Authors: Hadley Freeman
Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (20 page)
‘Class consciousness was very important to John, and you can see it as he wrote about it so much,’ says Broderick. ‘He didn’t talk about things like that so much but as time has passed I’ve realised that although he was very conservative politically, I think, he had a real problem with wealth when it was too concentrated. He always writes about it, even in something like
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
. There’s very often somebody with money and somebody without. With Ferris, he tried to keep it on a fable level but those elements are definitely still in there.’
This issue of class consciousness became, thanks largely to Hughes, such a staple of eighties teen movies it is as much of a cliché as the climactic prom. But it is the one ingredient to the genre that has never been picked up by its many copyists. Plenty of films have come out in the past decade that pay explicit homage to eighties teen films, especially Hughes’s teen films, from
Easy A
to
21 Jump Street
, which the film’s star and producer, Jonah Hill, described as ‘a mix of
Bad Boys
and a John Hughes film’. But none of these films ever deals with the class issues that Hughes depicted. Partly this is because the people who make these homages are remembering the films from when they saw them as kids and, by and very large, kids didn’t notice all these arguments about social mobility, focusing instead on the power ballads and fights in the school canteen. But it is also because Hollywood – and by extension America – doesn’t talk about class issues the way it used to.
‘There is an avoidance of talk about class identification now. You’ll hear talk of gender identification, sexuality identification, race identification, but never class,’ says Eileen Jones, a lecturer in film and media at UC Berkeley, and a writer for the socialist-leaning magazine
Jacobin
. ‘Class identification, in America at least, is going through what feminism went through in the eighties: it is completely passé.’
What is even more passé is to say that social mobility is impossible. This goes specifically against the American dream and therefore verges dangerously into the kind of talk that will get a filmmaker denounced by Fox News. Mainstream Hollywood movies that have depicted social mobility in the past twenty years, such as
Erin Brockovich
or even
Pretty Woman
, have all suggested that it is possible to lift oneself out of one’s class (even if one has to become a prostitute and – even worse – spend a week with Richard Gere in Beverly Hills to do so). Teen movies of the 1980s argue precisely the opposite. ‘Eighties films were willing to deal with being poor and people’s lives being screwed over by economic structures. You hardly see that at all in movies today,’ says Dr James Russell, Principal Lecturer in film, De Montfort University.
The reason American teen movies specifically stopped featuring class issues after the eighties can be traced, again, back to one specific film:
Clueless
.
Clueless
was so big it inevitably changed everything about how teen films were framed, including the trend in teen pop culture of showing, not how middle-class American teenagers actually live, but how they didn’t even know they would like to live. Already by the mid-1990s teen films such as
10 Things I Hate About You
and
American Pie
were depicting a world in which all teenagers came from the same upper-middle social class, in which everyone lived in big houses and drove big cars. Sure, there were still cliques and outcasts in the schools, but these had nothing to do with social class. Instead, the idea of a poor or even lower-middle-class kid appearing in a teen film today feels as outdated as a movie about workers unions.
But instead of looking at why American teen movies in particular don’t deal with class any more, the question could be instead why so many of them did in the eighties.
‘Never underestimate Hollywood’s eagerness to copy something successful,’ laughs
Dirty Dancing
’s Eleanor Bergstein. ‘The reason so many teen movies talked about class is because those movies were successful, so then more movies would come along just like them.’
Another factor is the demographic of the people who made the films. Hughes was from a lower-middle-class family, Bergstein grew up in a similar economic situation and
Dirty Dancing
was born out of memories of her childhood, ‘and these were subjects that we talked about,’ she says. It is impossible to find precise statistics about the demographics of who works in Hollywood now but one thing is widely agreed on: ‘Hollywood has never been culturally diverse, but it’s getting narrower, and it’s definitely narrower than it was thirty years ago,’ says Dr James Russell. ‘It’s much more male and more white and largely college-educated and middle-class. It doesn’t draw from a particularly broad background, at least at the top end. It’s hard to imagine Sam Peckinpah getting in today.’
But probably the most crucial factor of all is the fact that movies today are more dependent than ever on the international market.
