if you leave
RIP JH. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thx JR
In a summer notable for what seems like a surfeit of celebrity and/or notable deaths, the passing of John Hughes has hit me the hardest, and I am not a guy who usually gets all chokey about celebrity deaths. But I was a John Hughes guy. Those movies, especially the triumvirate of The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, were as significant to me as the divinings of any priest or shaman might be to a tribe of wondering natives. Because, basically, I was a native in the land of John Hughes. I grew up in John Hughes country, in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, and came of age in the years immediately following the release of his movies. This timing, in retrospect, was perfect. I imagine the kids who already were teenagers enjoyed and were amused by his films. But to me, a few years behind, they appeared as documentaries—this was how older kids lived! All the danger, romance, excitement, heartbreak, thrills, and weight of emerging adulthood were presented and seemed like the greatest, most aspirational place to be. To be happy was to be in love, to be sad was okay because you had friends, and music, and the knowledge that this too would pass and you would become an adult. Not an adult like your absent, affluent parents, or your well-meaning but clumsy parents, or your mean, abusive parents (I’m looking at you, John Bender), but something else. Something better. I learned from John Hughes how to be cool, or at least how to try to be. I learned from John Hughes that being popular wasn’t all that important. I learned from John Hughes that being romantic was as natural and unabashed as breathing and being alive. I learned from John Hughes that healthy irreverence for authority and a sense of humor were two of the most important assets a person needed to make it through life. I learned from John Hughes that your friends were your blood and your beating heart and that without them, whoever they were, you would feel powerless. I learned (without knowing it) from John Hughes that the Midwest and the lives of us Midwesterners were invested with as much meaning and importance as anyone else’s. Sure, all these lessons were reinforced by later gurus and teachers in the world of culture and music. But I really do believe that John Hughes was somewhere close to the first to make this clear, as I sat in my basement with my friends and watched The Breakfast Club for the umpteenth time and got chills when Simple Minds kicked in even though I’d seen it a hundred times. Or as we drove around aimlessly in my parent’s Volvo station wagon smoking cigarettes and listening to the Pretty In Pink soundtrack and hoping something might happen. Or as we all, secretly and not-so-secretly, dreamt about being Ferris Bueller.
I know this is pretty maudlin stuff. It’s incredible to me that a guy who I probably hadn’t thought about in a while and certainly hadn’t ever met could die and this stuff would well up in me and I’d still be thinking about it the next morning with no end in sight. Is it over the top to call John Hughes the voice of a generation? It’s certainly cliched, but it’s not necessarily untrue. It is, I believe, safe to say that there is a generation of people who are better people, more thoughtful people, more sensitive people, because of John Hughes. And that’s a pretty great contribution to have made to the world.
59 is too young for anyone to die. But it’s especially young for someone who seemed to get being young better than almost anyone else. So I mean it when I say rest in peace, Mr. Hughes. You made the years that can be the hardest time in anyone’s life a whole lot easier for me, and I’m grateful.
