![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
it's sorta social - demented and sad, but social
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 11:15 amI think I may have had a deprived childhood. In a good way, that is. As you know, Bob, we didn't have a TV or video player in the house for my entire schooldays, except for one year in Standard Four; we also lived variously on research stations and outside tiny half-horse farming towns, so it was only in my last four years of high school that we were anywhere near something like a local multiplex cinema. By that stage I had seriously failed to acquire the movie-watching habit to any useful extent (hence the maddened catching up in the last decade or so); I was also the class dweeb in high school, which means I didn't really get dragged off on cinema expeditions with classmates.
As a result of this, I can honestly say that I managed to be a Western teenager in the 80s and still didn't ever actually see a John Hughes film. Not one. My teen angsts went unreflected, unrecognised, unmelanged into the muddied, steaming pool of the adolescent collective unconscious. I've also managed not to see any of them since, with the result that I've had to acquire all the necessary Hughes quotes second-hand and out of context, in an essentially Baudrillardian fashion.
The recent death of John Hughes, mayherestinpeace, vaguely prodded me to actually do something about this tragic lack, revealing, in the process, a tragic lack. I lasted for precisely fifteen minutes of Weird Science, which is agonising enough that I couldn't even wait for RDJ to show up. Embarrassment humour makes me want to curl up and die. I'm further on with The Breakfast Club, which at least has some witty moments and interesting characters, although the desire to set about Bender with a horsewhip does occasionally surface. I have still to acquire Ferris Bueller, the ultimate classic, or Pretty In Pink, which are apparently better movies.
But tragically, I think these films have lost their chance to actually speak to me: I have to try and project myself back into my teenaged self, overcoming in the process the disparity between an American high school experience and my own, and there are too many layers here. The affectionate, nostalgic recognition with which so many people refer to these films is forever denied me. All I can summon is a distant, intellectual appreciation of the texts' iconic function, and tendency to wonder, wistfully, whether they would actually have meant as much to me if I'd seen them when I was sixteen. Possibly not. My fellow students were more or less aliens to me, I see no real reason why their celluloid versions should be any different.
Possibly it's a bit like Twilight - in order to actually get it you need to be sixteen, and ruled entirely by your hormones and teen myths about sex. And devoid of irony, in which latter class I was always more or less doomed.
As a result of this, I can honestly say that I managed to be a Western teenager in the 80s and still didn't ever actually see a John Hughes film. Not one. My teen angsts went unreflected, unrecognised, unmelanged into the muddied, steaming pool of the adolescent collective unconscious. I've also managed not to see any of them since, with the result that I've had to acquire all the necessary Hughes quotes second-hand and out of context, in an essentially Baudrillardian fashion.
The recent death of John Hughes, mayherestinpeace, vaguely prodded me to actually do something about this tragic lack, revealing, in the process, a tragic lack. I lasted for precisely fifteen minutes of Weird Science, which is agonising enough that I couldn't even wait for RDJ to show up. Embarrassment humour makes me want to curl up and die. I'm further on with The Breakfast Club, which at least has some witty moments and interesting characters, although the desire to set about Bender with a horsewhip does occasionally surface. I have still to acquire Ferris Bueller, the ultimate classic, or Pretty In Pink, which are apparently better movies.
But tragically, I think these films have lost their chance to actually speak to me: I have to try and project myself back into my teenaged self, overcoming in the process the disparity between an American high school experience and my own, and there are too many layers here. The affectionate, nostalgic recognition with which so many people refer to these films is forever denied me. All I can summon is a distant, intellectual appreciation of the texts' iconic function, and tendency to wonder, wistfully, whether they would actually have meant as much to me if I'd seen them when I was sixteen. Possibly not. My fellow students were more or less aliens to me, I see no real reason why their celluloid versions should be any different.
Possibly it's a bit like Twilight - in order to actually get it you need to be sixteen, and ruled entirely by your hormones and teen myths about sex. And devoid of irony, in which latter class I was always more or less doomed.
