Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  One fascinating little thing about the Making Of documentaries on the current UK DVD of FBDO is meeting Hughes himself. He is a middle-aged man, not far from his tragically early death from a heart attack in 2009 . . . yet he is very self-consciously trying to look like an ’80s teen. He has a jet-black feather-cut mullet and is wearing shades. You then see pictures of him during the filming of FBDO, and see that he looks exactly the same. Perhaps Hughes wrote so cogently for and about ’80s teenagers because, in his mind, he was one, and remained one for many years afterwards.

  Because FBDO is shamelessly in love with tacky, synthetic ’80s music and MTV; with gadgets that you don’t have to touch to make work; with expensive cars and expansive gardens and kids who are up to their eyeballs in smartarse pop-culture references; with clean streets and Reagan-era money for the few. Hughes’s characters always date less badly than other ’80s movie teens, because he even seemed to actually understand the kids’ fashions of the time, rather than surreptitiously mocking them.

  It’s this guilt-free embrace of its times that I suspect makes FBDO feel box-fresh every time you watch it. It simply refuses to inject a single note of real cynicism. Don’t get me wrong . . . the movie’s characters are cynical as hell. But the film isn’t. Take the constant, recurring, breaking of ‘the fourth wall’. FBDO’s characters play so relentlessly to camera that the clever-cleverness should strangle the life out of the movie. But it does exactly the opposite, succeeding in its aims to make the viewer feel like a co-conspirator. And I reckon this is because Hughes wasn’t trying to employ the device to appear smart. He actually, truly wanted to make the viewer feel like a part of the movie. The more guile Hughes displays, the more guileless FBDO feels.

  Another factor in the movie’s enduring popularity is its surgically precise encapsulation of a universal principle: all of us hated school. Or, more precisely, all of us hated school in our mid to late teens. Even if we went to a good school, even if we were a popular kid, even if we jumped all of our academic hurdles with qualifications coming out of our arse . . . none of us quite escapes that moment, some time in adolescence, when we truly understand that school isn’t a boring thing we’re made to go through to earn the right to be adult and free. It’s preparation for an endless, horrifying future of being forced, every day, to go to a place we don’t want to be, to do things we don’t want to do, for people we don’t like or respect. From that moment on, whether we conform or rebel, every minute drags, every order from a teacher feels like another humiliating nail in the coffin, every exam or piece of homework feels like a traumatising battle between your parents’ expectations and a barely containable desire to burn every book in existence and escape to a fairyland of everlasting childhood where no one expects you to earn a living and a nice woman puts three meals a day in front of you anyway. Tell me – are you one of those who, around once every two or three months, has a vivid nightmare about classrooms, exams and the ever-present feeling that, from the moment you first walked into your first school, you had been fooled into walking into prison? Of course you are. School is a nightmare we never get over. That’s why the friendships we make then are so intense. They’re the only hope we have to cling on to.

  FBDO taps into this with such a committed empathy and featherlight touch that it grants us 98 minutes where we can embrace the repressed fury at the indignities we suffered at the hands of adults we can now clearly see as mediocrities (I know we all had great teachers too – apologies to mine, but you weren’t enough to make up for your idiot colleagues) and laugh the anger out. Poor old Rooney becomes a symbolic Everyteacher, suffering each indignity as part of our revenge fantasy, while Ben Stein’s robotic economics teacher is the epitome of the murderous boredom of the classroom. Incidentally, despite being most famous for saying the word ‘Bueller’ repeatedly in a stunningly annoying monotone, Ben Stein is actually a real-life right-wing Republican economist who wrote speeches for Presidents Ford and Nixon, and has remained one of Nixon’s staunchest apologists. Weird.

