John Hughes’ bourgeois achievements

In a profile once of Francis Ford Coppola, I read that he was the rare great director from the 1970s who remained married to his first wife. Sure enough, the writer was correct. Scorsese, Lumet, Pakula, Allen, Lucas – each has been divorced and remarried, usually multiple times.

Assigning blame for the failures of those director’s marriages is difficult and beyond the scope of this post. However, their personal lives and worldviews contrast with the late director honored at last night’s Oscars – John Hughes. The tribute to Hughes was moving not because the brat pack reunited for one evening, and I say this as a child of the ’80s who rode his bike or got a ride from a friend’s older brother to see Hughes’ films. It was moving because Hughes’ films AND his family were honored simultaneously. He was a skilled filmmaker and husband/family man. At one point, Hughes’ wife put her hand up to her heart. Not many film directors’ wives would do that.

Hughes’ devotion to his family was no pose. He moved to LA in 1984 and realizing that Hollywood was no place to raise a family, decamped several years later to the Chicago suburbs. In the words of Vanity Fair writer David Kampman,

At some point, Hughes stopped and looked around, and he realized that he didn’t want to make movies anymore. He wanted to be at liberty to spend as much time with his family as he pleased, to work the farm he owned 75 miles northwest of Chicago, and to exult in the resolutely uncoastal ethos of his beloved Midwest. And by 1990, with the release of his highest-grossing movie, the Macaulay Culkin sado-slapstick comedy Home Alone, which Hughes wrote and produced but did not direct, he had the means to put Hollywood and the movies behind him.

Hughes simply never took to L.A. His sojourn there, though it coincided with what was arguably his artistic peak, sowed the seeds for his post-filmmaking life. It made him realize what he did and didn’t value. He had no capacity or tolerance for industry schmoozing, no interest in keeping up with his young actors’ emerging Brat Pack party circuit. What did matter to him was his family.

Later in the article, Kampman elaborated on Hughes’ adult and familial relationships:

Especially in his L.A. days, his sons say, their father got all the adult companionship he required from his film crews and the editors he worked with in postproduction, and otherwise maintained few close friendships. “I think he looked at family as a sort of wall,” John III says. “It gave him a sort of protection for not getting drawn out of the house. We were his social activity.” The Hughes home itself was a bustling, happy place, with an open-door policy for the boys’ friends and the actors Hughes liked—Broderick remembers dropping by often to use the pool—but beyond its warm confines, Hughes actively resisted being social.

One notable exception was the actor with whom he worked most regularly as he transitioned out of teen pictures: the reliably brilliant SCTV stalwart John Candy, the star of Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), The Great Outdoors (1988), and Uncle Buck (1989). Candy, though he was from Toronto rather than Chicago, led a life similar to Hughes’s: big hockey fan, big family man, strong marriage, two young kids.

By 1991, Hughes basically stopped working for Hollywood. He devoted his time to his family farm and spending time with his grand kids. Hughes’ personal commitment to family was mirrored in his movies. Think hard about the themes of his films, and you find that in many of them, bourgeois domesticity is championed. “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” is about the perils of men who devote more time to their careers than to their wives and kids. “Uncle Buck” shows the problems of the two-earner household on family life. The Home Alone series are about the problems of families who put travel and material goods ahead of its own members.

Hughes arguably was an early and prescient critic of the meritocratic lifestyle and ethos; I would have to go back and watch all of Hughes’ films to reach that conclusion. But certainly he was one of the bourgeoisie’s most popular artists and champions, behind and off the screen.