One of the most important but largely unsung heroes of the Reagan Era was movie-maker John Hughes. A close friend of P. J. O’Rourke, Hughes wrote, directed, and/or produced a whole slew of movies, including Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, to name a few. Born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised during his teenage years in a suburb of northern Chicago, Hughes’s career began with writing jokes for famous comedians as well as writing regularly for National Lampoon. It would be no exaggeration to claim that Hughes introduced the world to the cinematic careers of Michael Keating, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and Macaulay Culkin. Others, such as Kevin Bacon, John Candy, and Steve Martin, benefitted mightily as well. Hughes wrote a number of screenplays, too, under pseudonyms—especially under the name Edmond Dantes—and it would be impossible to exaggerate his influence on Hollywood from roughly 1982 through 1993. After 1993, Hughes became somewhat of a J. D. Salinger figure in his persona and focused almost exclusively on his role as husband and father. He died relatively young from a heart attack in 2009.

　　But Hughes did more than just make great movies—he expressed a zeitgeist. “We’ll never see his like again,” economist and comedian Ben Stein, another close friend, said upon the director’s death. “He was the Wordsworth of the suburban America postwar generation. He was a great, great, great genius and as much of a friend and a great family man as he was a poet.” Truly, Hughes defined the middle class of Reagan’s America.

　　Of all his films, though, his greatest achievement was 1985’s The Breakfast Club. I was 17 when I first saw it in the theaters. I remember walking out of the movie theater completely astounded that any adult—such as Hughes—could so well define and understand my generation. To this day, forty years later, the movie still hits me at the deepest level imaginable. Granted, I grew up in a town not that much different from Shermer, Illinois (the fictional setting of the movie), and I grew up in a dysfunctional family. Granted, too, I was the same age as the characters of the movie, and, granted, I was most like Brian, the geek who couldn’t make his shop project correctly. So, with all these “granteds,” the movie forty years later seems deeply autobiographical to me. Admittedly, I never tried illicit and illegal drugs in high school or college, but everything else seems true to my experience. I will state as adamantly in 2025 as I did in 1985, no adult understood my generation, Gen X, better than did John Hughes. He perfectly captured the contempt we felt for the Baby Boomers.

　　Raised in a middle-class household, Hughes’s movies often depicted—sometimes positively and sometimes negatively—the complexities of class in the American Midwest and, especially as Stein put it, in suburban America. Some have criticized and others have praised Hughes for projecting a Reaganesque view of the American experience. While O’Rourke, a libertarian-leaning Republican, admitted that he and Hughes had never talked politics, it’s most likely that Hughes was largely apolitical in a conservative fashion. Perhaps somewhat famously and somewhat flippantly, Ferris Buller says what Hughes probably felt:

　　It’s not that I condone fascism … or any -ism for that matter. Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism. He should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon. ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.’ A good point there. After all, he was the walrus.

　　Yet, not surprisingly, what shaped Hughes most in his filmmaking were cultural and class conflicts, not political ones. Some of his movies were absurd and puerile, such as Sixteen Candles, while others were deeply emotional and classic, such as his remake of Miracle on 34th Street. Some were silly meditations on teenage rebellion, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while others, such as Pretty in Pink, were serious meditations on the same.

　　As I’ve had the chance to write elsewhere,

　　His movies were equal parts perceptive insights into the human condition, mockeries of unearned and undeserved authority, slapstick comedy, introductions to the best of popular music, examinations of tight friendships, and development of full characters. In addition to these traits and themes, Hughes almost always wrote his stories around creative persons held down by peer pressure and societal desires for conformity. His movies end happily, but not without great struggles.

　　Let me explain why this Hughesian point of view expressed the spirit of Gen X in some detail and with some detached nuance. We did not hate all adults, and we did not hate all adult authority, but we desperately despised false and unearned authority. The early Baby Boomers were rich and decadent, and they had spent their college years preaching about love while marching against the draft. When push came to shove, though, they were mere authoritarians in the classroom. I can honestly write about myself that I have always hated modern liberalism. To me—and to many of my generation—the liberals were those who preached the virtues of Jesus but practiced the mockery of the devil. They were the worst hypocrites and the most abject authoritarians. They proclaimed individualism, but they demanded conformity.

　　Hughes was to the artistic world what Reagan was to the political world. Was he perfect? Of course not. Was he genius? To be sure. Each will endure.

