John Hughes and Generational Scripture

When I logged on tonight to check my email and saw that filmmaker John Hughes had passed, I got a little wistful.

I read the articles and Hughes' film credits and with the name of every movie, wave after wave of very specific, very powerful memories came back to me: sleepovers at my best friend Jon's house in junior high, popcorn, Cokes, and Hughes on VHS; my jones for Molly Ringwald; memorizing every single noxious line of dialogue in Ferris Bueller's Day Off; the way The Breakfast Club so satisfyingly ripped away the facade from everyone's horrifying high school cliques to suggest a common humanity beneath; and most poignantly for me--in the years after we'd all left for college, gathering every Wednesday night of Thanksgiving week with a dozen or so of my high school friends to watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and enjoy one another's company as we silently watched our friendships, formed in the crucible of adolescence, slipping farther and farther into an irretrievable past.

John Hughes told fables of adolescence--but they were stories that made the actual experience of it bearable. They made us believe we'd be OK, when most weeks that outcome seemed very much in doubt. Hughes films were counter-narratives by which a geeky kid like me could believe in, if not love, then that ephemeral, delirious thing that for a teenager is even more powerful, more intoxicating, more alluring, and more redemptive than love: the crush. From the New York Times:

"Mr. Hughes... creat[ed] an ideal of American youth that allowed for idiosyncrasy and growth. Cliques could reliably be broken down, the girl could get the guy, and parents would always go out of town so you could have a killer house party.

I'm 34. It's been a long time since I dealt with detentions, pubescent angst, or crushes, thank God. It's long been part of my past. But I'm sad. A preacher whose words I cling to says "part of living a faithful life is preparing to die... it just never occurs to us that we have to bury ourselves along the way." Here I am, throwing another shovelful of dirt on my teenage self--a part of myself that, because of how utterly vulnerable it was, feels all the more precious in passing.

My friend Wesley, in his Boston Globe article, called Hughes' movies "generational scripture." And while I probably should have read the Bible as a teenager, John Hughes' movies were my Good Book. In the five or six years when living was most hellish, they offered a vision of a teenage life that was not simply better than the one I knew, but even beautiful.