It’s hard for me to understand how John Hughes (in glasses) was able to write with such sensitivity, and also have such glaring blind spot.
Photos from the universal pictures / Everett
Earlier this year, the criterion collection, which is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world,” has released a restored version of “the Breakfast club,” writer and Director John Hughes that I was acting over three decades ago. For this edition, I participated in an interview about the film, as did other people close to the production. I don’t tend to review movies that I did, but it was not the first time I came back to this: a few years ago, I was watching it with my daughter who was ten at the time. We recorded a conversation about it radio show “this American life”. I’ll be the first to admit that ten is too young to be watching “Breakfast club,” a film about five students who each other during a Saturday detention session, with lots of swearing, talking about sex, and now-famous scene, the students were Smoking pot. But my daughter insisted that her friends had already seen it, and she said she don’t want to watch it for the first time in the presence of other people. Writer-Director friend assured me that children tend to filter out what they don’t understand and I thought that it would be better if I was there to answer uncomfortable questions. So I gave up, perhaps thinking that it will be a sweet, if unconventional “mother-daughter” moment.
It’s a strange experience watching younger, more innocent version of himself on the screen. It’s even more weird, surreal, even watch it with your child when she is much closer in age to the version of yourself than you. My friend was right: my daughter did not register a big part in sex, although, she loudly gasped when she thought I showed my underwear. At one point in the film bad boy character, John Bender, dives under the table, where my heroine, Claire, sits to hide from the teacher. While there, he took the opportunity to peek under the skirt of Claire and, although the audience doesn’t see, it meant that he would touch her inappropriately. I was quick to point out to my daughter that the man in the underwear wasn’t me, although that explanation seemed insignificant. We continued to watch, and despite my best intentions to give the context of the uncomfortable bits, I did not specify what could go under the table. She expressed no curiosity In something sexy, so I decided to follow her example, and to discuss what seemed to resonate with her. Maybe I just chickened out.
But I kept thinking about this scene. I was thinking about this last fall, after several women made the sexual-assault charges against the producer Harvey Weinstein, and in this movement of Metoo gaining momentum. If the ratio of female subordination are systemic, and I think that they are, it goes without saying that the art that we consume and the sanction plays a role in strengthening the same views. I did three films with John Hughes, when they were released, they’ve done enough cultural influence to put me on the cover of Time magazine, and to Hughes called a genius. His critical Reputation has only grown since his death in 2009, aged fifty-nine. The movies Hughes is constantly playing on television and taught in schools. There is still so much that I love them, but lately I felt the need to explore the role that these movies play in our cultural life: where they came from, and what they might mean now. When my daughter asked to watch “the Breakfast club”, I hesitated, not knowing how she would react if she wanted to understand the movie, or if she would even like it. I was afraid that she would find aspects of it troubling, but I didn’t expect that it will ultimately be the most worrying for me.
It can be hard to remember how little art for And about teenagers was before John Hughes arrived. Young adult novels have not yet exploded as a genre. On the screen, the biggest problems faced by teenagers, it seemed, to a large extent belong to the world of special ABC after-school care, which took place in 1972 and is still around as I came of age in the eighties. All teenagers, I knew that it would be better to die than to watch one. The films had a whiff of sanctimony, the dialogue was obviously written for adults, the music is corny.
The images of Teens in movies was even worse. Actors cast in teenage roles, usually much older than their characters—they had to be, because films so often exploited. In teen horror movies that flourished in the seventies and eighties killing them: if you were a young, attractive and sexually active, your chances to make it to the end was basically nil (trop-fake, years later, the “scream” franchise). Successful teen comedies of the period, such as “animal house” and “Porky’s” was written by men for boys, and those few women that they were either nymphomaniacs or axes. (Thick women’s coach in “Porky’s” is called Balbricker.) Boys are perverts, as one-dimensional as their female counterparts, but with more screen time. In 1982, “easy times at Ridgemont high” that had the rare privilege to be sent a woman, Amy Heckerling, closer to a genuine portrayal of adolescence. But he still made room for young men’s fantasies of the actress Phoebe cates walks Topless in the soft porny sprinkler mist.
