In memorium: John Hughes August 11, 2009

I don’t think I could I even begin to add up the hours I spent, as an adolescent, watching the films of John Hughes. I know there was a whole summer where I watched Ferris Bueller every day. And the next summer there was The Breakfast Club and the summer after that Some Kind of Wonderful.  Even now I can quote them word for word.  I have a memory of lying on my belly, in front of a VHS player with a friend. It was hot and sticky and we sucked on homemade icepops as one of us pressed play and rewind over and over again and the other wrote down every sentence uttered by John Bender and gang. It took us a whole day. This was a time before the internet, where getting hold of words you fell in love with was not as easy as typing keywords into Google. If you wanted them you had to work for them. I did the same thing many times with song lyrics but only once with a whole film.

I don’t think I was the demographic that John Hughes was aiming for. I was a Yorkshire girl, attending a single sex school in the early to mid nineties. Yet his films struck a chord with me and, so it seems from the comments on the internet this week, with millions of others. People in different countries, who became teenagers in different decades, watched these films and found something they could relate to. As an adult it is somehow easier to remember what it feels like to be a child rather than a teenager. The highs and lows of childhood are so much simpler than the tangled emotions of the teenage years. This makes it all the more remarkable that John Hughes was in his mid-thirties when he wrote these films dealing with the formation of identity. He managed to encapsulate so perfectly the simultaneous anxiety and exhilaration of growing up.

As I entered my late teens and early twenties I became quite the film snob. I became as obsessed with the films of Francois Truffaut as I had once been with the films of John Hughes. I almost accepted an offer to a university course with a minor in film studies and when I chose a different university I joined it’s Film Society and wrote mediocre reviews for it’s newsletter. Since then, my interest in film has slackened considerably. Every now and then I see a film that excites me but more often than not going to the cinema has become more of a social occasion than anything else.  Fairly recently I have been lucky enough to be part of a group of girls who have set up their own kind of informal film society.  We catch up with each others news, eat stupid amounts of junk food and watch several themed DVDs in a row chosen by whoever is hosting that month. Despite the fact that I’m now thirty years old, you don’t need to be a genius to work out what I chose for my theme. Hint: It wasn’t Francois Truffaut.

I’ve read somewhere  (I can’t remember where or I’d link) that The Breakfast Club is a our generations version of The Wizard of Oz.  Everyone one of us is a little bit like the heartless Tinman and a little bit like the cowardly Lion. And a little bit like misfit Allison and a little bit like highly driven Andrew. I don’t know about that but I do know John Hughes made some films that I’ll still enjoy watching when I’m forty, fifty, eighty. And maybe, just maybe our teenage grandchildren will enjoy them too.

Advertisement