I’ve been wanting to blog about John Hughes for some time and with his recent passing I’ve given it a bit more thought.  Andrew’s blog on generation was the most recent time, as I was thinking about how each generation has its cultural touchstones.  Gen-Xers might recall their reactions to:: coming of age in the era of Reagan or Mulrooney, the AIDS scare, seeing John Hughes films, hearing the ubiquity of pop stars like Springsteen, Madonna, and Michael Jackson, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen massacre, political correctness, being typified by a slacker young-adulthood, relating to Cobain’s angst, relating to someone from the cast of Friends, living the era of diminished expectations, dot com to dot bomb, seeing Ferris Bueller 15 years later as a broken Jim McAllister {Election}, relating to the dysfunction of life through Palahniuk or the neurosis of it through David Sedaris, 9-11, celebrating failure with Wes Anderson and the Venture Brothers, the bubble economy, market meltdowns, and seeing that shift from W to O.

I was never a fan of John Hughes films.  The experiences portrayed didn’t resonate with me and the message was about the status quo masquerading as rebellion.  A few years later I would be in a French lit. course realizing that I had the same reaction to the overblown sentimentality of romanticism.  Hughes has a deft hand at skewering adults, portraying them as buffoons, and showing slabs of teenage life with all of its and pain injustices {See above clip of Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club}, but at the end of the day, the universe gravitates towards a social equilibrium of winners and losers.  Of course, with a cool soundtrack.

My “heroes” at that time were in the UK, in the likes of Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records, Tony Wilson of Factory Records, and designer Peter Saville, all iconoclasts of a sort, whose ideals would eventually clash hard with the vagaries of market capitalism.  In the mid-1980s, I felt these guys were onto something, an æsthetic and an ethos that was far removed from the suburban milieu of Hughes’ territory, which at the end of the day was just more identity posturing on my part.  I remember wanting to go to university in order to start the next Rough Trade, back when alternative was post-punk or new music.  So, imagine my chagrin upon seeing Hughes coöpt music that mattered to me back in the day, e.g., The English Beat {Ferris Bueller racing to get home running through yards to “Rotating Heads”, Psychedelic Furs {“Pretty in Pink”}, and the Smiths {The Dream Academy covering “Please, Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”}.

Hughes’ mid-1980s was squarely in the Reagan era and his films are evocative of the zeitgeist of the times.  I think several of Hughes’ films capture this well and I can’t help but wonder how growing up in this era has affected Gen-X.  Hughes was a conservative himself and the defunct Premiere magazine dubbed him as a Normal-Rockwell-in-Hollywood type of guy.  I think this 2006 Slate article has it right, his “conservatism” wasn’t one that celebrated old money elitism and stuffiness, but rather an optimistic Reagan Republicanism with a party-animal twist.  Put another way, a middle-of-the-road “moderatism” of quiet desperation punctuated by good times.  Rebellion was an incrementalist affair and our individualistic identities navigate seemingly treacherous waters of acceptance, but at the end of the day, nothing really changes.  Misguided as it may have been, this is how I perceived many of my peers.  Aware of the hypocrisy of society, but far too complacent to do anything about it.  I would meet revolutionary characters from Gen-X years later, but it dawned on me that in a generation that often values the status quo, iconoclasts are going to be hard to spot, as they’re often content to be flying under the radar.

On a ThickCulture note, I finally had the pleasure of meeting Andrew Lindner at this year’s ASA.  I now feel pressure to get up to speed with soccer in order to have something reasonably intelligent to say when he and José start talking about the game.

Twitterversion:: Pondering political conservatism of #JohnHughes, captured 80s zeitgeist& a GenX touchstone. Does this inform who GenX is? http://url.ie/27hk  @Prof_K