{"id":1699,"date":"2009-08-12T00:26:27","date_gmt":"2009-08-12T05:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=1699"},"modified":"2009-08-12T00:39:12","modified_gmt":"2009-08-12T05:39:12","slug":"the-political-moderatism-of-john-hughes-gen-x-the-status-quo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2009\/08\/12\/the-political-moderatism-of-john-hughes-gen-x-the-status-quo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Political Moderatism of John Hughes:: Gen X & the Status Quo"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Click<\/a>
Click on image to play clip - Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club on family life<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve been wanting to blog about John Hughes for some time and with his recent passing I\u2019ve given it a bit more thought.\u00a0 Andrew\u2019s blog<\/a><\/strong> on generation was the most recent time, as I was thinking about how each generation has its cultural touchstones.\u00a0 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I was never a fan of John Hughes films.\u00a0 The experiences portrayed didn\u2019t resonate with me and the message was about the status quo masquerading as rebellion.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/a><\/strong>}, but at the end of the day, the universe gravitates towards a social equilibrium of winners and losers.\u00a0 Of course, with a cool soundtrack.<\/p>\n

My \u201cheroes\u201d at that time were in the UK, in the likes of Geoff Travis<\/a><\/strong> of Rough Trade Records, Tony Wilson<\/a><\/strong> of Factory Records, and designer Peter Saville<\/a><\/strong>, all iconoclasts of a sort, whose ideals would eventually clash hard with the vagaries of market capitalism.\u00a0 In the mid-1980s, I felt these guys were onto something, an \u00e6sthetic and an ethos that was far removed from the suburban milieu of Hughes\u2019 territory, which at the end of the day was just more identity posturing on my part.\u00a0 I remember wanting to go to university in order to start the next Rough Trade, back when alternative was post-punk or new music.\u00a0 So, imagine my chagrin upon seeing Hughes co\u00f6pt music that mattered to me back in the day, e.g.,<\/em> The English Beat {Ferris Bueller racing to get home running through yards to \u201cRotating Heads\u201d, Psychedelic Furs {\u201cPretty in Pink\u201d}, and the Smiths {The Dream Academy covering \u201cPlease, Please Please Let Me Get What I Want<\/a><\/strong>\u201d}.<\/p>\n

Hughes\u2019 mid-1980s was squarely in the Reagan era and his films are evocative of the zeitgeist of the times.\u00a0 I think several of Hughes\u2019 films capture this well and I can\u2019t help but wonder how growing up in this era has affected Gen-X.\u00a0 Hughes was a conservative himself<\/a> <\/strong>and the defunct Premiere magazine dubbed him as a Normal-Rockwell-in-Hollywood type of guy.\u00a0 I think this 2006 Slate article<\/a><\/strong> has it right, his \u201cconservatism\u201d wasn\u2019t one that celebrated old money elitism and stuffiness, but rather an optimistic Reagan Republicanism with a party-animal twist.\u00a0 Put another way, a middle-of-the-road \u201cmoderatism\u201d of quiet desperation punctuated by good times.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Misguided as it may have been, this is how I perceived many of my peers.\u00a0 Aware of the hypocrisy of society, but far too complacent to do anything about it.\u00a0 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\u2019re often content to be flying under the radar.<\/p>\n

On a ThickCulture note, I finally had the pleasure of meeting Andrew Lindner<\/a><\/strong> at this year\u2019s ASA<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 I now feel pressure to get up to speed with soccer in order to have something reasonably intelligent to say when he and Jos\u00e9 start talking about the game.<\/p>\n

Twitterversion::<\/strong> Pondering political conservatism of #JohnHughes, captured 80s zeitgeist& a GenX touchstone. Does this inform who GenX is? http:\/\/url.ie\/27hk\u00a0\u00a0@Prof_K<\/a><\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve been wanting to blog about John Hughes for some time and with his recent passing I\u2019ve given it a bit more thought.\u00a0 Andrew\u2019s blog on generation was the most recent time, as I was thinking about how each generation has its cultural touchstones.\u00a0 Gen-Xers might recall their reactions to:: coming of age in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[374],"class_list":["post-1699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-asa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1699"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1707,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1699\/revisions\/1707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}