And then Hughes came in. Hughes, who grew up in Michigan and Illinois, got a job, after leaving College, writing an advertising text in Chicago. The work brought him often to new York, where he began to hang out in the office of the journal of the national Lampoon humor. He wrote a story called “vacation ’58”—inspired by his own family trips—which ensured him a job in the magazine and became the basis for the movie “National Lampoon vacation”. Another story caught the eye of producer Lauren Schuler Donner, who encouraged him to write what became “Mr. mom”. These films helped him to get a contract with universal studios. “The Breakfast club” was his directorial debut, he was going to shoot in Chicago with local actors. He told me later that over the 4th of July weekend, looking at pictures of actors for the film, he found the mine, and decided to write another movie around the character, he imagined that the girl will be. This scenario has become the “sixteen candles” a story about a girl whose family forgets her sixteenth birthday. The Studio really liked, perhaps because in the form, at least, he had more in common with the experience of successful“Porky’s”, etc.—than it was with “the Breakfast club” which is basically to read how to play.
A meeting was arranged, we hit it off and I shot the movie “sixteen candles” in the suburbs of Chicago the summer after ninth grade. As soon as we finished shooting, and before we started shooting the film “the Breakfast club,” John has written another film for me“, “pretty in pink”,” about the working class girl navigating the social prejudices of her rich school. The dramatic arc of the film includes invited and then uninvited to the ball. In synopsis, the movies can seem far-fetched—a girl loses a date to the dance, the family forgets the girl’s birthday—but that’s part of what made them unique. No one in Hollywood was to write about the minutiae of high school, and certainly not from the female point of view. According to one study, in the late nineteen forties, in top-grossing family movies, characters, girls had outnumbered boys three to one and this ratio has not improved. Two Hughes movies of women heroes in the lead roles and has considered these young women’s feelings about quite ordinary things that have happened to them, and managing to have instant credit, which translated into success at the box office, was an anomaly that was never replicated. (In several blockbusters, starring roles of young women in recent years were mostly set in grim futures or featured vampires and werewolves.)
I had what can be called a symbiotic relationship, with John in the first two of these movies. Used to call me his Muse, which I believe was, for a while. But more than that, I felt that he listened to me—although, of course, not all the time. Coming out of the National school of Lampoon Comedy, there was still the rest of vulgarity that trailer, no matter how much I protested. In the scenario of the film “the Breakfast club”, there was a scene in which an attractive woman, the teacher bathed naked in the school pool, as Mr. Vernon, the teacher who engaged in detention of the students was spying on her. The scene was not in the first version I read, and I lobbied John to cut it. He did, and although I’m sure the actress who was cast in the part still blames me for the failure to break it, I think the film is better. In “sixteen candles” character alternately called a Geek and farmer Ted makes a wager with friends that he can score with my character, Samantha; by the evidence that he says he will protect her underwear. Later in the film, After Samantha agrees to help Geek lent her underwear to him, she’s touching scene with his father. Originally it ended with the father asking: “Sam, what the hell happened to your pants?” My mother does not object. “Why father knows what happened at the underwear of his daughter?” she asked. John stirred uneasily on the bed. That is not what he meant he said it was just a joke, but a joke. “But it’s not funny,” my mother said. “It’s creepy”. The line was changed to “just remember, Sam, you wear the pants in the family.”
My mom also says that during filming of the movie “the Breakfast club” when they hired a woman to shoot lingerie Claire. They couldn’t even ask me about it—I don’t think it was allowed by law to ask minor—but still have to take the other person to pretend that I was ashamed and sad mother, and she said so. This scene remained. Moreover, as I see it now, Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film. When he’s not sexualizing her, he’s taking out his anger on her with vicious contempt, calling it “pathetic”, mocking her as “Queenie.” This failure, which inspires his vitriol. Claire acts derogatory to him, and in a key scene towards the end, she predicts that at school on Monday morning, although the group bonded, all back, the social status quo. “Just bury your head in the sand and wait for prom, dammit!” Bender screams. He never apologizes for it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end.
If this sounds too critical, just looking back. Then I was only dimly aware of how inappropriate a lot of writing John was, given my limited experience and what was considered normal at the time. I was in my thirties before I stopped counting to insult people more interesting than good. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it took even longer for me to fully understand the scene at the end of “sixteen candles” when the dream of Jake, in fact, sells his drunken friend, Caroline, for being a Geek, to meet the sexual desire, instead of Samantha’s underwear. Geek takes Polaroids Caroline to have proof of his conquest; when she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn’t know, he asks her if she “liked”. (None of them seem to remember.) Caroline shakes her head in amazement and said, “You know, I have a strange feeling that I did.” She had a feeling about it, not thought, because thoughts are things that we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.