　　Brilliantly, The Breakfast Club revolves only around seven characters: Brian (the geek), John (the criminal), Andrew (the jock), Allison (the basket-case), Claire (the prom queen), Mr. Vernon (the teacher), and Carl (the janitor). At the beginning and the end of the movie, we see several parents (and a few siblings) as well, but the parents really serve only to show that the adult generation is detached or broken. The entire story takes place between 6:56 in the morning and a little after 4:00 in the afternoon, March 24, 1984, in the fictional Chicago suburb of Shermer, Illinois. The movie, released a year later, presumably recounts the events from the perspective of a future academic year.

　　The setting itself is a brilliant paradox. The school building, Shermer High School, is a Stalin-esque monstrosity—some massive concrete blocks and a few stolid windows. The school’s library, however, in which the students are forced to serve their detention is modern but quite beautiful, full of long worktables, books, magazines, plants, and statuary.

　　The plot is fairly simple. Five students earn detention (well, one comes to detention just because she has nothing better to do for the day) on a Saturday. Two of the students know one another, but the rest are strangers to each other. They are almost immediately blindsided by a brutal uncaring teacher, Mr. Vernon—presumably the vice principal, though this is never stated explicitly in the movie—who has watch over them on the Saturday. Though the five students would have normally been at odds with one another—each representing a different aspect of high school life—Vernon’s startling bravado and macho authority draws them together in opposition. Slowly and organically, through fits and starts, the five coalesce into a cohesive group by the end of the movie. Never, however, did they come together easily, but, at times, most unwillingly. Throughout the day, they begin to see life from the other’s perspective. In the end, though, the five of them are united in their opposition to Vernon, and they name themselves The Breakfast Club.

　　Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, with the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club.

　　Though Vernon presents himself initially in a Dirty Harry, tough-cop manner, the students instantly deflate him by mocking his clothing. Vernon never really recovers from this initial pushback. In almost every way, Vernor represents the worst of the Baby Boomer generation. Not only is his authoritarian bark overdone, but we find out through the movie that he’s creepy, rummaging through the private files of other teachers. Truly, he’s no Dirty Harry.

　　The movie ends with a slight re-reading of this letter, the students departing—promising to recognize one another the follow Monday as friends—and the criminal, Judd Nelson thrusting his fist in victory as he crosses the football field with “Don’t You Forget About Me” performed by Simple Minds playing over it all, and the credits roll.

　　Though there are silly moments in the movie—such as when the five students break out into spontaneous dancing—most of the movie is deeply intense, moving from one dramatic revelation to another. Hughes has rightly been praised—not just by yours truly—but by a number of critics who recognize that he uniquely understood the perspective of Gen X. But, the great lesson of the movie is this: true friendship comes from being vulnerable to one another.

　　None of this should suggest, however, that Hughes was without his negative critics. The New York Times panned the movie on its release, decrying the scenario as implausible and the arc of the characters too unbelievable. The Wall Street Journal agreed with the Times, stating that plays shouldn’t be movies and movies shouldn’t be plays.

　　Since, then, a number of negative critics have sprung up from every corner of pop culture. Many decry his movies as too white, too homophobic, and, at times, blatantly racist. Of all critics, the most interesting is Molly Ringwald, the movie star made famous by Hughes. In the New Yorker and elsewhere, Ringwald has written and talked about how possessive Hughes could be in their relationship, how needy he was, and how he held terrible grudges. Ringwald also believes that much of The Breakfast Club is misogynist. She states:

　　But I’m not thinking about the man right now but of the films that he left behind. Films that I am proud of in so many ways. Films that, like his earlier writing, though to a much lesser extent, could also be considered racist, misogynistic, and, at times, homophobic. The words “fag” and “faggot” are tossed around with abandon; the character of Long Duk Dong, in “Sixteen Candles,” is a grotesque stereotype, as other writers have detailed far more eloquently than I could.

　　What these critics miss, however, is Hughes’s wit and determination to allow Generation X to speak for itself. Almost every hero in a Hughes movie is an outsider, even when middle-class, white, and heterosexual. The critics also miss (or despise) that Hughes knew exactly how hypocritical the radicals of the Baby Boomers could be, especially in their hippy authoritarianism and conformism. No progressive was he.

　　Whatever the criticisms, though, Hughes’s legacy remains intact. Like P. J. O’Rourke and Ben Stein, we gaze in wonder at the art that he created. Hughes was to the artistic world what Reagan was to the political world. Was he perfect? Of course not. Was he genius? To be sure. Each will endure.