‘You can’t sell a movie to Japan or China that is about specific American cultural issues. So while American movies are still set in America, they are much vaguer and certainly not about American social issues,’ says Dr Russell. ‘Also, it tended to be mid-budget films that dealt with social issues in the eighties, and Hollywood doesn’t make films with those budgets any more. It makes big blockbusters or low-budget independents.’ Hollywood in the 1980s produced hundreds of films about American social issues. Four alone were produced about the 1980s farm crisis:
Field of Dreams
,
Places in the Heart
,
Country
and
The River
. These days, social engagement is left to the niche independents while the big-budget movies that are aimed at the masses take care to talk about nothing specific at all.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
isn’t just a fantasy about wealth, it’s about growing up. The best of Hughes’s teen films –
The Breakfast Club
,
Pretty in Pink
and
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
– are ultimately about the dread of growing up, of moving away, of losing that sparkle you have as a teenager and becoming as dead inside as all the adults seem to be around you. Everyone who watches those films as teenagers grows up with that dread and, eventually, regret about it. And this is something Hughes struggled with as much as any of his fans. It is ironic that Hughes, who made such a sparkling film fantasising about what it would be like to be rich and popular, struggled when he attained that status for himself.
By the time he started shooting
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
, Hughes was already, as Broderick puts it, ‘the god-like Spielberg figure of teen movies’. By the time it came out, and became his biggest success, he was one of the most sought-after directors and writers in Hollywood. Everyone wanted to meet and work with the former kid who used to lurk around museums on his own. ‘And John, I think, really didn’t like it,’ says Howard Deutch. ‘He always felt like an outsider, and that’s how he was able to write those characters. When he became successful out in LA and everybody wanted him, from Spielberg to Katzenberg, and all the power elite all wanted to do business with him, he found himself as a member of the insiders boy club. I think he felt like it was actually an obstacle to writing these characters that he believed in because he no longer felt like himself.’
So Hughes and his family moved back to Chicago, Hughes’s hometown where he always felt happiest, and he continued to write. But the films he wrote ‘never had the emotional impact I recognised as John’s real skill’, says Molly Ringwald. Instead, particularly from 1990 onwards, he wrote his ‘dopey-ass comedies’:
Beethoven
,
101 Dalmatians
and, of course,
Home Alone
. He no longer wrote about soulful teenage outcasts, maybe because he knew he no longer was one.
He also cut himself off from almost all the friends he’d made on those teen films, leaving them behind when he left the genre. ‘I went to John’s funeral and I realised when I was there that I hadn’t actually seen him in over a decade,’ recalls Broderick. ‘It was sad because it had been such a happy set when we were making the film, and even afterwards John would invite Jennifer [Grey] and me to his house and we’d hang out in the pool with his family.’ He smiles at the memory, and then sighs: ‘But then he just disappeared.’
Ferris had his one perfect day. It’s what comes after that can be a drag.
THE TEN BEST LOVE SONGS ON AN EIGHTIES MOVIE SOUNDTRACK
10 ‘Almost Paradise’, by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson, from
Footloose
The song from when the kids are waiting for the prom to start. A classic eighties duet.
9 ‘It Might Be You’, by Stephen Bishop, from
Tootsie
One giant cheese mountain of a song, and that is no bad thing.
8 ‘Let’s Hear it for the Boy’, by Deniece Williams, from
Footloose
Everything about this song, including the spelling of the singer’s name, is adorable.
7 ‘I Melt With You’, by Modern English, from
Valley Girl
This song should be better known. The movie, on the other hand, should not.
6 ‘Hungry Eyes’, by Eric Carmen, from
Dirty Dancing
Quality keyboard intro, bonus points for use in the best montage of the decade.
5 ‘Take My Breath Away’, by Berlin, from
Top Gun
This song is so good it makes having sex with Tom Cruise seem almost sexy.
4 ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’, by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, from
Dirty Dancing
It is a testament to the quality of love songs from eighties films that this classic is not at number one.