Thinking about this scene, I was curious how the actress who played Caroline, Haviland Morris, felt about the character she portrayed. I sent her an email. We haven’t seen or talked to each other when she was twenty-three and I was fifteen. We met for coffee, and after we filled each other in all these years, I asked her about it. Haviland, I was surprised to learn, does not have the same problem with the scene as I do. In her mind, Caroline has some responsibility for what is happening because of how drunk she gets at the party. “I’m not saying it’s O. K. to then be raped or consensual sex,” Haviland to clarify. “But . . . this is not a one-way street. Here’s a girl who bombed herself so that she doesn’t even know what is happening.”
There was a time in my early twenties, when I drank too much at a party and ended up in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed with the producer, I didn’t know the dizziness and weakness. A good friend who followed me, stuck his head in the door a few minutes later and said “time to go, Molly!” I followed her, trying not to stumble, and spent the rest of the night terribly bad and ashamed and all my life grateful that she was there, watching me, when I was temporarily unable to look after themselves. I shared the story with Haviland, and she listened politely, nodding.
Haviland, like me, have children, and so I decided to put the question hypothetically, the mother’s mother to see if she changed her point of view. If one of our kids drank too much, and something similar happened to one of them, she’d said, “It’s on you because you drank too much”? She shook her head, “No. Absolutely, positively, it stays in my pants until I invited someone who willingly and voluntarily invite you to remove it.” Still, she added, “I’m not going black and white. This is not a one-way street”.
After our coffee, I answered an email from Haviland to thank her for agreeing to talk to me. Later that night, I received another note. “You know, she wrote, the more I think about it this evening, oddly enough, the less uncomfortable I am with Caroline. Jake was disgusted with her and said that he may violate it 17 ways, if he wanted, because she was so drunk, but he’s not. And then, Ted was the only one who had to ask if they had sex, which, of course, does not demonstrate responsible behaviour on the part of one party but not the spell rape. On the other hand, she had basically traded for a pair of underwear . . . Ah, John Hughes”.
It’s hard for me to understand how John could write with such sensitivity, and also have such glaring blind spot. Looking for understanding in the dark, I decided to read some of his early recordings for National Lampoon. I bought an old issue of the magazine on eBay, and found other stories, all from the late seventies and early eighties online. They contain many of the same themes he explored in his films, but without the humanity. Yes, it was a different time, as people say. Still, I was taken aback by the magnitude of the ugliness.
“Story dogs” is a boy watching his mother turn into a dog. “Against his will” particularly “ugly fat” woman trying to rape man at gunpoint in front of his wife and her husband’s parents because she can’t have sex any other way. “My penis” and “vagina” are not quasi-magic-realist stories written from the point of view of Teens who Wake up in the morning with different genitals than they were assigned at birth; the protagonist of “my penis” literally makes her boyfriend opening her mouth to penetrate him, and the man in “my vagina” is gang-raped by their friends once they discover that he was alone. (The last story ends with him using the money he saved on a new ski to receive an abortion.) “The user interaction Hughes” is an illustrated guide on how to protect themselves from women. He gives examples of women “lied to POPs” and teaches readers how to do it “quick pelvic exam,” how to detect “signs of future” fat-and how to determine if a woman has any ancestors of different races, based on what her family is similar—there is an accompanying picture Asian and African American—and so on.
Since October 1980 issue included a piece co-authored with Ted Mann, entitled “sexual harassment and how to do it!” The guide explains: “if you hire a woman from another field or with a background that is not suitable to the duties it assumed, you head into the crevice, or, if you prefer, a foot in the door”. He continues: “not only the humility to prepare her for sexual advances, it will also help steel her for the inevitable dismissal.” There are sections describing different kinds of secretaries, based on their age, and how best to reward and punish them. (The old “easier” younger “better.”) There’s even a section on the arrest: “sometimes even the guys with the cool sideburns and a smooth line of patter arrested for sexual harassment and are issued summonses.” It offers different methods to get to the police officer.
It’s all satire, of course, but it’s pretty clear that this is not the chauvinists, which admits, but “women’s liberation movement.” Women began to speak, in the mid-seventies, against harassment in the workplace. (Favorite movie is “9 to 5” in which three women take revenge on a sexist Boss, was released in December 1980, two months after Hughes-Mann piece ran.) Mann is now a writer and producer who was nominated for seven Emmys, most recently for his work in the Showtime series “homeland.” I sent him a letter asking what he thought now that the pieces he writes with Hughes. He replied that he does not remember that ever wrote. “It looks like one of the desperate fillers our art Director, Peter page,” – said he, turning to Peter Kleinman. “It won’t work today, and it never would fly then,” he continued, adding that “it was the degenerate days of cocaine”.
