John Hughes Films Weren't Racially Diverse, but That's OK
Filmmaker John Hughes was no Thornton Wilder. The characters he envisaged weren't of the universal Our Town variety, and the halls of the so-called all-American high schools in which many of his innocuous comedy-dramas played-out were sorely homogeneous. It's true, he was responsible for other touchstones in movie culture (Mr. Mom's "220 ... 221, whatever it takes," and the Macaulay Culkin Home Alone face-slap, for starters), but Hughes' main legacy will always be that familiar string of influential 1980s flicks about middle-class white teens: Sixteen Candles, the Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful.
Why the Samantha Bakers, Allison Reynoldses, Cameron Fryes, and Amanda Joneses of Hughes' world struck a chord with Gen X is no mystery; while 1970s TV and film producers attempted to tear down the myths of their parents' "Leave It to Beaver"-era depictions of domesticity and replace them with "chin-up" coping strategies for the realities of modern home life (like divorce and joblessness in shows as disparate "Good Times" and "Family"), the 1980s were all about life outside the home: Working moms in 9-to-5. Dads at "Cheers." Latchkey grammar-schoolers in E.T.. But what about that hot new marketing demographic -- teens? Well, where else would they hang out, if not at school? And John Hughes captured life at school better than anyone had done, up to that point.
While my own high school experience wouldn't have been complete without Prince's "When Doves Cry" and Whodini's "Five Minutes of Funk" thumpin' from a friend's Impala in the parking lot outside the cafeteria each morning (or my school's marching band doin' drumlines from Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock"), the fact that Hughes' films were so definitively Caucasian never dawned on me at the time (my African American girlfriends said they liked Pretty in Pink as much as I did). I just loved everything about Hughes' movies, and I didn't know any better. Fighting at the lockers, crying in the restroom, smoking in the gym, avoiding bullies, defending your outfit to a white male principal who thought all students should be cookie-cutter preppies -- what kid, black or white and born in the late-1960s, couldn't relate to that? John Hughes taught American teens that it's OK to be yourself, even if that self is a white middle-class high school student. Because that's your life. And when you're 14, you can't choose how diverse your school is. You're a kid. You just go, and you deal.
True, some of Hughes' films involved an exclusivity that seems outdated in today's more diverse movie landscape. And Hughes' point of view may have blindly omitted race from the picture, but that doesn't mean his stories about high school life should be dismissed. Let's face it, some art just isn't meant to "go there" about race.
By honing in so closely on the pop-cultural specificity of the lives of teens, John Hughes not only created his own genre of films, but also suffused them with an aspirational cool-factor that combined fashion, music, and angst in a manner oft-replicated since. In other words, every generation has its outcasts/heroes -- the James Deans, the Kerouacs, the Cobains. But only kids of the 1980s have Duckie Dale. In Pretty in Pink, Hughes never tells us about Duckie's family -- he doesn't have to, because the wing-tip shoes, stripped-bare mattress, thrift-store jacket, and Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" do all the talking. And when New Order's "Thieves Like Us" kicks in as Duckie takes his ragtag bike for a spin past Andie's house, just forget it. For a 17-year-old kid spurned by love in 1986, that was cool incarnate. Andie Walsh may have been from the wrong side of the tracks, but who wouldn't want to adore a redhead who lives in a house with Mondrian posters and a stash of sewing notions and vintage fabrics, even if her dad sits around in a wife-beater all day? When it came to the ultimate micro-cultivation of Hughes' character cool, though, Ferris Bueller took the cake: the hot girlfriend, the stately suburban two-story, Bryan Ferry on his bedroom wall and the trophy-rigged doorknob parent trap? "Oh Yeah," indeed.
The music in his films wasn't groundbreaking, but the way Hughes (and his music directors) bound the music to each character's psyche and story was fresh and unforgettable. That's why, to this day, when we hear OMD's "If You Leave," we think of Molly Ringwald kissing Andrew McCarthy; or when we see a Seurat painting, we automatically hear the Dream Academy's instrumental version of the Smith's "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" and see Matthew Broderick, Mia Sara, and Alan Ruck staring at the pointillism.
Who was John Hughes? We may never know much about the man, but spend a few hours rewinding Farmer Ted in Sixteen Candles or Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful or Iona in Pretty in Pink, and you'll discover that Hughes' films didn't have to be diverse to have heart.
