Posts tagged: working class kids

I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.

The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.

The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?

Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of …

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100 AD: Roman Legions. Actually they all had those Eminem haircuts, but the helmets had bolt-on Mohawks. Original wig-hawkers: Romans suck.

1976: Bobby DeNiro as Travis “Taxi Driver” Bickle. Travis’ hawk was a wig (DeNiro had another job lined up and needed to keep his hair), but it got the job done with style. Inspired presidential assassin John Hinckley, who was apparently too busy beating off over Jodie Foster to watch all the way to the end.

1977: Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics. Hatchet-faced punk rock bitch W.O.W. is owed by everyone who gets off on electrical tape pasties, shaving cream shirts, and women rocking chainsaws and shotguns onstage. The Dark Bros. classic New Wave Hookers vidporn series never would have happened without Wendy O. Tell me I’m wrong.

1982: GBH. Seminal UK triple-initial punk rockers. A bunch of jolly Thatcher-era working-class kids, the sort who would more likely use broken pint glasses on your face like cookie-cutters than bore you with student Marxism. The initials stood for Grievous Bodily Harm, but those were some Great Big Haircuts.

1982: Lawrence “Mr. T” Tureaud. Beat the shit out of Sly in Rocky III, shot AKs with eyes closed in The A-Team. Took the long way around rationalizing beard/hawk combo, mostly relied on the “YOU tell him he looks ridiculous” factor. Must shoulder no small blame for the jockhawk.

1984: The Kid in Suburbia. Come on, you choked up when the little bastard hit the windshield.

1986: Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Wig-hawkers extraordinaire. Looked like post-apocalypse Rip Taylors. Supposed to be some sort of post-ironic Max Headroom anti-consumerist performance screed that would make money no matter how much it sucked because we’re all sheep and deserve to be told it. The music sucked plastic dogshit and the whole thing sank …

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