John Hughes, Unsentimentally

When moviemaker John Hughes died Thursday of a heart attack at 59, one film critic eulogized him as a director and writer who took teenagers seriously and treated them as three-dimensional characters. This reputation Hughes cultivated rests largely on Sixteen Candles, is directorial debut, in which Molly Ringwald played a suburban high school student whose family is too obsessed with her older sister's wedding to remember her sixteenth birthday. Yes, Sixteen Candles was a sweet, warm, and genuinely funny movie, but to call Hughes a great director for that one movie is like inducting Kansas into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame strictly for "Dust In the Wind."

The truth is that most of Hughes's work, as a director, producer, or screenwriter, was by and large sophomoric. The Breakfast Club asked us to feel sorry for kids trapped in Saturday detention together simply for being different from each other and everyone else, when they're being punished. (We, the viewers, are punished with Judd Nelson.) Weird Science was about two high school nerds who create the ideal woman with a computer. Ferris Bueller's Day Off illustrated a day in the life of a teenager who cuts class because he's entitled to free time from school. These characters were pretty juvenile, and Hughes seemed more interested in celebrating their shallowness than making them grow up. Home Alone, which Hughes wrote and produced by did not direct, was even less mature, involving a ten-year-old kid left to his own devices at home who sadistically booby-traps his house to keep bandits from breaking in.

Even when Hughes came up with a genuinely funny idea, he overdid it. In National Lampoon's Vacation, which he wrote, the hapless Griswold family travels from Chicago to Los Angeles (the Route 66 trajectory, coincidentally) and everything goes wrong. This is something that happens to many families on road trips, including mine. My mother, my sister and I even related to the scene where Clark Griswold (played by Chevy Chase) takes the wrong exit in St. Louis and ends up in a black ghetto, because that happened to us in Newark. But in that scene, Hughes couldn't leave well enough alone, playing up every black ghetto cliche - the pimp with two hookers, the gunshots, the hubcap thieves, and folks living in cars with no wheels. In fact, every stereotype Hughes exploited was a decade out of date by the time the movie came out; the superfly pimp was pretty much passe by 1983. And Clark's son Russ wondering aloud if the black guy Clark gets directions from or his friends know the Commodores was just dumb.

That was the only time Hughes bothered acknowledging black people in his movies. Otherwise, he spent much of his time exploring the angst of white, upper-middle class kids from Chicago's North Shore suburbs, trying to make us feel pity for these kids dealing with adolescent problems. I'd have had more pity for them if they came from the wrong side of the tracks. Hughes did have such a character in Pretty In Pink (again, played by Molly Ringwald), but that was an exception.

Hughes's movies mostly celebrated the vapid youth culture of the 1980s, with all the mall hair and bad synth music that went with it. His greatest contribution to civilization may have been giving Ben Stein an entertainment career by casting the former Nixon White House aide in Ferris Bueller's Day Off as a dull teacher. Hughes couldn't claim credit for Molly Ringwald; she originally came from television sitcoms.

So, does anyone want to defend Hughes' career?

Anyone?

Anyone?