Follow Kristi York Wooten on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kristiwooten
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People who love his work from the 80s do so because he held up a mirror to suburban American teens of that era. Hughes wasn't trying to make films that were insufferable politically correct harangues. And that's just another great thing about him and his work.
I understand that taste in movies (just like anything else) is subjective. And that's fine. But I feel sorry for people who analyze movies on the basis of whether they fit a narrow political agenda.
My problem was not with representing a certain slice of America. I went to largely white, upper class schools. And experienced little overt racism. And I could identify with many of the school life experiences he portrayed, regardless of my race.
My problem is with his racial stereotyping. They were largely unnecessary in his films. he would have been better served just eliminating them. And if people can't recognize the negative racial stereotyping or the problems they can cause, it seems people might need to reassess their racial issue awareness.
Spare Me all your self- righteous pontificating on Hughes Films, they were espacist entertainment and outside of Breakfast Club and Weird Science most of them were average films with great soundtracks. As for the racial element it was Reagan's America and Hughes films was a reclaimation of "whiteness" and 1950's America after the first culture wars of the 60's and 70's. for Blacks like myself Hughes and the Cosby Show was an illusion because the crack wars where I grew up was begining to rear its ugly head and take people's lives and souls. I loathed both Hughes and Cosby for their shows and simplistic messages.
THANK GOD FOR THE GOLDEN AGE OF HIP- HOP AND BLACK ROCK OR I WOULD HAVE TOTALLY THROWN UP !!
Good post.
The Hughes films, particularly the ones you mentioned in your post, were part of the idealized, Reagan Revolution. It was the start of the conservative political zeitgeist. It was the height of the Cold War and we were "winning." Hughes understood, like many of his movies, that the paying public, those that buy movie tickets, were not overwhelmingly minorities. Thus, it was easy to marginalize them like the politik of the day.
Hughes married the second coming of British Invasion, New Wave music, with relatively tame dialogue and plots. But, that was the magic of a Hughes movie. Simple storylines about teenage angst coupled with flashy styles and season it with New Order or OMD or Oingo Boingo.
One can contrast Hughes movies and his style with, say Porky's or Fast Times or even, Less Than Zero. These movies are grittier and harsher and darker; in direct opposition of a Hughes movies, and that's ok.
Don't we all have a little 'white middle class teenager' in us all?
John Hughes once admitted that he couldn't accurately portray the black experience in America.
Spike Lee does that.
Showing issues and problems of ethnic minorities was not what Hughes did. But I can't say it was a bad thing that he made movies about what he knew. Whether or not they accurately reflected your reality growing up, they reflected the feelings of millions of teenagers in the 80s. Look at the people in the films as characters- outside of their race- they are about the feelings ALL teens have of isolation and being on the outside. No matter how popular you are, how good an athlete, etc. If you know you are on the 'wrong side of the tracks' a la Pretty in Pink and will NEVER make the status quo- you can embrace that like Ducky or try for a while to fit in, but decide to be true to yourself and your indie -record store friends.
Race is a HUGE component of how kids identify and see themselves, yes. But it isn't the only one.If Hughes had tried to make a film dealing with race specifically or using characters of another race to make a point, maybe he would have felt like a phoney- that is not an experience he came by personally. And maybe he would have been right. It doesn't invalidate the films he did make or their impact on teenagers.
It was the 80s. The major Black star at the time was Eddie Murphy. And after the "Black-ploitation" period, many Black actors were practically getting their feet wet in Mainstream HollyWood.
I'm not gonna diss on Hughes because of the lack of ethnicity in his films. He was only going from what he knows for the most part. Two of my favorite films from that period are "THE BREAKFAST CLUB" and "PRETTY IN PINK". These were White kids in THEIR environment. Plus I was in love with Molly Ringwald.
It would be like me dissing on James Cameron's "ALIENS".
Film's a classic sequel in every sense.
But for a while, myself and a few of my buds at the time couldn't stop talking about how all the Black Space Marines got offed within the first 15 minutes. All at once.
But we still loved the film.
And I seriously doubt Cameron was/is racist.
The Latina woman ( wise or not) makes it for quite a while though. And a lot of the uptight white men are real jerks and at least one is a whiney crybaby to boot. So I feel like it kind of evens out.