  The rest is the joy of small details – the teen ephemera of Ferris’s bedroom, the hilarious Edie McClurg as Rooney’s secretary, pulling stockpiled pencils out of her giant perm, the moving connection between Cameron and Sloane, attempting to locate some substance in the shadow of Ferris’s grandstanding, Jennifer Grey’s kung-fu kicks, just about every Jeffery Jones gurn – that earn the set-piece triumphs of the giant Twist ’N’ Shout dance routine and the necessary demise of Mr Frye’s car. There is something so shamelessly right about this movie that, when one of my friends gets in touch to tempt me into an occasional boozy truancy from another hard day at the laptop, she always calls our attempts at carefree hedonism ‘a Ferris Bueller’. I suppose Ferris does seem more of an arsehole than he did when I was 23. But he’s still an arsehole I love spending a day with.

  PRETTY IN PINK

  1986

  Starring: Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, Jon Cryer, Harry Dean Stanton, Annie Potts, James Spader

  Dir.: Howard Deutsch

  Plot: The new wave Cinderella.

  Key line: ‘I just wanna let them know that they didn’t break me.’

  Rock boys hated this movie. Not only was it a multi-coloured teen romance told from a girl’s point of view. Not only did it take its name from a great post-punk song and then force the band to re-record it with the guitars turned down and the sneer removed. Not only did it star a girl whose entire demeanour seemed to scream, ‘Men are so fucking boring’, and who was really plain but completely irresistible. Not only was it obsessed with all those school rules and norms and codes that made any unreconstructed geek shudder at the memory of endless humiliations suffered at the hands of girls who barely noticed you existed. Not only was it light and bright and peppy and sentimental at the core. None of these was the worst thing. The worst thing – the most blatant Hollywood subversion of everything an indie boy holds dear – was the record shop. A record shop . . . run by girls.

  The post-punk record shop was, in reality, a male-only haven; the nearest a right-on young man could get to a female-free environment without joining a gentleman’s club and therefore becoming a Tory or, worse, your father. Worker boys oversaw consumer boys poring through racks of records made by boys in environments made hip by large posters of boys with guitars, who were usually The Clash. One could have earnest conversation about the B-sides of Smiths and Sonic Youth records, and conspire with the Masters Of The Universe (the boys who stood behind the counter) to sneer at people – especially women, especially older women – who came and asked for chart records, because chart records are stoopid. The shops were dirty, musty and kind of smelly, which ensured that women didn’t want to hang around these palaces of geek testosterone, and became home from home for men whose women didn’t understand why the presence of a drum-machine on the latest Fall single should make you sulk for a week, or why you would want to spend precious shagging time cross-referencing your albums by bands from Athens, Georgia with your albums by bands from Akron, Ohio. No style, fashion, fun, dancing, sex or pastel shades entered therein, and everything was fine, emotionally repressed, safe.

  So the record shop in Pretty In Pink was an abomination and a blasphemous affront to our Lord Captain Beefheart. Two women who look like the punk rock girls who would never shag you run the place. One of them looks exactly like Siouxsie Sioux and talks about sex in a loud voice and shoots male thieves with a stapler. The other quietly flirts with flash prick Andrew McCarthy, bringing the entirely unwelcome taint of sex, romance and upward mobility into the previously monk-like, dressed down confines of the holy Vinyl church. The shop is dressed beautifully – especially the vinyl stapled to the ceiling and the plants and thrift-shop lamps – and you can almost smell that spicy, pine-fresh scent that women seem to make everything smell like when they spread their dastardly standards of hygiene and décor. The whole shop is a sadistic visual reminder that, (1) punk had been co-opted by Hollywood, (2) that actually punk was the idea of fashion
designers rather than urban street fighters, (3) that most of the best punk was made by women, (4) that all your indie heroes wanted to sell out and have big hits but just weren’t good enough at writing melodies, (5) that your hair looked like the hair of the poser blokes hanging round this shop, ergo, your hair sucked, and (6) – and worst of all – that punk and indie and art-rock and whatever was just . . . pop music. No morally worse or better than Madonna or Milli Vanilli. Just less catchy. And more worthy. The whole set-up seems to be laughing at the rockbloke notion of cool. The Smiths are just another poster of pretty boys here. It is the music scene according to John Hughes. And it’s evil because it’s true.

