Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes
edited by Jaime Clark
Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 224 pp., $14
For a collection of cinematic madeleines, you couldn’t get a better title than Don’t You Forget About Me. Then again, if the soundtracks of the John Hughes oeuvre couldn’t be plundered to name a volume of essays, then I bet there would be no book. Ironically, The Breakfast Club may own that song, and its cast may grace the cover, but there’s not much ink devoted to it inside, the foreword by Ally Sheedy notwithstanding. One hesitates to draw too-sweeping conclusions about the fortunes of an artistic output (especially based on a limited survey of mid-to-late-30s fiction writers and poets), but it is interesting how thoroughly Ferris Bueller and Pretty in Pink‘s Andie Walsh dominate discussion. They fire up more identification and consternation here than the whole Saturday morning detention crowd combined.Strong reactions to characters who carry an entire movie, however, isn’t all that surprising, since these are chiefly personal essays, concerned with the memories and feelings conjured by the films. On this score, the book works awfully well. There may be very little straight film or cultural criticism here, but the approach suits the subject matter, and it’s refreshing to read “where was I then/where am I now” narratives about movies unburdened by the feeling that nostalgia should be tricked up into analysis. And when we do get harder film criticism, as in Steve Almond’s astutely visual reading of the Cameron/Ferris relationship, it’s more persuasive and sensitive to performance than a lot of what passes for academic or professional film writing.
Elsewhere, T Cooper’s account of trying to derive fashion sense from the Hughes canon enjoyably dances among the often-perplexing signals of adolescent sexuality in the films. If the piece seems to be just getting started as it ends, perhaps that’s because the subject could be bottomless; the gender insanity at work in Some Kind of Wonderful alone easily could have a collection of essays to itself.
As do the conflicted feelings about Ferris Bueller that hog a good portion of this book. Now I’ll confess my bias here and declare Ferris Bueller’s Day Off the Hughes masterpiece, not least since I’m fascinated by the complexity of reaction to its two-dimensional hero, so it’s easy for me to gravitate toward the essays wrestling with this little shit/righteous dude. In particular, John McNally’s account of shifting identification over the years, from Ferris to principal Rooney, impressively examines the not-so-pretty race and class relationships at work in this ultimate Eighties fantasy of white-boy entitlement, while Rebecca Wolff’s surprising and thoughtful entry uses Bueller to consider problems of identification encountered when you’re actually popular in high school, as most teen films valorize the outcast.
But if Molly Ringwald’s Pretty in Pink heroine actually rates even more passionate writing than Ferris does, the book’s intensely personal angle makes me feel fully comfortable only evaluating what most interests me. Nevertheless, I wonder if I should reconsider. After finishing the book, I took an online quiz to find out which John Hughes character I am and came up Andie Walsh.
This article appears in July 20 • 2007.