John Hughes was not trying to use his films to make a statement about valuing diversity and inclusion. The worldviews he captured on film were those of suburban white teens for whom minorities were just part of the scenery. Like it or not, that was the reality of the 80s. But at least Hughes did acknowledge the presence of minorities in the suburbs and inner cities depicted in his films. This is entirely different from Woody Allen and the producers of the Jerry Steinfield Show or Friends - both located in New York City where one had to literally stage locations that did NOT include any minorities.
As a minority who grew up in those exact chicago suburbs where Hughes films were set and shot, his depiction was completely accurate. There were only a handful of non-whites at my school, and race was never really an issue of any kind for me growing up. I was just another kid. Despite having universal themes, his films are actually very specific about the North Shore region they are set in. He wasn't making films set in anytown usa and to expect them to reflect the racial palette of the entire country would've been dishonest. I loved those films growing up, and had way more in common with the kids in The Breakfast Club than any character in one of Spike Lee's or John Singelton's films.
I think it's as off base to critique a dead man's work just as it was when beloved MJ left us and the PC pop culture police were having a field day. Back in the 1980s America was hanging onto the last gasp of its innocence. To downplay Hughes' teen epics because they didn't look like the United Nations reeks of feel good killjoyishness or retro bashing. For fans of civilized entertainment who live in the past, classic TV and movies could do no wrong. The late John Hughes was a giant of the teen film epic. Such a loss deserves a measure of respect and not to be raked over the coals of snobby, ageist filmic criticism.
No one is trashing the character of John Hughes -- which is what many people went out of their ways to do regarding Michael Jackson.
Hughes' films to many of us were mindless, passable entertainment. Something to do on a Friday or Saturday night at the mall. During that same periid, MJ was making music and music videos and small films that WERE racially diverse or unexpected in the way the were cast.
Ms. Wooten suggests that maintaining the "all-American" status quo in his films was just fine. But from a pop culture standpoint, that very white world in Hughes' films was both an echo of and a precursor to this false notion of "color-blindness" (the phony "I don't see race".) White kids living in white neighborhoods going to white schools with their white friends, and anyone else of any other ethnicity was "foreign", "alien" , "other" "un-American" outsiders.
We can critique his films as predictable, formulaic and homogenized -- on par with the Andy Hardy films of 1930s and 40s.
Three words: Long. Duk. Dong.
No more yanky my wanky. Donger need food!
Automobile!? [laughter, car driving sounds, splash sound] Lake. Big lake!
"Filmmaker John Hughes was no Thornton Wilder. The characters he envisaged weren't of the universal Our Town variety, and the halls of the so-called all-American high schools...."
I don't recall any minorities in "Our Town." Hughes' "all-American" high schools were a certain kind of "all-American." The towns were white - and where there were minorities lurking in the background, it's because the character found themselves in the "really wrong" part of town. The foreign exchange students were of the "acceptable" Asian persuasion and have to go home, at some point It was the preppy white jerks versus the poor white trash.
If your African-American girlfriends "liked" "Pretty in Pink," or "16 Candles," it wasn't because they were drooling over James Spader, Andrew MacCarthy or the other interchangeable white boys. As mindless Friday night entertainment, it was passable. It told us a lot about what makes you tick. "The Breakfast Club" had cute fashions (there's a brown suede skirt I still covet.) But it highlighted the inequities of a system that gives you Saturday morning study hall and the black kids (if any) expelled.
It made your world small, self-centered, fixated on material things, social status and ultimately safe -- for you. It reminded us that our world was more complex and we couldn't skate by on looks or vintage fabric sewn into a fetching ensemble. It taught us what we were up against.
I enjoyed the more mad-cap aspects of Hughes' pictures, but I don't remember personally having too hard a time with many diverse "cliques" in school. I got along with and hung out with the preps, jocks, nerds, pot-heads, rich kids, and poor kids fairly equally. I thought all of their tastes in music sucked, and I never really identified with any one group though.
So long John...
kristi- i gotta point out a couple things
hughes didn't "blindly omit race". long-duc dong(sp?) was an extremely "racial" character. also, blacks weren't depicted as very trustworthy in "Vacation," and the guys who joy-rided in cameron's dad's car in ferris bueller had a decidedly ethnic edge. anthony michael hall also took on a stereotypical black voice in "weird science".
also, i would say that cameron crowe captured real teen life a little better in "fast times..." than hughes ever did.
all this negative stuff aside, i did enjoy hughes' films growing up.
Fast Times? Really? Fast Times was nothing more than an exploitation flick that said nothing about the real teenage condition in the 1980s.
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