Sunday, July 5, 2009

#317. John Hughes Movies


The 1980s is considered by many pundits to be the greatest decade in the history of the world. Great music, great fashion and the rise of the imaginary Black family- thanks to The Cosby Show - made the 80s a harmonious place for race relations. Michael Jackson was still Black, Mr. T was still relevant and white America and Black America were living in a peaceful detente after a turbulent 60s and 70s.

In the early 1990s however, that harmony was replaced by universal discord with the Los Angeles Riots, rise of the militia movement and OJ Simpson. A movie was made entitled Falling Down, which depicted a white male fighting back against the corruption and decadence of modern Los Angeles, a vain attempt at showing life in the dwindling majority of California. Of course this movie was pure fiction and never will we see white people show the slightest opposition to their displacement.

Few theoreticians have been able to identify why racial tensions were so great in the early 1990s after such a wonderful decade of integrated decadence in the 80s... until now.

Black people, as has been discerned, love movies. They truly enjoy going to the cinema and watching films for their enjoyment. However, one director's films in the 1980s were subliminally racist and exuded an implicit whiteness that Black people picked up on and in turn, lead to the disastrous downturn in race relations in the 1990s: John Hughes films.

Hughes directed or wrote such classics as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Weird Science, Home Alone and National Lampoon's Vacation series. The problem with these movies, despite being hilarious and amusing, is that they have few if any Black people. Even the requisite "Token Black" is missing, and in the case of one movie, Sixteen Candles, replaced with an Asian exchange student named Long Duk Dong. In The Breakfast Club, five white students enjoy a Saturday in detention and learn that the social class system that rules the school, hierarchically putting labels on people, is wrong.

However, the world that John Hughes creates in his stories and movies is one devoid of Black people. It is as if non-whites don't exist in this ficticious world of John Hughes and his America is occupied only by cool and hip white people, like Ferris Bueller, Clark Griswold and Cousin Eddie or Buzz McCallister.

Only Black people can be cool and hip, so depicting white people in such Black roles is a major blunder, and John Hughes - who turned out hit after hit in the theaters (the correlation being that the bigger the hit, the whiter the movie) - and his films directly led to the civil breakdown in race relations in the early 1990s.

His desire to make movies that starred the ultimate white guy everyman, John Candy, was more than Black people could take.

It would be incredibly difficult to even name one Black character in a John Hughes movie that even had a speaking part, let alone a minor role. For this reason only, Black people decided to make the early-90s a sea of racial disharmony and those troubled waters have been dicey every since.

Black people consider the John Hughes movies incredibly racist and yet another example of Pre-Obama America that they detest. Take for instance the Hughes film The Great Outdoors, which stars John Candy. There is not one Black face or Black person to be seen the film, as it is a glorification of white people, families and summer.

Most of John Hughes movies take place in Chicago, a city that has a sizable white population and, according to his movies, no Black people.

John Hughes and his movies depict an America without the glory of racial diversity and Black people, and for this reason his films merit yet another inclusion in Stuff Black People Don't Like.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not a colored, but except for what you write about, John Hughes movies just are not good.

Anonymous said...

R.I.P. John Hughes.

Anonymous said...

that is so funny. correct. john hughes movies were not good at all and he did go out of his way to make all white movies. it was talked about briefly in the late 80's then you didn't hear about it any longer. but who cares. his movies sucked all black or all white. i hated his movies. I had no idea that he was only 59.

Anonymous said...

No other director can claim so many watchable hits. You can watch Planes trains over and over again. John Candy RIP was EveryWhiteGuy. Ferris too. Breakfast club. Great. Who can forget long duck dong. Hey, I have a great idea. Let's organize, and bring the great old days of white america back. All we have to do is come up with a plan, then do it. Because this multicultural cesspool will get us all killed and bring about the ruin of Western Civilization. Minorities belong back in their third-world toilets. Like Santeria or Sharia law or even Yom Kippur, they don't belong here. Like i said to the chinaman beside me in the middle of nowhere: "What the hell are you doing here? One billion in Asia ain't enough?" He laughed and told me "when we feared you white devils we respected you. Now you kiss our ass we spit on you pussies. Your world belongs to us now." Decent societies are just more stuffblackpeopledontlike.

Anonymous said...

doesn't #26 conflict with this one...?

Andrew M. said...