  Which reminds me . . . did you have any idea that some geezer called Howard Deutsch directed this film? How could this be anything but a John Hughes movie? Deutsch also directed the Hughes screenplay Some Kind Of Wonderful, which, in case you’ve forgotten, is Pretty In Pink with the genders switched, before graduating to future classics like Grumpier Old Men and Lea Thompson’s Caroline In The City sitcom. If there’s some kind of definitive opposite to ‘stamping your own identity’ on a movie, I reckon old Howard might be that definition.

  Pretty In Pink is about a poor girl who fancies a rich, popular boy but is fancied by another, nastier rich boy, and her goofy best friend. But it’s not. It’s about Molly Ringwald. Her small, exhausted, heartbroken eyes. Her huge bee-stung mouth. Her bush of red hair. Her thrift-shop threads. And the way an infinite sadness engulfs her so completely that, when something happens in the story that makes a slow, reluctant smile creep around the edges of her Grand Canyon gob, it feels like Hosannas and World Peace and a preview peak through the gates of Heaven. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s entire portrayal of Buffy Summers is based upon the Ringwald oeuvre, and it is here, rather than The Breakfast Club (see here) or Sixteen Candles, where she reached her peak of adorableness before inevitably plummeting into obscurity by way of growing up. A thousand-yard sulk is just not an attractive thing on a grown woman. It isn’t fair. But neither is high school, so, like, get over it.

  Pretty In Pink is one of those movies that comes down to favourite scenes, because Hughes (and, OK, this Deutsch guy) were great at showing you funny, memorable things that didn’t need much dialogue to make ’em stick. There is, for example, the bit where Blane (McCarthy) walks out of a door at school, in his yuppie casuals, and is surrounded, on all sides, by self-conscious and hostile fashion victims, sporting every take on the punk/new wave/mod/new romantic/goth/psychobilly explosion of tribal dressing-up that we Brits had managed to brainwash Yank kids into copying in the ’80s, usually around five years late. Blane is our representative here, a little wary of the obvious antipathy towards his rich boy look, but also allowing our amusement at the heroic pretension of ’80s youth dress codes. It’s a couple of seconds that carries all of Hughes’ wry affection for the peacock teens of the era.

  And then there’s the sheer hatred and agony on Ducky’s face when he realises that Andie has a date with Blane. Jon Cryer’s Ducky is a fascinating character, designed to polarise viewers. His dress style is ridiculous. His hyperactive class-clown schtick is not funny. He doesn’t love and support Andie . . . he stalks her. He’s a control freak in geek clothing, and the obvious inspiration for Buffy’s Zander Harris.

  But Ducky works for Pretty In Pink because he is real. I’m not alone in having had hopeless crushes on female friends who just weren’t attracted to me as a kid, and Ducky makes me shudder because I now realise that the self-image I built at the time – that I was cool, basically – was entirely deluded. When I attached myself like a limpet to an object of desire who wanted my love, but not my love . . . I looked as big a twat as Ducky. We boys all did, because we don’t deal with female friendship as well as girls deal with male friendship.

  So when Ducky sees Blane at the door of the record shop and his face becomes a mask of sick shock . . . let’s just say I relate. We repress so much of our teenage pain because, at that time we feel so deeply about stuff that is, in the big scheme of things, utterly irrelevant. But we are so vulnerable then that small slights leave lifelong scars. Hughes is the absolute master of universally understood teenage angst, and watching his best movies is sometimes a trip down the more traumatic side streets off Memory Lane.

  And, of course, there is the entire disaster of Blane and Andie’s first date. Pretty In Pink presents a strange vision of class conflict. Here, money or aspirations aren’t the problem. Blane’s friends are appalling because they’re hedonists. Andie’s rock club milieu is terrifying because people wear punk clothes. Apart from the fact that lots of working-class kids fuck and take drugs, and lots of middle-class kids dress up . . . actually, there is no apart from that. The drama and the tension works because of the hostility to the couple generated by Ducky and Blane’s slimy muckers Benny (Vernon) and Steff (Spader, a man seemingly born to ooze unfathomable depths of elegantly sociopathic perversion). But, if Pretty In Pink has any basis in the facts of youth social division in America in the ’80s, then it’s an unfamiliar kind of class war to us Brits. You just come out of the scene feeling that these two people should pick nicer friends. Thankfully, Ringwald swings the scene round with her visceral shame about showing Blane where she lives . . . again, a scene that takes me back to feelings best forgotten.

