Role Models in the John Hughes Universe
As an adult, I started learning the knack of being a stealth introvert: I can act like an extrovert. At the end of the day, though, other people eventually tire me out and I need alone time. I haven't stopped being introverted, I've just learned how to socialize in a more socially-validated way. Add to that my decision in my 20s to force myself to do things that terrified me (speak my mind, write and share my writing, sing in public, public speaking, dancing in public, performance art), and I'm not acting out my shyness much lately. It's still there, but I don't allow my instinct to care so much about what other people might think about me to rule my life any more. Someone once said that shyness is a type of egotism or narcissism: you think you are so important and interesting that people are constantly watching you and taking the time tojudge what you do. Once you realize that you don't do this to anyone else, it gets easy to figure out that no one is doing it to you...unless they have a crush on you, in which case everything you do is fantastic to the observer.
In high school, despite the impressively advanced core curriculum (I took classes in college as a junior that used the same textbooks SCD used when I was a sophomore), many of my group of friends were not intellectually challenged much. I know several of us who wrote term papers and reports the night before and got As, art students who raced through the assignments given and did two or three instead of the one required, and kids reading the classics for fun, not because we had a test on them), a lot of us were frequently bored and disengaged. Those of us who weren't interested in standard social rungs like sports or cheering lacked those outlets for our energy. We're lucky to have found our niche with similarly adrift students who also had atypical interests and talents.
When you're trying to figure out what growing up and becoming an adult is all about, and finding out who, exactly, you ARE, where do you look? Teen movies these days may be re-treads of classics (Emma and Clueless, Taming of the Shrew and 10 Things I Hate About You (or so I think, having seen maybe a quarter of it on cable), Othello and "that other Julia Stiles movie I am too lazy to go look up on IMDB", the Cinderella fairy tale and She's All That, and Romeo and Juliet and ...erm... Romeo + Juliet), but often they are just one big fart joke decorated with the occasional boob flash (such as the American Pie series, which I find painfully unfunny and even kind of gross), or not-very-funny parodies of schlocky recent horror films. Sure, kids in the 80s had "Porky's" for that kind of sex-obsessed marketed-to-teens film, but we also had other options, such as charming John Hughes films.
You probably remember Grace the secretary in Ferris Bueller running down the list of high school students who belonged to various groups: sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads. How about The Breakfast Club: brains, athletes, basket cases, princesses, criminals. What if you don't fit into any of those groups? Are you forced into one? Forced to adopt the "least incorrect" labels as your own? Was our lunch table full of basket cases and geeks?
I don't remember anyone being turned away from our lunch spot, or much anxiety about roles we needed to be filling. Our table was always crowded. Were there that many folks who had no idea what roles, in an adolescence shaped by John Hughes movies and MTV videos and their messages aimed at us? Did we just not like what we were supposed to be? Not a single Farmer Ted in the lot, after all. But there could have been, and we would still speak to them when we passed in the halls if we'd befriended them elsewhere. (What peer pressure?) If you don't care what your peers think, or simply don't even notice, maybe that's a sign right there that you're letting it all wash over you and that it won't rate as important enough to remember once real life after adolecence kicks in and there are bills to pay. A defined role would shape memory: whatever you did that matched the expected role, you'd remember. Right?
Maybe Hughes should have added "artist" or "philosopher" or "iconoclast" somewhere into one of his lists of roles. Maybe one of us would have related to those. Maybe we have to be satisfied with the "geek" label, even though it doesn't fit. Or maybe we're just not the types to take cues about roles from pop culture in the first place. Maybe I got all my ideas about my personal social roles from books or thin air.
John Hughes was clever. We like being told escapist fantasy stories. Rather than trying to ape actual teen dialogue, he invented a lot of the quirkier terms wholesale, or had parental or authority figures try to ape teens (where it would sound funnier; see again Grace the secretary casually using the phrase "righteous dude") instead of the teen characters, and it sounded real because real teens heard his turns of phrase and language choices in his films and liked how it sounded, and adopted it. Which came first, actual "neo-maxie-ultra-zoom-dweebies" in real life, or in a Hughes script? I don't think it could work today: kids are more savvy. Consider the character being admonished in Mean Girls: "stop trying to make (the slang term) 'fetch' happen!" No one likes a forced meme.
