There are certain elements that exist in every John Hughes movie: someone lives on the wrong side of the tracks (and there are actual tracks); money is a big part of people’s lives, whether they have it or they don’t; the music is perfect; and the beautiful agony of being a teenager is treated, for once, with respect and kindness.
My parents were strict about age-appropriate entertainment, so my early John Hughes exposure occurred only after the movies were available on video and were in rotation as the Sunday afternoon movie. My elementary school best friend, through a combination of benignly negligent parents and her own VCR, was the main supplier.
I can’t remember in what order I saw them or exactly how old I was but for me, there are five main films that constitute what it means to be a John Hughes fan: "Sixteen Candles," "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off," "Pretty in Pink," "The Breakfast Club" and the slightly ancillary (due to lack of Ringwald) "Some Kind of Wonderful."
Needless to say, I wanted to be Molly Ringwald because she wasn’t close to perfect. In the '80s, it was OK to have messy hair, wear weird clothes, listen to strange music and look different. In fact, it was cool. I wasn’t really any of those things but I liked having the option.
It helped that Molly always got her man but that wasn’t the main thing -- it was that she stayed who she was and still got her man. That she kind of disappeared afterwards only made her cooler.
A few years ago, I was walking through Herald Square in NYC and she was just standing there, talking on the phone (“This is Molly, calling collect”) and my inner teenager nearly lost it. Yes, there are some people who would freak out about seeing say … the Dalai Lama but you know what, when I was 13 year old, Molly Ringwald was the Dalai Lama, just in better clothes.
Not only wasn’t I Molly, but none of the elements from Hughes’ movies had any real bearing on my real life. Although there were train tracks in my neighborhood, living on the other side of them didn’t have a social stigma and they certainly weren’t tracks that you could moodily walk along like Eric Stolz.
I went to all girls’ schools so the romances in the movies were 100 percent vicarious. Money wasn’t talked about much -- some people had more than others but it didn’t manifest itself in everyday life. Only two things were really true -- the music was exactly what I was feeling so I wore out my soundtrack tapes (yes, tapes) and being a teenager was simultaneously heaven and hell.
Everyone wanted to be like Ferris, but no one was really that confident. We quoted that movie endlessly pretending to feel like Ferris when most of us really thought we were Cameron.
"Sixteen Candles" was fun, but it lacked the depth of "Pretty in Pink" and the magic of Duckie.
