John Hughes' Underdogs
Only Win If They're Bitches
Although writer/director John Hughes created some hilarious and sympathetic teen characters in the 1980's, he did not allow their love-lives to deviate much from a few simple patterns.
Deidzoeb's First Law
of John Hughes' Teen Underdogs
Lopsided Love-Triangles:
If there is a love-triangle among the main characters (those shown on movie poster or cover of video) of a John Hughes teen movie, the female underdogs will win the objects of their affection, while the male underdogs will be left laughably alone at the end, or with a last-minute substitute.
(See Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful.)
Deidzoeb's Second Law
of John Hughes' Teen Underdogs
Male Success Inversely Related to Female Depth:
John Hughes' male underdogs are more likely to get the girls when those girls are two-dimensional characters. The deeper the female love-interest, the less likely she will have anything to do with male underdog.
(See Weird Science, Career Opportunities, possibly all the rest.)
♥ 16 Candles (1984) Breakfast Club (1985) Weird Science (1985) Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) ♥ Pretty in Pink (1986) ♥ Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) |
As you may have noticed, Hughes stopped making teen movies at the end of the '80s, bouncing forward and backward into older and younger territory. Home Alone, Curly Sue, finally Baby's Day Out. Couldn't get much younger without writing something like Herbie Needlemacher's Cozy Womb. But then there's the older protagonists of She's Having A Baby and Uncle Buck.
After the teen movies but before the older adult movies, Hughes depicts a young loser stumbling through his first jobs after high school...
Career Opportunities (1991)
With only two people pictured on the video, you know who's going to end up together. Boy meets mannequin, boy talks to camera, boy drives off with mannequin. No love triangle, basically a fantasy. Jennifer Connelly's kleptomania makes her symbollically damaged goods, which explains why she would settle for a lying weasel like our hero. These kinds of broad strokes don't paint her as a very complex person. Indeed, the only three-dimensional things about her character are the parts that jiggle when she works that pony-ride for all it's worth. Male underdog wins hot babe because she doesn't have enough character to put up any resistance.
...And the rest of Hughes' movies just get sappier from then on. No love-triangles in Uncle Buck or The Great Outdoors. Maybe he wanted to stop doing teen screwball comedies where the girl always wins. Maybe his magic dried up when the decade ended. After all, Hendrix couldn't survive more than a year of the Seventies, John Lennon couldn't survive more than a few months of the Eighties. The devastating effect of the Nineties was that John Hughes could only rewrite old Disney properties like 101 Dalmatians, Flubber, and every installment of Beethoven the slobbering St. Bernard. A fate worse than Dutch...