Also, I need better late late late night cable programming to watch. :)
I think another stumbling block that prevents so much role model glomming by current kids, in addition to more savviness about being a target market, is that pop culture is far more rapid-fire, diffused and ephemeral now. In the 70s and 80s, before the Internet and before almost all households had cable, you saw the same movies (in the theatre; this was before VHS tapes and DVDs were available, so you couldn't pick and chose), you watched (or avoided watching) the same three to five channels on the TV (and that's all you got, kid), and unless you had older friends or siblings or a helpful music fiend at a record store feeding you tips about cool stuff, you listened to what was on one of a handful of generally crappy radio stations or available through Columbia record club (or their competitor, which I can't recall). You wore what you saw on your peers, in one of a half dozen fashion / entertainment magazines, on television sitcoms, or what was actually available in the cheapest department store chains. There were fewer sources, so even with the amazing diversity of fashion in the 80s, it still came from, say, MTV. You could tell what television and music someone liked by how they dressed. To an extent, you still can, you always were able to, but I suspect there are a lot more weekday bangers / weekend yuppies (or vice versa) these days.
What roles are being marketed to kids these days? Slut / bimbo a.k.a. Paris Hilton types? Gangsta thugs? Metrosexuals? Jam band hippies? Emos / proto-Goths? Clown band fans? Hilfiger fratrats? What? It may be more realistic to show groups of homogenous teens who are all basically interchangeable in films now (sometimes politically correct gender and race tokens are added), but what does that say? If you're not able to see yourself fitting into the firmly upper-middle class / wealthy / white American Pie crew, do you get your roles from TV, almost no one lives in a home worth less than several million dollars, even the lowliest secretaries (unless you watch BET, where your heroes can be either super wealthy, uneasily middle class, or even garbagemen, apartment complex supers, preachers and so on)?
If you're looking for self-awareness and your personal niche in life, and who you are, your role, where do you look? It's kind of frightening to think about what has gone into each of our personal self-images: a combination of the roles your peers and family chose for you, roles you liked and tried to adopt, and roles you internalized from observing others and from entertainment and media.
It might be nice to still have a John Hughes type making cartoony universes full of interesting characters we can instinctively understand. I just don't know if kids these days would be able to relate. We were younger, as teens then, than teens are now. Emotionally, life experience-wise, in terms of the educational and social opportunities available, kids are both older and more jaded, but somehow more immature. It's not something you can blame on them, it's just how things change.
Or, perhaps, I'm wrong. :)
In high school, despite the impressively advanced core curriculum (I took classes in college as a junior that used the same textbooks SCD used when I was a sophomore), many of my group of friends were not intellectually challenged much. I know several of us who wrote term papers and reports the night before and got As, art students who raced through the assignments given and did two or three instead of the one required, and kids reading the classics for fun, not because we had a test on them), a lot of us were frequently bored and disengaged. Those of us who weren't interested in standard social rungs like sports or cheering lacked those outlets for our energy. We're lucky to have found our niche with similarly adrift students who also had atypical interests and talents.
When you're trying to figure out what growing up and becoming an adult is all about, and finding out who, exactly, you ARE, where do you look? Teen movies these days may be re-treads of classics (Emma and Clueless, Taming of the Shrew and 10 Things I Hate About You (or so I think, having seen maybe a quarter of it on cable), Othello and "that other Julia Stiles movie I am too lazy to go look up on IMDB", the Cinderella fairy tale and She's All That, and Romeo and Juliet and ...erm... Romeo + Juliet), but often they are just one big fart joke decorated with the occasional boob flash (such as the American Pie series, which I find painfully unfunny and even kind of gross), or not-very-funny parodies of schlocky recent horror films. Sure, kids in the 80s had "Porky's" for that kind of sex-obsessed marketed-to-teens film, but we also had other options, such as charming John Hughes films.
You probably remember Grace the secretary in Ferris Bueller running down the list of high school students who belonged to various groups: sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads. How about The Breakfast Club: brains, athletes, basket cases, princesses, criminals. What if you don't fit into any of those groups? Are you forced into one? Forced to adopt the "least incorrect" labels as your own? Was our lunch table full of basket cases and geeks?
