How the teen movie maestro behind The Breakfast Club inspired a new generation to expand on his vision of growing up on screen.
With The Breakfast Club receiving a 4K upgrade within the Criterion Collection, many may find themselves returning to the locker-lined hallways of Chicago's suburbia through the lens of filmmaker John Hughes.
Shortly after Hughes’s death in 2009, fellow Chicagoan and prolific film critic, Roger Ebert, distinguished the writer-director as, “the creator of the modern American teenager.” With references to MTV, endless shots of bleachers, and strong affinities to Ray-Ban sunglasses, there’s no denying that Hughes perfectly captured the milieu of the late twentieth-century high schooler. However, his focus and concern regarding white middle class characters neglects the more diverse survey of people that might’ve better represented the realities of actual modern American teenagers.
Hughes’s narrow focus is apparent in three key pillars of his filmography: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s skiving trio; Pretty in Pink’s love triangle; and The Breakfast Club’s brain, beauty, jock, rebel, and recluse, are of whom are white, straight people. And when he did try to write an ethnic minority character – Sixteen Candles’s Long Duk Dong – the results are frankly offensive.
Therefore, Hughes owes much of his legacy to the filmmakers who came after him, not unlike certain ’80s-era adolescent characters disregarding the guidelines set by adults. While heeding Hughes’s vision of depicting teenagers authentically, subsequent writer-directors have incorporated people of colour and the queer community into their own coming-of-age stories. Rather than the “safe” route of remakes, Hughes’s catalogue spawned inspired-by films that are doing the work that he didn’t.
One such entrance into the high school genre is Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa. Like its spiritual predecessors, the 2015 film unfolds over a short period of time focusing on a group of nerdy Black teenagers, Malcom, Jib, and Diggie. Famuyiwa set his comedy-drama in the predominantly Black and Brown Los Angeles neighbourhood that raised him, Inglewood.
After an advance screening of the film in 2015, Famuyiwa spoke to an audience on his inspirations: "I grew up watching a lot of John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and I just felt like even though they were mainly set in middle class suburban Chicago, I could relate to these kids…I felt, well, if we were able to connect to these kids in a way, why can't those kids from suburban Chicago connect with Malcolm, Jib, and Diggie?" Famuyiwa acknowledges the impact on coming-of-age films on those coming of age, all while staying true to the world he grew up in.
Then there’s Emma Seligman, the director and co-writer of the 2023 film, Bottoms, a raunchy high school comedy starring Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott as two teen girls on a near-desperate quest for girlfriends. While doing press for Bottoms, Seligman talked to AnOther Magazine, denoting Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as one of her “favourite movies of all time,” and adding, “I was looking for a John Hughes kind of school when scouting for Bottoms. I wanted it to feel kind of timeless … John Hughes was one of the first directors to ever take teen characters seriously.” An act Seligmann conveyed through her own queer lens in Bottoms, albeit the silliness.
Famuyiwa and Seligman didn’t adapt to their generation on account of Hollywood pressure, they simply incorporated dialogue that one would likely overhear in a cafeteria. And while perhaps it’s for the best that Hughes, a straight, white male filmmaker, didn’t write a back and forth exchange between two people of colour grappling with discrimination, there was ample room for inclusion. Everyone should be encouraged to skip school on occasion, because life indeed moves pretty fast for all.
A fact both Famuyiwa and Seligman appreciated and executed, while continuing to honour the VHS tapes that read “A John Hughes Film.” Often art, be it a song, a book, or a film, is the last stop before alienation completely closes in, making it even more critical that young people seem themselves on screen. Watching a character use familiar slang, express identifiable insecurities, crush with the same chaotic fervour, and also wear outfits they’ll regret in ten years time, can be incredibly validating. And the stories teenagers need, regardless of identity, are not ones of trauma and heart-wrenching confession, but ones of dance breaks in libraries, parades, and record shops.
In 2025, labelling a film as “modern” comes with the subtext that someone just finally set a score to a story that’s existed this whole time. That the industry trends are in favour of a person’s sexual orientation. Or a person of colour cast in a leading role might be worth spending big money on.
Indeed, in the ‘80s, modernity in cinema meant something entirely different and in his own way, Hughes redefined an entire genre. During a posthumous tribute at the 2010 Academy Awards, his frequent collaborator Molly Ringwald, eulogised, “His genius was taking the pain of growing up and relating it to everyone. His gift was creating characters, stories and truths about being a teen and bringing them to film in a way no one had ever done before.” After Hughes, each iteration of a high school-centred film speaking age-appropriate truths is another push ahead. And just like a semicircle of five adolescents seated on the floor of a library, individuals who relate to Hughes, in both vision and career, progress even more so.
Despite the narrowness of his vision of American high schools, Hughes was writing from a personal perspective. Hughes’s alma mater, Glen Brook High School, located in the North Shore suburb of Chicago, is the direct inspiration for the fictional, Shermer High School of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Glen Brook’s student population was predominantly white during both Hughes’s enrollment and the time of filming Ferris Bueller, which uses the school’s red brick exterior. In a 1986 interview with The New York Times, Hughes was quoted in regards to his choice of locations, “All my references go back there and I don't want to abandon them.” The topic of privilege, while broached by The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, remains solely on class, because that’s what Hughes observed – the wealth disparity.
Legacy has little to do with those it refers to, rather the ones that name it. Hughes didn’t represent everyone, nor create the modern American teenager. Rather he provided a stepping stone within the film world, a funnel for future filmmakers to see adolescents as capable human beings, despite their acne, slouching, braces, and occasional gross habits. That “timeless” quality of a Hughes film that Seligman spoke of, goes beyond a final scene taking place on the expanse of a football field.
There’s a through line in every one of Hughes’s high school films, the same question raised again and again: What can we learn from young people? This question has an open-ended answer, because there will always be young people and each generation will be pushing societal bounds with intent to improve. Hughes’s scripts were never the final word.
Besides, adults don’t know all that much anyway.
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