John Hughes Was Right
A confused piece in Slate about filmmaker and teen specialist John Hughes. According to Michael Weiss, Hughes and his films were always more conservative than you thought. Okay, maybe, maybe not (depends a lot on what you thought).
Weiss seems to feel there's something vaguely wrong about this. Why? Who cares about the politics of Hughes or his films? The important question is are they any good.
PS Oddly, Weiss says that later Hughes films like The Great Outdoors , Home Alone and Dennis The Menace "were comedies for the Dan Quayle in all of us." I say oddly because Quayle has stated clearly his favorite film is Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
PPS For the record, my favorite Hughes film is Ferris Bueller and I don't like The Breakfast Club.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:46 AM
3 Comments:
Well, I'd rank Sixteen Candles clearly first. There are an incredible number of details in it that reward repeated watchings. For example, when the Anthony Michael Hall has his big conversation with Jake, they are in the kitchen of Jake's trashed house. Jake is the cool one, Hall is the ultra-geek. But during this scene, not commented on by either character, Hall is making a perfect martini in a shaker. It's totally incongruous and totally bizarre.
After that, maybe Breakfast Club despite some points that make one gag a bit.
More importantly, I totally disagree that Some Kind of Wonderful has a noble ending while Pretty in Pink has a sell-out ending. This argument is based on the fact that, if you mirror the genders, SKOW ends with the hero going for the lower-class girl, while PIP has Molly Ringwald get the upper-class guy and bypass the geek.
But this isn't inconsistent, because in Hughes' movies you can never mirror the gender roles. For him, a romantic ending involves a girl "marrying up" -- not the guy.
Moreover, I think the fact that male high school nerds never end up with girls is part of what Hughes sees as the realism of his movies. The only exception being Weird Science, in which it is demonstrated that nerdy high school guys can get girls only with supernatural help.
Oh, one other problem with the reviewer. He seems to believe that lower-class people who envy the material goods of the upper-class are being "right-wing", while those who turn against materialism are being "left-wing".
As a historical claim, this is false. The "left" from Robespierre to Castro was always about taking the wealth of the upper classes and giving it to the poor, to make them happy. In other words, classical leftists never challenged the idea that riches were the source of happiness.
John Hughes sent out secret conservative messages all those years! Finally, an explanation for how the Republicans took over Congress.
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