I don't remember anyone being turned away from our lunch spot, or much anxiety about roles we needed to be filling. Our table was always crowded. Were there that many folks who had no idea what roles, in an adolescence shaped by John Hughes movies and MTV videos and their messages aimed at us? Did we just not like what we were supposed to be? Not a single Farmer Ted in the lot, after all. But there could have been, and we would still speak to them when we passed in the halls if we'd befriended them elsewhere. (What peer pressure?) If you don't care what your peers think, or simply don't even notice, maybe that's a sign right there that you're letting it all wash over you and that it won't rate as important enough to remember once real life after adolecence kicks in and there are bills to pay. A defined role would shape memory: whatever you did that matched the expected role, you'd remember. Right?
Maybe Hughes should have added "artist" or "philosopher" or "iconoclast" somewhere into one of his lists of roles. Maybe one of us would have related to those. Maybe we have to be satisfied with the "geek" label, even though it doesn't fit. Or maybe we're just not the types to take cues about roles from pop culture in the first place. Maybe I got all my ideas about my personal social roles from books or thin air.
John Hughes was clever. We like being told escapist fantasy stories. Rather than trying to ape actual teen dialogue, he invented a lot of the quirkier terms wholesale, or had parental or authority figures try to ape teens (where it would sound funnier; see again Grace the secretary casually using the phrase "righteous dude") instead of the teen characters, and it sounded real because real teens heard his turns of phrase and language choices in his films and liked how it sounded, and adopted it. Which came first, actual "neo-maxie-ultra-zoom-dweebies" in real life, or in a Hughes script? I don't think it could work today: kids are more savvy. Consider the character being admonished in Mean Girls: "stop trying to make (the slang term) 'fetch' happen!" No one likes a forced meme.
Also, I need better late late late night cable programming to watch. :)
I think another stumbling block that prevents so much role model glomming by current kids, in addition to more savviness about being a target market, is that pop culture is far more rapid-fire, diffused and ephemeral now. In the 70s and 80s, before the Internet and before almost all households had cable, you saw the same movies (in the theatre; this was before VHS tapes and DVDs were available, so you couldn't pick and chose), you watched (or avoided watching) the same three to five channels on the TV (and that's all you got, kid), and unless you had older friends or siblings or a helpful music fiend at a record store feeding you tips about cool stuff, you listened to what was on one of a handful of generally crappy radio stations or available through Columbia record club (or their competitor, which I can't recall). You wore what you saw on your peers, in one of a half dozen fashion / entertainment magazines, on television sitcoms, or what was actually available in the cheapest department store chains. There were fewer sources, so even with the amazing diversity of fashion in the 80s, it still came from, say, MTV. You could tell what television and music someone liked by how they dressed. To an extent, you still can, you always were able to, but I suspect there are a lot more weekday bangers / weekend yuppies (or vice versa) these days.
What roles are being marketed to kids these days? Slut / bimbo a.k.a. Paris Hilton types? Gangsta thugs? Metrosexuals? Jam band hippies? Emos / proto-Goths? Clown band fans? Hilfiger fratrats? What? It may be more realistic to show groups of homogenous teens who are all basically interchangeable in films now (sometimes politically correct gender and race tokens are added), but what does that say? If you're not able to see yourself fitting into the firmly upper-middle class / wealthy / white American Pie crew, do you get your roles from TV, almost no one lives in a home worth less than several million dollars, even the lowliest secretaries (unless you watch BET, where your heroes can be either super wealthy, uneasily middle class, or even garbagemen, apartment complex supers, preachers and so on)?
If you're looking for self-awareness and your personal niche in life, and who you are, your role, where do you look? It's kind of frightening to think about what has gone into each of our personal self-images: a combination of the roles your peers and family chose for you, roles you liked and tried to adopt, and roles you internalized from observing others and from entertainment and media.
It might be nice to still have a John Hughes type making cartoony universes full of interesting characters we can instinctively understand. I just don't know if kids these days would be able to relate. We were younger, as teens then, than teens are now. Emotionally, life experience-wise, in terms of the educational and social opportunities available, kids are both older and more jaded, but somehow more immature. It's not something you can blame on them, it's just how things change.
Or, perhaps, I'm wrong. :)