Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (20 page)

I don’t know how this massive cultural change happened so suddenly, with no public outcry or debate—but it did. America, we got this one right. How did this [quote fingers] “happen”?

The same thing with the way people on an airplane used to clap when the plane landed. I guess if the plane crashed, we were supposed to just fold our arms and boo? I assumed, without giving it much thought, this was going to annoy me for the rest of my life (along with everything else about air travel). Then sometime in the late 1990s, I noticed that air applause had died out. Nobody talked about not clapping anymore—they just stopped clapping.

Some annoyances persist forever, like the Eagles or “last time I checked.” Some are gone before you know it, like Dire Straits or Paris Hilton. You can’t tell which is which until it’s too late. I mean, everybody assumed Wilson Phillips were going to stick around for years. If I’d known how temporary they were, I would have enjoyed them more.

But there’s one prediction I feel confident in making. “No worries” is going to annoy people forever.

“No worries” is the best thing to happen to sullen teenagers since I was one—even better than vampire sexting, GTL or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. When I was a sullen teenager, we had to make do with the vastly inferior “whatever.”

“No worries” beats “whatever” six ways to Sunday. It’s a vaguely mystical way of saying “I hear your mouth make noise, saying something that I plan to ignore.” It has a noble Rasta-man vibe, as if you’re quoting some sort of timeless yet meaningless proverb on the nature of change—“Soon come,” or “As the cloud is slow, the wind is quick.” In terms of ignoring provocation, “no worries” is just about perfect.

I first noticed it at a rock show in the late ’90s, where somebody was accidentally kicking my friend’s calves. When this was pointed out to him, he smiled and said, “No worries!” Three times in a row. But the fourth time, he finally understood what we were saying and stopped kicking. He was a perfectly friendly and agreeable guy. He just hadn’t even
heard
us, because he had a magic shield to protect him. He had “no worries.” I did a
Rolling Stone
article on MTV’s Carson Daly, which meant following him around all day while people bugged him for decisions or reactions or favors. He kept saying, “Yeah, no worries,” which struck me as the most brilliant possible response to any stupid request. Suddenly, “whatever” was just not sullen enough.

Every time you say “no worries,” you have chosen a non-aggressive and nonconfrontational way to inform me it’s not your problem, and I admire you for that. It’s a bit like “ma’am,” an expression I picked up living in the South and wondered how I’d ever functioned without it. You can say “ma’am” to mean anything from “Excuse me, you’re blocking this supermarket aisle” to “I’m sure the flight attendant would put that in the storage bin for you” to “Are you really pretending not to notice the line starts over here?” But “ma’am” doesn’t translate in the North, where it just startles and offends. In my hometown, “ma’am” is something only a hit man would say. The first time I tried it was when I was driving around in Randolph with my dad, looking for the bakery where we were supposed to pick up my sister’s wedding cake. He pulled over and said, “Ask this lady for directions.” I rolled down my window, cleared my throat for the nice Irish woman in her front yard weeding the hedges and said, “Ma’aaaaam?” She jumped about a foot in the air.

When we pulled away, my dad asked, “Why did you call her man?”

“I didn’t. I called her ‘ma’am.’ ”

“You what?”

There was no defense.

What I should have said was, “No worries, Dad.” But sadly, this hadn’t been invented yet.

When John Hughes died in the summer of 2009, I grieved because he’d never gotten to use “no worries” in a movie, though he’d already given us so much. Being a sullen teenager when those John Hughes movies came out—well, it must have been like how it felt to be a real-life button man in the Gambino family when Al Pacino started making gangster flicks. Today we remember those films as a unit, but they came out one by one, year by year. After seeing one installment, we had to wait months for the next. We had no way of knowing
Sixteen Candles
was a bridge to the still-unimaginable
Breakfast Club.
And we had no way of knowing they would culminate in
Pretty in Pink
, the apex of the Molly Trilogy. Hughes personally had nothing to do with
St. Elmo’s Fire
, but since it came out between
The Breakfast Club
and
Pretty in Pink
, it went into the canon too—it was to the Molly Trilogy what
Mean Streets
is to the
Godfather
movies.