Who gives a shit whether John Hughes's movies were any good? That's not the point. Black people didn't have to apologize for fantasies like "A Different World" and "The Cosby Show," where everybody was black and living lives we all know most of them are incapable of achieving. Why should Hughes have apologized for making movies with characters that reflected not only his world, but the world occupied by the vast majority of 1980s Americans? He didn't "go out of his way" to make "all-White" movies. He made movies that he could identify with. The only people in this fucking country who don't seem to have a right to do that without bringing opprobrium down on their heads are Whites. Does BET concern itself with multicultural entertainment, despite the fact their viewership is found within a paltry 12% of the population?

Anonymous said...

Blacks dont use Facebook. They prefer Myspace because its more ghetto. As far as John Hughes, I think he was brilliant. Blacks dont understand his films because they have tunnel vision. They honestly think Obama is "black" minded, and that O.J. had black friends. All of O.J.'s friends were WHITE people. He didnt associate with blacks. Get that thru your head...

Anonymous said...

This is a good article except for the phrase "Only Black people can be cool and hip." If you truly believe that, you are a racist yourself. I found this blog entry because, after watching National Lampoon's Vacation I thought, "this movie is racist." So I thought I'd google "John Hughes racist" and it led me here.

The reason I thought that movie was so bigoted is not because there were no black characters. Rather, all the black characters in the movie are racial stereotypes.

The only African Americans you see in the first half of the movie are the ones in the "bad neighborhood" that steal the Griswold's hub caps and tag their car. The only one you see in the second half is the Wally World security guard who Clark treats like a dog, telling him to lie down and roll over.

Maybe I should have looked up "National Lampoon's Vacation racist" because it was the director, Harold Ramis, and the casting directors Susan Arnold and Phyllis Huffman that were truly at fault.

Anyway, I just discovered your blog. I'll have to check it out.

P.S. It's astounding to read some of these comments. Bigotry is alive and well in the Obama days.

Anonymous said...

He made the movies for his racist audience.

Anonymous said...

No, he made movies about white people because they represent a greater share of the market then Black people did in the 1980s... and still do.

Hence, why Princess and the Frog BOMBED.

Anonymous said...

(response to black people are only portrayed as stereotypes in his movies)
John Hughes used nothing but stereo types in all of his movies. The breakfast club, each character depicted a stereo type, pretty in pink was rich vs poor stereo types...movies are all about stereo-types! That's why it's a surprise when a seemingly diminutive secretary ends up being a killer...it's going against stereotype!
Our society CAN be distilled into stereotypes. What kind of movie hasn't been defined by them?!?
Only a movie where characters have no background or no story would be stereotype free. And NOBODY would go to see that.
Relax people! Sheesh...

Anonymous said...

"Hence, why Princess and the Frog BOMBED."

Hey, Cletus....do your homework instead of drinking your moonshine and screwing your sister.

Princess and the Frog cost $105 million to make. It made $267 million worldwide and it domestically made its budget back.

Anonymous said...

Who gives a damn if black people don't like it.
Too bad!

MICHAEL DEAN MILLER said...

.


Anonymous said... "He made the movies for his racist audience"


No. He made movies for an audience of his race and for you to impugn them makes YOU a racist.


.

Anonymous said...

I grew up in the 80's (teen years)and I saw all of John Hughes (RIP) movies and I loved them all. Many movies in that decade didn't show black people or minorities. Some did like Black Rain (1989) which stared Michael Douglas in Japan, one of my favorite movies (non-John Hughes film). White movies are fine, if a black person today wants to see Tyler Perry movies or just black people movies, like For Colored Girls, good I'm not insulted. I hate token people (minorities) being put on TV or movies to make some politically correct statement, I'm not fooled. Let all people make movies to cater to racial/ethnic groups including Anglos (European descent). I've been around the world (Russia, China, South Africa, Swaziland, Mexico, South Korea, Costa Rica, Japan, Bahamas, and more in the future). Not one of these countries do they have to force their moviemakers to hire a different race/ethnic group. And of all things I'm Hispanic and could care less if a Hispanic is put into a movie just to make brown people happy. In the end we all are going to associate with who we want to, outside of work and school, we all are going to see movies we like (Anglo or whatever), and this is perfectly fine. P.S. If you are white your fine I don't care about white guilt, you owe nobody anything, go and live your life the way you want, political correctness can go down the toilet along with affirmative action.

Anonymous said...

The people that stole the car in Ferris Bueller were a black and a hispanic. There was also the street dancing scence during "Twist and Shout" that was all blacks.