about him, as well as what it says about the 1980s more generally.
Hughes’s teen films are commendable for many reasons. Notably, he took
teens and their concerns seriously. In interviews around the time his films
were in production, Hughes would express how important it was to him to
foreground the significance of the teen experience, and was quoted as say-
ing “there’s a general lack of respect for young people now”9 and that “it’s
wrong not to allow someone the right to have a problem because of their age.”10
Indeed, while still giving time for teens to have fun, as in Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off, Hughes also focused on some of the serious problems teens face (even
within the same film), such as debilitating pressure from parents and peers.
Even if the problems seem small to people who are older, Hughes recognized
that they are monumental to the people going through them. Accordingly, he
would try to tell stories from a youthful point of view; Anthony Michael Hall,
who was a teen during the time the films were produced, said Hughes’s screen-
plays “know exactly what it’s like to be a freshman in high school.”11 Hughes
focused on particularly astute and relatable teenagers from all echelons of the
social groups in high schools, and gave comparable screen time to many of
them, like the ensemble of The Breakfast Club. By focusing on and labeling
as such the archetypical characters found in both high schools and teen films,
he was able to call attention to ingrained stereotypes and then show that teens
could actually be quite complex.
Hughes also depicted numerous quintessential teen film elements, but he
did so particularly effectively and cohesively. Like many entries in the teen
film genre, his stories focused on the conflict between generations, helping to
codify different dynamics by variously depicting authority figures who were
absent or harmful (such as parents who are out of town when parties take place
and all the adults except for the janitor in The Breakfast Club), or well-meaning
but clueless (Sam’s father in Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s parents in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). In line with ongoing contemporary concerns about
class, Hughes also did not shy away from pointing out how popularity in high
school is often aligned with wealth as antagonistic relationships played out
between the haves and have-nots in a microcosm of larger societal struggles.
Additionally, his films would often take a female perspective, and as Hadley
Freeman points out, the young women would be characters unto themselves
instead of there to further male characters’ development.12 He made insightful
That the reader may not be led to suppose the book he has just
gone through with, a sheer fabrication, the author has thought it
adviseable to give a few of the many facts upon which the tale is
founded, in the very language of history.
The true name of Mr. Paris was Samuel, instead of Matthew, and he
spelt it with two r’s; that of his child was Elizabeth and that of her
cousin, Abigail Williams. With these corrections to prepare the
reader for what is to follow, we may now go to the historical records
alluded to.
And first—Of the manner in which the accused were treated on their
examination, and of the methods employed to make them confess.
John Proctor, who was executed for witchcraft, gives the following
account of the procedure had with his family, in a letter to Mr. Cotton
Mather, Mr. Moody, Mr. Willard, and others.
“Reverend Gentlemen,—The innocency of our case, with the enmity
of our accusers and our judges and jury, whom nothing but our
innocent blood will serve, having condemned us already before our
trials, being so much incensed and enraged against us by the devil,
makes us bold to beg and implore your favourable assistance of this
our humble petition to his excellency, that if it be possible our innocent
blood may be spared, which undoubtedly otherwise will be shed, if the
Lord doth not mercifully step in; the magistrates, ministers, juries, and
all the people in general, being so much enraged and incensed
against us by the delusion of the devil, which we can term no other, by
reason we know in our own consciences we are all innocent persons.
Here are five persons who have lately confessed themselves to be
witches, and do accuse some of us of being along with them at a
sacrament, since we were committed into close prison, which we
know to be lies. Two of the five are (Carrier’s sons) young men, who
would not confess any thing till they tied them neck and heels, till the
blood was ready to come out of their noses; and it is credibly believed
and reported this was the occasion of making them confess what they
never did, by reason they said one had been a witch a month, and
another five weeks, and that their mother had made them so, who has
been confined here this nine weeks. My son William Proctor, when he
was examined, because he would not confess that he was guilty,
when he was innocent, they tied him neck and heels till the blood
gushed out at his nose, and would have kept him so twenty-four
hours, if one, more merciful than the rest, had not taken pity on him,
and caused him to be unbound. These actions are very like the popish
cruelties. They have already undone us in our estates, and that will
not serve their turns without our innocent blood. If it cannot be granted
that we have our trials at Boston, we humbly beg that you would
endeavor to have these magistrates changed, and others in their
rooms; begging also and beseeching you would be pleased to be
here, if not all, some of you, at our trials, hoping thereby you may be
the means of saving the shedding of innocent blood. Desiring your
prayers to the Lord in our behalf, we rest your poor afflicted servants,
John Proctor, &c.