Throw in
Weird Science
,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
and
Some Kind of Wonderful
and you get the mythic canon of an ur-American teen utopia. Thanks to years of weekend-afternoon reruns, these movies still define high school agony, even for kids (especially girls) who weren’t born when they came out. You’re never more than a few minutes away from hearing somebody quote Judd Nelson (“Could you describe the ruckus, sir?”) or Anthony Michael Hall (“Not many girls in contemporary American society today would give their underwear to help a geek like me”). This guy could really describe a ruckus. He knew how to listen.

When he died, it was startling to realize how famous he was, especially since he hadn’t directed a movie in years. But despite his reclusive ways, he was arguably Hollywood’s most famous director. Even at the time, he was as famous as the Brat Packers in his movies—when
Pretty in Pink
came out, everyone called it the new “John Hughes movie,” even though he’d farmed out the actual directing to his associate Howard Deutch. In the 2001 sleaze comedy
Not Another Teen Movie
(one of my favorite films of the past decade, to my shame), the kids go to John Hughes High, while the football team plays in Harry Dean Stadium.

It’s a sign of how 1980s teen culture keeps on resonating—even people who were born in the ’90s can O.D. on borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s. Maybe that’s because it was an era when teen trash was the only corner of pop culture that wasn’t a high-gloss fraud. Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s, and music for adults sucked even worse; whether we’re talking Kathleen Turner flicks or Steve Winwood albums, the decade’s non-teen culture has no staying power at all. The only sign of life
was
teen trash, the most despised, frivolous and temporary stuff out there. Alyssa Milano wasn’t lying: “Teen steam! You gotta let it out!”

To simplify brutally, there were really only two kinds of movies in the ’80s:

It goes without saying that the first kind remains lingua franca, while the second kind was forgotten by the time the ’90s started and seems both hideously dated and joyless now. One of the reasons we remember these movies so clearly is that they were so much more honest than the Hollywood adult movies of the day. There was a feeling of expensive mendacity to all the aging baby-boomer dramas, all those sensitive flicks with William Hurt or Michael Douglas or Melanie Griffith backlit with baby oil all over the lens. The moment that sums it up for me is the truly loathsome opening shot of
Top Gun
, with the caption “Indian Ocean: Present Day.” That totally sums up where Hollywood culture was at in 1986: the ruling principle was that the “Present Day” would always look, sound and feel exactly like 1986—too horrible a thought to even contemplate.

There was already a glorious teen movie boom before John Hughes showed up. In 1982 we got
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, which still gets my vote as the decade’s best movie. But in the early ’80s we also got
Class, Risky Business, Getting It On, The Last American Virgin, Private School, Paradise, The Legend of Billie Jean, The Beach Girls, Vision Quest, Footloose
,
Flashdance
and many more.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
is one of the all-time best movies about growing up Catholic, with Sarah Jessica Parker as the bespectacled geek girl who longs to go on
Dance-TV,
and Helen Hunt as her wisecracking friend (“Hail Mary? Sorry Sister, I thought you meant ‘Proud Mary,’ but I do a great Tina Turner!”). Even the nuns in this movie get to be cool.
Dirty Dancing
was just a big-budget copy of this movie, although an admittedly great one. (Hard to go wrong with Patrick Swayze.) People obsess about the strangest teen movies. When I’m walking around in Greenpoint, my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I always take a loop around McGolrick Park to the side street where one of my neighbors is parked with a license plate that reads WORDMAN. I always think, damn, that is one hard-core
Eddie and the Cruisers
fan. And who thought that in 2010, there’d be any kind of
Eddie and the Cruisers
fan?

The teen movie explosion was mostly garbage, sure. But as a rebellion against smug Hollywood pap, the garbage meant something. And Phoebe Cates? She
really
meant something.

