Pretty In Pink

Even if I didn't glean anything for the thesis from Jonathan Bernstein's book Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies, it would be well worth reading just because it is so entertaining. Bernstein is often hilarious savaging directors, actors and mind-numbing plot lines, to the point that there are several sizable laughs per chapter.

But the bonus is that it does provide some interesting context. If Xers grew up with the films of the 1980s, they learned a few things from this cultivated view of the outside world. You can't trust authority. Institutions are crumbling. Parents -- if we actually have them around -- let us down. Alienation and pain are part of life. Sometimes a wry and cynical sense of humor is the only thing that keeps us from going insane.

Sound familiar? Sould like the lessons and plotlines of so many '80s teen flicks? Sound like the stereotyped attitudes of people of my generation?

In terms of intergenerational conflict and parental absence, there is much of it found on the screen and among these pages. In his open, Bernstein made a very sage point, albeit parenthetically: ...(how many hundreds of films used "my parents are away for the weekend" as part of a plot point?) You read the book, and the answer is even more than I recalled. If teens weren't hiding the mortification of their what their own parents were putting them through, they were locked in the occasional zero-sum game with clueless elders. Consider Ferris Bueller vs. his school's dean of students, Edward Rooney. Ferris outwits, outplays and outlasts the authoritative adult throughout the picture (or, in Bernstein's words, proves "the Bugs to Ed's Fudd, the Road Runner to his Coyote").

Particularly noteworthy is a chapter on teen film king John Hughes. Bernstein finds a commonality in all Hughes flicks of the era:

All representatives of adult authoritiy were characterized in the Hughes canon as cringing, vindictive, foul-smelling, prehistoric, bewildered and spiritually undernourished. ... Parents were tyrannical in their expectations. They were criminal in their neglect. They were simpleminded. There were devious. ... His teen leads were smarter, hipper, more sensitive, more articulate and, at all times, morally superior to their adult oppressors.

Bernstein steals a line from The Breakfast Club for the title of the chapter: "When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies." Hughes and the other filmmakers for the teen set were not trafficking in flashbacks from wistful adults on their teenage years, they were giving us a universe that revolved around teens. It's as if a Logan's Run situation wiped all the hipness and morality out of people once they hit college. Bueller's devil-may-care attitude masks his worries that he and his friends will lose contact and grow into old, boring, irredeemable creatures. That's what adulthood does in these films: takes you from cool to fool, bro to bore, funkster to fossil.

With lessons like these learned during the 1980s, consider the charges leveled against Generation X in the early 1990s. They didn't want to grow up. They feared commitment. They shied away from joining the adult world.

It's hardly a silver bullet from the silver screen. But it's a very interesting parallel.