The art of making films successful films is finding a resonant message that people can follow. One of the things that the late film director John Hughes Jr. (Feb. 18, 1950 - August 6, 2009) was able to do was tie into the discontentment that people feel with school. In films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, he used school as the background for looking at issues in students' lives. He managed to show that schools are mismanaged, rather bizarre places that are backdrops for showing teen angst.
When Hughes looked at school, it was merely a backdrop for the pressing issues of adolescence. In Ferris Bueller, skipping a day of school didn't appear to be a big deal. The protagonist was able to outsmart the school system and his parents. In doing so, he managed to have quite a day. One got the feeling that missing a day of school really didn't make that much difference. In The Breakfast Club, students were brought together for Saturday school to serve detention and Hughes used the occassion to show the heavy emotional toll that being a teenager in suburbia can create. The detention teacher and the school were merely backdrops and foils in the students' lives. The films were filled with the crisis that students feel and the idea was that the smart kids would outsmart the system; playing by the rules lost its way. The films, made in 1985 and 1986 said that outsmarting the system was something to admire.
Twenty years later, we have a generation that experiences a financial melt-down. It was caused by people that wanted to make money by ignoring financial reality. This generation of students built houses and created mortgages for people who had no hope of paying for them. The financial system created ways of outsmarting the typical mortgage lending environment. The problems leading to the mortgage crisis were found in Hughes movies. Living within the rules wasn't very important, and perhaps Hughes was smart enough to pick up on that. His movies were wildly successful and had a very attentive audience.
What Hughes films seemed to exploit was disenchantment with the status quo. The students in his films weren't rebelling against school or society, but they didn't seem to respect it all that much either. The truth is, schools haven't changed that much since 1986. Hughes was a master at using school as a backdrop that meant little to his students. School and the education system was shown as more or a prop than a place to prepare for the future.
The truth is, our schools need to be better. Hughes films showed the upper middle-class perception of schools from a student's perspective and for that we should thank him. We should also thank him for some laughs.
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