John Hughes’s movies were special because they had the sassiest girls, the cattiest boys, the most relatable boy-girl friendships and bumbling parents and big sisters on muscle relaxants. For those of us who were sullen teenagers, it shocked us how he got the details right, especially the music. “I’d rather be making music than movies,” he said in 1985, describing himself as a frustrated guitarist. “
Pretty in Pink
was written to the Psychedelic Furs, Lou Reed and Mott the Hoople.
The Breakfast Club
was written in my Clash-Elvis Costello period.”

That’s how we got the
Pretty in Pink
soundtrack, one of the defining ’80s new-wave albums. You could complain that when the Psychedelic Furs did their remake of “Pretty in Pink” for this movie, it was about one-third as good as the original. I would counter that until this movie, girls never listened to the original; once “Pretty in Pink” became a song girls actually liked, it became a totally different song.

His movies had loads of talk; it’s no coincidence that the generation weaned on
The Breakfast Club
was the generation that decided John Cassavetes was the great American filmmaker. I first fell for Molly Ringwald in a movie where she plays John Cassavetes’ daughter, Miranda to his Prospero, in the 1982 Shakespeare update
Tempest.
When a cute American boy arrives to rescue her from desert island drudgery, the first thing she asks him is “So is punk still big in the States?”

But John Hughes didn’t bother trying to catch how teens “really” talked, which then as now just meant “um” and “you know.” Instead, he indulged his genius for invented catchphrases. It’s not like any of us actually said things like “So I smell” or “While we’re on the topic of the double-breasted party machine,” but he had an ear for what we were trying to say.

Here’s just one example: it’s easy to forget now, but
Sixteen Candles
invented the word “geek” as we know it. Before Anthony Michael Hall played the kid listed in the credits only as “the Geek,” geeks were just called “wusses” or other homophobic epithets. The word “geek” was just an arcane reference to the old Dr. Demento novelty “Pencil Neck Geek.” (It doesn’t come up once in
Fast Times
, which goes for “wuss” instead.) The geek as a social category didn’t exist before
Sixteen Candles
entered the Anthony Michael Hall of Fame. Now, can you imagine a day without that word? Hughes knew geekdom: he even did a cameo as Hall’s dad in
The Breakfast Club,
dropping him off with an E MC2 license plate. (This joke helped the geeks in the theater figure out where all the other geeks were sitting, since we were the ones who laughed.)

To me, his most famous and beloved creation is Duckie, from
Pretty in Pink.
It has been suggested in some quarters that Duckie is, in fact, the Messiah. This suggestion is probably correct. The parallels are daunting: Jon Cryer and Jesus Christ? Practically the same name! Both are poor Jewish boys with absent fathers. Both make the ultimate sacrifice so that others may have life—or, if they prefer, Andrew McCarthy. Duckie tells Andie, “I would have died for you!” Both have a very special relationship with Dweezil Zappa. Duck of God, you take away the sins of the world; grant us peace.

The Duckman is at the heart of the central question of the John Hughes universe: Why, Andie, why? Why does Molly’s character go for hot richie Blaine (McCarthy) when she could have the lavishly moussed Duckie? It’s amazing how violently people argue over the end of
Pretty in Pink
. To this day, there’s a popular legend that the original version of the movie had Andie choosing Duckie, except it supposedly got changed after test screenings. I’ll believe this when I see it—but given that this scene has never shown up anywhere, not even in the DVD outtakes, I’m going to keep believing this “lost original” is a myth that just illustrates how much people love Duckie.

I love Duckie too, but what makes him Duckie is the selfless way he accepts the ruckus of female desire, and the way he wants her to get what she wants. So he urges Andie to go dance with Blaine, even though Blaine’s a jerk, and even though Blaine showed up to the prom wearing an even goofier outfit than Duckie’s. And of course, Duckie ends up getting jumped by another girl—Kristy Swanson!—before the song even ends. That’s teen utopia for you.

Those final seconds of
Pretty in Pink
will always be controversial—but they sum up why I will always love John Hughes movies. The sullen teenager inside me needs Duckie to set Molly free, and so the sullen teenager inside me will go to his grave defending that final scene.
Pretty in Pink
shows why sullen teenagers will always exist and will always annoy people. You disagree? Hey—no worries.