  By the end, Hughes’s inherent conservatism about women rears its ugly head. Andie’s older punk friend Iona finds love and therefore, in an echo of Allison’s makeover in The Breakfast Club, she must conform and embrace her inner Soccer Mom in order to enter polite society and keep a man. But, lest we forget, Pretty In Pink is Cinderella recast for nice kids who dig the alternative sounds of New Order because it’s naughty, where Cryer is Buttons, Spader and Vernon are the ugly sisters, and Harry Dean Stanton gets to be the anti-Dennis Hopper and play the most sympathetic Bad Dad in movie history. Subversion is not here. But Molly Ringwald in a horrible pink dress at the prom is. It makes me feel like I’m eating popcorn in fluffy pyjamas with the girls. And I don’t even like popcorn.

  LUCAS

  1986

  Starring: Corey Haim, Kerri Green, Charlie Sheen, Winona Ryder

  Dir.: David Seltzer

  Plot: Teen cinema’s first Heroic Nerd.

  Key line: ‘I think it’s superficial. You know . . . football heroes, cheerleaders, parties. I’d be willing to play football if all that other junk didn’t go along with it.’

  In March 2010, an almost-forgotten actor called Corey Haim died of what appeared to be an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. He was 38 years old. He’d been taking drugs since the age of 15 when he was, briefly, the most popular child actor in America. His biggest success, The Lost Boys, was a 1987 teen vampire movie that paired him with Corey Feldman, and the two starred in seven movies together. Haim couldn’t escape his fellow Corey, nor find a place in entertainment as an adult. He died broke, disturbed and living with his mother, who had breast cancer.

  Haim’s death became international news, a typical Hollywood case of too much too soon. Eulogies from more successful stars poured out. His ex-girlfriend and Baywatch star Nicole Eggert commented: ‘It’s a little late. If people realised, he would have liked to have heard that when he was here with us, it could have maybe made a difference in his life.’ She’s right, right? So I’m not going to eulogise too much, especially as I’m no fan of The Lost Boys and didn’t see this, his finest moment, until months after his death, after it came strongly recommended in Entertainment Weekly’s handy 50 Best High School Movies list. Except to say that the 15-year-old Haim’s portrayal of an eccentric prodigy called Lucas Blye is one of my favourite performances in this book. So it’s sad that someone so talented never got to show it as an adult. That’s all.

  Lucas is a rare thing in teen movies: a mix of high school comedy, unrequited love story and character study. Haim and Lucas screenwriter-director David Seltzer present Blye as a motor-mouthed cross between Holden Caulfield and a baby Woody Allen. From the opening
scenes, he is utterly adorable in his big glasses, battered safari hat and ragged shorts, his legs so skinny you wonder how they hold him up. For once, the teen we’re watching is a little boy. And it’s this that is a key part of the Lucas appeal, because not all of us were wannabe adults as teens, as teen movies would have us believe. Haim’s performance strikes an authentic balance between verbal confidence and physical gawkiness, his open-mouthed, fly-catching gawp a recurring motif, reminding us how bewildering life, love and sex are in adolescence.

  You’re in an unusual teen movie place from the get-go, watching Lucas prowling around the countryside with a butterfly net, searching for the insects he studies with obsessive fascination, before chancing upon new-girl-in-town Maggie (Green) practising shots on a tennis court. The wire fence is the sexual line the boy can’t cross, and Haim’s awestruck stare is as funny and accurate a representation of hopeless first love as you could wish for. As a special eccentricity bonus, it turns out that our young hero carries a cassette recorder in his backpack. He hits play, and awards himself and us, of all things, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite as a soundtrack for the ballet of a slender, fresh-faced redhead hitting a ball against a fence. Five minutes in and we’ve got our first classic scene.