.

“This wasn’t how it’s supposed to go, I should be the one you’re dancing with

Spinning with a vodka coke, everybody at my fingertips.

I was gonna get my coat, and baby you were meant to follow me

And I was gonna act surprised, even though I’d know you wanted me.

It’s not like I’ve been crying, no

There’s just smoke in my eyes

‘Cause this ain’t no John Hughes movie, where the girl gets the guy

You look right through me, every time you walk by

I keep waiting for the heartbreak music, that’s never gonna come

‘Cause if you don’t want me, then you’re not the one.”

These are the opening lyrics to Maisie Peters’ debut single John Hughes Movie, released in 2021 which was thirteen years after Hughes last had anything to do with any movies and almost three and a half decades since the last of the films associated with the notion of a ‘John Hughes Movie’ came out.

It’s not as though the later years of his career didn’t bring success, in the 90s he wrote such things as Home Alone, Miracle on 34th Street, the Glenn Close 101 Dalmatians and Flubber, but he is best known for the short series of teen films he was behind, all debuting in just a four year period with Sixteen Candles in 1984, Weird Science and The Breakfast Club in ‘85, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty in Pink both in 1986 and Some Kind of Wonderful in 1987.

Still though these live on in pop culture such that Maisie Peters, born in 2000, wrote about it as she was coming out of the end of her own teens.

There is actually quite a lot of variance in those six films. Ferris Bueller and Weird Science are broad comedies with elements of fantasy, especially the latter, and The Breakfast Club has a very particular setting and time frame. Of those that tell of young love and real teenage life though, the thing that is certainly the focus of Hughes’ legacy, Pretty in Pink is the best.

For such a well remembered movie, Pretty in Pink has a very simple premise. It is essentially about a girl who wants to go to her high school prom. There’s slightly more than that; there are two different guys who she might go with and there’s some social commentary about the American class system but essentially it is about having crushes on people, kissing and dancing.

The reason it works is because it treats these things with the same importance as do the characters, and the target audience. Sure it has nostalgic value, and the music and the fashion are deliciously 80s, but that’s not what appealed to Maisie Peters. The themes of youthful longing are pretty universal whether you’re living it or remembering it. Crucially the people in the story are all so appealing and believably written (with the possible exception of James Spader’s one dimensional hissable villain but even he has to come to terms with knowing deep down that he’s $#*¥ by the end so there’s some depth there). Duckie’s heartache at being in the friend zone and Andie’s angst around Blaine are so convincingly played and the actions it prompts in them totally real. Jack’s relationship with his daughter is built around great chemistry between Harry Dean Stanton and Molly Ringwald and their pain at being left by the mother is tangible. Then there’s Andie’s sweet companionship with Iona played with effortless charm by Annie Potts who was perfectly essaying the surrogate parent figure at the same age as Margot Robbie and Jennifer Lawrence are now. Even Blaine, who is a bit of a cliche, brings some identifiable self doubt, anguish and regret when he needs to.

Much has been made over the years around whether Andie ultimately ends up with the right man, and indeed it is clear that the denouement of Some Kind of Wonderful was Hughes reversing this only ten months later. Still, while Blaine may only have one tenth the personality of Jon Cryer’s exuberant Duckman, it does wrap up as it needs to. Quite aside of the fact that Andie clearly doesn’t feel that way about her childhood friend, there is another reason we need to see her win the devotion of Andrew McCarthy’s pastel wearing richie.

Eight years earlier Grease had gleefully put forward the message that the way for a young woman to successfully get a man in a different social circle to accept her as a love interest was to totally compromise and change her whole identity, throwing aside the sense of style that she was comfortable in and that set her apart from many of her conformist peers. In fact Hughes’ own The Breakfast Club had compounded this with Ally Sheedy’s character the Summer previously. Here though the girl does not have to change to get the guy. When Andie turns up at the prom alone she has not altered her individuality, she has leant into it. The fact that only moments earlier, in the scene where Andie gets the dress that ultimately defines her, Iona has done her own Sandy by going conventional for her yuppie boyfriend only serves to reinforce what is clearly a deliberate point.

Incidentally I did read that Pretty in Pink was shot in the same school building as Grease which I find it hard to believe but for reasons explored above I so want to be true.

There’s something else that sets Pretty in Pink apart. In 2018 Ringwald herself wrote an article in the New Yorker looking back on the films she made with John Hughes from a contemporary, specifically a #metoo, view point. She’d sat down to watch the movies with her own daughter and realised that there was a lot in them that sent a worse message than even Grease. Pretty in Pink she decided was the only one that still stood up to scrutiny. Certainly when Maisie Peters was singing about her life not matching up to a John Hughes movie, she was not hoping to be sexually assaulted under a school desk or to have sex when she was too drunk to consent but these are a part of the writer/director’s oeuvre. There is one bit in Pretty in Pink where Duckie approaches two young women in the school corridor and says he can work out a deal where one or the both of them could be pregnant by the holidays, but he immediately gets a deserved slap for it. No one hits Bender when he sticks his head up Claire’s skirt in The Breakfast Club. There is a suggested reason for some of Duckie’s errant behaviour in Ringwald’s New Yorker piece too. Read it here.

Much to Maisie Peters apparent vexation then, life is not like it is in the movies but it does move pretty fast and if you don’t stop to look around once in a while you could miss it. Much of that experience is reflected in Hughes work and even if we can’t quite live it we can totally still watch it, and even now we totally should,

especially Pretty in Pink.