3 ‘Waiting for a Star to Fall’, by Boy Meets Girl, from
Mannequin
Terrible film, amazing song from the best one-hit-wonder band of all time.
2 ‘In Your Eyes’, by Peter Gabriel, from
Say Anything
The most beautiful song in the world, and that is a scientific fact.
1 ‘She’s Like the Wind’, by Patrick Swayze, from
Dirty Dancing
Patrick Swayze sang AND wrote this little piece of genius. Obviously it’s number one.
Of all the many extraordinary qualities that eighties Hollywood movies possess – the glorious hairstyles, their respect for power ballads, the endearing amount of confidence they had in the acting abilities of Steve Guttenberg – their depiction of women is not, strangely, generally cited as being among their strengths. Eighties movies, the theory has long gone, were absolutely awful when it came to women, and no one argued this more vociferously at the time than feminist critics. ‘The backlash [against feminism] shaped much of Hollywood’s portrayal of women in the eighties,’ Susan Faludi writes in the 1990s
Backlash
, in her famous chapter looking specifically at eighties movies. ‘Hollywood restated and reinforced the backlash thesis: women were unhappy because they were too free; their liberation had denied them marriage and motherhood … [whereas] in the 1970s, the film industry would have a brief infatuation with the feminist cause.’
Faludi is right about one thing: between the seventies and the eighties movies did change their attitude towards feminism. In the seventies there was a slew of overtly feminist films about independent women, such as
Private Benjamin
,
My Brilliant Career
,
Norma Rae
and
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
. Marriage was shown to be a prison for women in films such as, most famously,
The Stepford Wives
. Of course, not all movies were so charmed with feminism: in 1979’s bafflingly much lauded
Kramer vs. Kramer
feminism is portrayed as something kooky and selfish. It is explicitly blamed for the breakdown of Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and Joanna’s (Meryl Streep) marriage
fn1
and, the movie insinuates, will probably result in the couple’s doe-eyed son spending the rest of his life hating women BECAUSE FEMINISM RUINS EVERYTHING. But it is fair to say that movies weren’t as explicitly interested in feminism in the eighties as they were in the seventies – with the noted and glorious exception of 1980’s
Nine to Five
. In this still very funny film, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and the glorious Lily Tomlin fight their sexist pig of a boss (Dabney Coleman) for equal pay, flexible working hours and an in-office nursery (come back, Dolly, Jane and Lily! We working women of the twenty-first century still need you!).
It is also certainly true that some 1980s movies were decidedly nervy about feminism – as nervy, in fact, as
Kramer vs. Kramer
. In 1988’s
Die Hard
, for example, the whole reason John McClane (Bruce Willis) is visiting LA, where he is nearly killed by Alan Rickman’s German accent, is because his wife Holly (the brilliantly named Bonnie Bedelia) has SELFISHLY insisted on moving there for her career. And look what THAT gets her: a destroyed office, traumatised children and a beat-up husband. FEMINISM RUINS EVERYTHING. Thank heavens her husband happens to be in town to save her from her dreadful feminist mistake, right? Just to make the point even more clearly that this woman is a selfish feminist cow, she insists on going by her maiden name which is, like, totally outrageous, the film suggests, because her husband loves her so much. But by the end, she has learned her lesson and introduces herself as ‘Holly McClane’. Her husband grins happily at his newly obedient wife. In the next scene, we see the McClane family happily eating cupcakes the wife has just baked, as they gaze happily out of their window at the pleasing view of 1952.
The popular argument that the eighties were terrible for women in movies is primarily based on one ridiculously OTT and all-dominating piece of evidence:
Fatal Attraction
. Directed by British former ad-man Adrian Lyne,
Fatal Attraction
was so clearly designed to needle women that it might well have been written by someone from the
Daily Mail
. The film’s message is that women who work and aren’t married by the decrepit age of thirty-six are pathetic, crazed with baby hunger and deserve to be shot by good and humble housewives (I am not exaggerating – this is literally the message of the movie). Along with S&M romcom
9½ Weeks
, which was also directed by Lyne,
Fatal Attraction
tends to skew all discussions about women in eighties movies, and that’s a shame.