Jonathan Cary, whose wife was under the charge, but escaped, has
left a very affecting narrative of her trial, and of the behavior of the
judges.
“Being brought before the justices, her chief accusers were two girls.
My wife declared to the justices, that she never had any knowledge of
them before that day. She was forced to stand with her arms stretched
out. I requested that I might hold one of her hands, but it was denied
me; then she desired me to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the
sweat from her face, which I did; then she desired that she might lean
herself on me, saying she should faint.
Justice Hathorn replied, she had strength enough to torment those
persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I speaking
something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be
silent, or else I should be turned out of the room. The Indian before
mentioned was also brought in, to be one of her accusers: being come
in, he now (when before the justices) fell down and tumbled about like
a hog, but said nothing. The justices asked the girls who afflicted the
Indian; they answered she, (meaning my wife) and that she now lay
upon him; the justices ordered her to touch him, in order to his cure,
but her head must be turned another way, lest, instead of curing, she
should make him worse, by her looking on him, her hand being guided
to take hold of his; but the Indian took hold of her hand, and pulled her
down on the floor, in a barbarous manner; then his hand was taken
off, and her hand put on his, and the cure was quickly wrought. I,
being extremely troubled at their inhuman dealings, uttered a hasty
speech, That God would take vengeance on them, and desired that
God would deliver us out of the hands of unmerciful men. Then her
mittimus was writ. I did with difficulty and chagrin obtain the liberty of a
room, but no beds in it; if there had been, could have taken but little
rest that night. She was committed to Boston prison; but I obtained a
habeas corpus to remove her to Cambridge prison, which is in our
county of Middlesex. Having been there one night, next morning the
jailer put irons on her legs (having received such a command;) the
weight of them was about eight pounds; these irons and her other
afflictions soon brought her into convulsion fits, so that I thought she
would have died that night. I sent to entreat that the irons might be
taken off; but all entreaties were in vain, if it would have saved her life,
so that in this condition she must continue. The trials at Salem coming
on, I went thither, to see how things were managed; and finding that
the spectre evidence was there received, together with idle, if not
malicious stories, against people’s lives, I did easily perceive which
way the rest would go; for the same evidence that served for one,
would serve for all the rest. I acquainted her with her danger; and that
if she were carried to Salem to be tried, I feared she would never
return. I did my utmost that she might have her trial in our own county,
I with several others petitioning the judge for it, and were put in hopes
for it; but I soon saw so much, that I understood thereby it was not
intended, which put me upon consulting the means of her escape;
which through the goodness of God was effected, and she got to
Rhode-Island, but soon found herself not safe when there, by reason
of the pursuit after her; from thence she went to New-York, along with
some others that had escaped their cruel hands.
Of the trial of “good-wife Proctor,” the following interpretation was
had.
“About this time, besides the experiment of the afflicted falling at the
sight, &c. they put the accused upon saying the Lord’s prayer, which
one among them performed, except in that petition, deliver us from
evil, she expressed it thus, deliver us from all evil: this was looked
upon as if she prayed against what she was now justly under, and
being put upon it again, and repeating those words, hallowed be thy
name, she expressed it, hollowed be thy name: this was counted a
depraving the words, as signifying to make void, and so a curse rather
than a prayer: upon the whole it was concluded that she also could
not say it, &c. Proceeding in this work of examination and
commitment, many were sent to prison.
“In August, 1697, the superior court sat at Hartford, in the colony of
Connecticut, where one mistress Benom was tried for witchcraft. She
had been accused by some children that pretended to the spectral
sight: they searched her several times for teats; they tried the
experiment of casting her into the water, and after this she was
excommunicated by the minister of Wallinsford. Upon her trial nothing
material appeared against her, save spectre evidence. She was
acquitted, as also her daughter, a girl of twelve or thirteen years old,
who had been likewise accused; but upon renewed complaints
against them, they both flew into New-York government.
His death.—
“Mr. Burroughs was carried in a cart with the others, through the
streets of Salem to execution. When he was upon the ladder, he made
a speech for the clearing of his innocency, with such solemn and
serious expressions, as were to the admiration of all present: his
prayer [which he concluded by repeating the Lord’s prayer] was so
well worded, and uttered with such composedness, and such [at least
seeming] fervency of spirit, as was very affecting, and drew tears from
many, so that it seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the
execution. The accusers said the Black Man stood and dictated to
him. As soon as he was turned off, Mr. Cotton Mather, being mounted
upon a horse, addressed himself to the people, partly to declare that
he [Burroughs] was no ordained minister, and partly to possess the
people of his guilt, saying that the devil has often been transformed
into an angel of light; and this somewhat appeased the people, and
the executions went on.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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