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30 Years of John Hughes

The Sunday of 6th Week saw a film milestone pass by with little fanfare in the British media: the 30th anniversary of John Hughes’s teen classic The Breakfast Club.

The 1980s was a period in which the blockbuster, a term heavily associated with Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws truly came into its own not only as a genre, but as the sort of tent-pole spectacular we now associate with the term. The 1980s was home to the last two thirds of the original Star Wars trilogy, James Cameron’s Terminator and Aliens, which redefined the boundaries of action and horror and gave them mass-market appeal, and even the 1987 film Predator, which originally evolved from a Hollywood joke to have Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky fight an alien, since he’d clearly run out of human opponents after Rocky IV rolled out in 1985. Spielberg would continue his box office success with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 and the Indiana Jones trilogy, and it seemed as though “blockbuster” had become synonymous with the movie-going experience.

When John Hughes burst onto the scene in 1984 with his directorial debut Sixteen Candles, he offered something distinct from the heavily stereotyped, raunchy, sex-comedies like Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds that dominated the early 1980s, and something even more distinct from the prevailing blockbuster form. What John Hughes pioneered was a new kind of tongue-in-cheek teen comedy; an incredibly self-aware imitation of middle class school life that dealt with teen characters without reducing them to cultural stereotypes.

Hughes had a successful string of films following Sixteen Candles, with the bizarro comedy Weird Science in 1985, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986 and Some Kind of Wonderful in 1987. Arguably however, none of his films are as culturally significant as 1985’s The Breakfast Club, a film that explicitly broke down the ridiculousness of teen stereotyping by collapsing the distinctions between the initial stereotypes he creates. A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal are the imposed definitions that close the film, but Hughes shows the audience that really these are all just kids dealing with the same problems; fears about inadequacy and dissatisfaction with their relationship with their parents. In this film, the characters only act according to stereotypes because they perceive it as a way of fitting in, or dealing with their problems. Hughes even pairs up the characters in surprising ways to challenge our preconceptions. Hughes pairs the basket case with the athlete; the princess with the criminal and the brain gets to write an essay. Poor Brian.

Commercially, John Hughes was extremely successful. The Breakfast Club was produced on a $1 million budget and grossed over $50 million, a remarkably impressive return on the film’s initial investment. Whilst this pales in comparison with the highest grossing films of the decade, Spielberg’s E.T. would gross $435 million on a $10.5 million budget, it showed that teen movies were both low-cost and generated audiences, even if they were not into blockbuster territory yet. Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film Back to the Future is perhaps the closest the 1980s saw to a teen high school blockbuster, and was the eighth highest grossing film of the 1980s with a $390 million gross on a $19 million budget. Critically however, Hughes’s films were always well reviewed, but never considered important enough by contemporary critics to merit recognition at the Academy Awards.

Following Hughes’s teen film career, he branched into more diverse comedies. Hughes created Planes, Trains and Automobiles in 1987, his first non-teen comedy directorial effort, and went on to pen and produce the highest grossing film of 1990, Home Alone. Whilst he saw further commercial and critical success in his later films, none were as subversively critical or thoughtful as his run of teen comedies. When he died in 2009, Hughes was commemorated during the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, recognising his contribution to film.

Nowadays, the teen comedy has slowly regressed into the power of those like Judd Apatow, who have dropped the critical, subversive aspects of Hughes’s work in favour of crass sex-comedy once again. The 30th anniversary of The Breakfast Club perhaps hints that it is time once again for a neglected genre to be shown some love and attention, to become a dissection of real life teenagers rather than a gross exhibition of parodic stereotypes. Let’s end with Andrew’s words from The Breakfast Club, “We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.”

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