john hughes, RIP

By Robbie on August 10, 2009

When his byline started popping up in National Lampoon in about 1977, we eager readers might not have recognized a fresh and original voice in Mr. Hughes, and not only because of the button-down blandness of his name. He was a copywriter for Leo Burnett in Chicago who harbored an off-hours fondness for the Ivy League wise-assery of Doug Kenney and Chris Miller, and his pieces for the magazine seemed more or less content to maintain those writers' tones (pulpish economy and motion, puerile bawdiness, some light-hearted surreality in the plot) and tastes (fantasy sex and cruelty, middle-class hate/love, a thoroughgoing skepticism of Puritanism, dull postwar comfortableness, and hippie idealism).

His penchant for sussing out and flourishing within established guidelines (if I'm identifying it right) followed him into his Hollywood work. His sympathetic portrayals of suburban American teens didn't aim to, and didn't, break any ground in visual or narrative technique; they were, one reads, delivered cheaply and on time. The bit of Hughes-ness I see threading through Vacation and Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller and Home Alone is these films' unabashed affection for their privileged characters, who aren't taken to task by themselves or their creator for being unintellectual, unpoor, unglamorous, and not all that interested -- like the sorry lot of us -- in overanalyzing their selfish emotions or escaping their cloistered environments. His use of the perspective of youngsters, as he explained in a short but revealing essay in Zoetrope, allowed him to flatten disproportionate events amusingly. A deceased grandma trussed and tied to the roof of a car earned the same level of excitement and interest as a cussword or a missed birthday.

Hughes's solidarity with midwestern ordinariness came across as mildly subversive in the 1980s, when movies had Mary Tyler Moore flushing French toast down the Dispos-all and Kyle Maclachlan coming across an ear in the grass. Notwithstanding that, it would be interesting to see a treatment of Vacation that, instead of shrewdly adapting itself to mass-market movie conventions, preview cards, and Chevy Chase's persona, followed the mood and line of Hughes's original story, in which drunken Indians terrorize the Griswolds and the dad shoots Walt Disney and is taken off to prison at the end.

I reread the Lampoon story "My Vagina" after Hughes's way-too-early death last week. It might not be the top thing by which he'd choose to be remembered, but, like his "Vacation 1958" story, it's a terrific yarn full of good ground-level observation and profane spirit. A boy wakes up to discover that he has a vagina where his penis used to be. He explores the organ with disgust, then mounting avidity. He finds the hair to resemble "camel's hair sport-coat material," the depth equal to a Little League trophy (not empirically tested!), the clitoris surprisingly slight, and the smell nauseating. The organ's complexity is limned and lingered over for many paragraphs. ("Boy, is there ever a lot of skin! There's probably enough extra skin down there to make a whole face.") Then an adventure begins in which he masturbates, joins his family for breakfast, goes to school, fills the swimming pool with a cloud of menses at gym, stuffs himself with Kotex from the girls bathroom, and tries laboriously to hide his condition. But he's finally outed by his friends, who, after a brief discussion of whether sex with a vagina-bearing male is homosexual, rape him. Despite this story's assault on the salubrious value-your-body sex-ed pieties of the 1970s, and its conceit of the female sex organ as something that just landed from outer space, its elaborate anatomical care and outlandish pile-up of what you might call female problems lend it an oddly feminist flavor. Conceivably this gift for cool concentration on other-ness came into play in the thirtysomething's depictions of teenage life in the Reagan era.

A thing that irks me a little is the insinuation in many obituaries that Hughes's retreat from movie directing in 1991 was some kind of inexplicable slide down the greasy pole. From his farm in Harvard, Illinois, his productivity as a screenwriter continued. Friends of friends who live in my neighborhood and worked for him during his Salinger years have only positive character reports. His declining to yak about himself and his work for the TV and press reinforce the point. We're left with a picture of a man who was not only bright, skilled, and opportunistic (most people in showbiz are) but also mindful of the difference between price and value. John Hughes married his high-school sweetheart and remained a devoted family man. When he was able to, at the mere age of 41, he took the pile he had made off the frameworks of other men to establish his own, writing in happy seclusion far from Hollywood, accepting its rewards by mailbox while attending to his cows and his loved ones. That's the kind of ultimate and rare success any of us would be thrilled to (but maybe not die to) attain.