I can’t vouch personally for any of the days of cocaine that John may not have. When I knew him, he never expressed interest in any drugs, including alcohol, except for the cigarettes he constantly smoked.
John believed in me and in my gifts as an actress, more than anyone I know, and he was the first person to tell me what I must write in one day. He was also a phenomenal offense-Keeper, and he can respond to detected deviations in much the same way the character did Bender in “the Breakfast club.” But I don’t think about the man right now, but from the movies that he left behind. Movies that I’m proud of in many ways. The films, how he used to write, although to a much lesser extent, can also be seen as racist, misogynistic and sometimes homophobic. The words “fag” and “faggot” tossed around with abandon; the character of long Duk Dong in “sixteen candles” is a grotesque stereotype, as other writers have detailed far more eloquently than I could.
And I would say more times than I could count as friends, and strangers, including people in the L. G. B. T. community, that the films to “save” them. Left the party not long ago, I was stopped Emil Wilbekin, gay, African-American friend of a friend who wanted to tell me just that. I smiled and thanked him, but what I wanted to say “why?” There is hardly a person of color can be found in the movies, and no characters are gay. A week after the party, I asked my friend to introduce me to him. Email Wilbekin, a journalist who created an organization called native son dedicated to the empowerment of gay black men have stated what he told me when I left the party. “The Breakfast club”, he explained, saved his life by showing him the guy grew up in Cincinnati in the eighties, “there were other people like me who are struggling with their identity, feeling out of place in the social constructs of school and family concerns ideals and pressures.” These children also were “in search of themselves and “others” in a very traditional, white, heteronormative environment.” The lack of variety does not bother him, he added, “because the characters and the story line was so beautifully human, perfectly imperfect and flawed”. He watched movies at school, and while it’s not out yet, he had a pretty good idea that he was gay.
“Pretty in pink” was a character, the Duckling, which was based on my best friend for forty years, Matthew Freeman. We were friends when I was ten, and he has worked as assistant Director on the film. Like Emil, he came out now and not later. (This is one reason why I often claimed, to the disappointment of some fans and delight others, that ducky is gay, although there is nothing to indicate that in the script.) “Characters created by John said with feeling invisible and an outsider,” Matt told me recently. They are “how we felt as a latent gay children who could only live vicariously through others sexual awakenings that we learned, with the very real threat of being ostracized or beaten”.
Movies of John to convey the anger and fear of isolation that teenagers feel, and seeing what others can feel the same is a balm for the trauma that teenagers experience. Will this be enough to make up for the incorrectness of films, hard to say—even criticizing them makes me feel that I give generation some of his memories, or be ungrateful, because they helped to establish his career. And completely grabbed them feels hypocritical. And another, and another. . . .
How should we feel about the art that we both love and contrast? What if we find ourselves in the unusual situation when all this was created? Erasing history is a dangerous path when it comes to the art change is necessary, but so, too, Recalling the past, in all its lawlessness and barbarism, so that we can properly assess how far we have come and how far we still have to go.
By studying this subject, I came across an article that was published in seventeen magazine in 1986, I interviewed John. (It was the only time I did it.) He talked about the artists who inspired him when he was younger—Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and how, once they “got comfortable” in their art, they moved on. I noted that he’s already done a lot of movies about the suburbs, and asked him whether he felt that he must move on, his idols were. “I think it’s reasonable for people to care about things that they know,” he said. He added, “I feel very shy to write about something I don’t know.”
I’m not sure that John was really comfortable and happy. He often told me that he didn’t think he was quite a good writer in prose, and although he loved writing, he certainly hated to revise. I was set to do another film for Hughes, when I was twenty, but felt that it needed rewriting. Hughes refused, and the film was never made, although there could be other circumstances I was not aware of.
In an interview, I asked him if he thought that teenagers looked different than when he was at that age. “Clearly,” he said. “My generation should be taken seriously because we were stopping things and burning things. We were able to initiate change, because we had such huge numbers. We were part of the Baby boom, and when we moved, everything moved with us. But now, less teenagers, and they are not taken as seriously as we do. You make a teenage movie, and critics say, ‘how dare you?’ There is just a General disrespect for young people.”
John wanted people to take seriously teenagers, and people did. The films are still taught in schools because good teachers want their students need to know what they feel and say is important; that if they speak, adults and peers will listen. I think that’s ultimately the biggest value of the movies, so I hope they will suffer. Talking about them will change, and they should. It is up to future generations, to figure out how to continue these conversations and make them their own—to continue to speak in schools, activism and art—and believe that we care.
Sourse: newyorker.com
