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Hughes-d and abused

John Hughes is my hero. It’s basically his fault that I spend a lot of time wishing I’d been a teenager in the ’80s, at school with Judd Nelson and/or Ferris Bueller, rather than the rather lifeless noughties. And it seems that his ’80s hits are making a funny sort of comeback under the radar.

Hacked Off Films’s decision to screen Ferris Bueller for their immersive cinema experience in Oxford earlier this term, and its considerable success, is a great indicator of how relevant Hughes’ feel-good, close-range plotting is to our age group. Two recent Hollywood blockbusters have employed his work in a way which suggests his messaging is more relevant than the confusing knitwear combinations and gravity defying hairdos might initially appear. Yet these homages seem to fall a long way short of doing him justice, or even understanding what he achieved in his early work. 

Hughes’ brilliant mastery of the art of soundtrack is (rather horrifyingly) re-employed in last year’s act-trocity Pitch Perfect: lead boy introduces lead girl to The Breakfast Club and romance ensues, with the climax being her recognition of its (and thus by some logic also his) brilliance. The problem is that the Hughes classic, its soundtrack and its images are introduced with no noticeable connection, and the iconic final freezeframe of Judd Nelson’s fist-in-the-air triumph, with Simple Minds’ classic anthem ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’, is used and re-used to the point where even its meaning in the original becomes confused, let alone its significance in a film about a singing competition.

A marginally less appalling appropriation of Hughes is Easy-A, which is guilty of trying the recreate the Judd Nelson salute, this time in the context of an entirely predictably romantic ending which provides neither character with a moment of self-definition or personal triumph (the entire Brat Pack would roll in their video-cassette box.)

These films which so desperately seek to recreate Hughes’ memorability and emotional engagement seem to have missed Hughes’ central genius of characterisation, and this is what creates the black hole into which references to him fall. Their two-dimensionality (Pitch Perfect’s girl-with-divorced-parents-and-therefore-Commitment-Issues is genuinely toe curling) is a poor board on which to pin the genius of Hughes, and so what seems like a kooky and cinematic allusion becomes an unwise way of demonstrating how comparatively poor the film actually is within the genre.

That said, Olive herself delivers the following line, which might be timelessly relevant (particularly in such a week as this): “Just once, I want my life to be like an ’80s movie, preferably one with a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason. But no, no, John Hughes did not direct my life.”

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