colinr0380 wrote:
Its like the teen drama version of a prison drama in some ways, which is why the Principal is a rather larger than life monstrously cruel jailer figure, patrolling the halls and halting break-out attempts! (Who of course, like the majority of adults in a John Hughes film, is jealous of his own lost youth being thrown back into his face by all these young punks!)
I was thinking a bit more about this and wonder if this is why all of John Hughes's films have a slightly conservative Peter Pan-like quality about them. Most of the adult figures in his films seem manic, comic figures, struggling to survive (or just get back home!) and often criminals. Or they are slightly abstract figures usually motivating the younger characters through fear of some sort of punishment, whether its a real threat or just something like the ticking clock of what will happen once your parents get home, as in Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Weird Science!
The kids in the films are all wanting to take on adult responsibilities (romances, even running the family home in the case of Kevin in Home Alone!), yet don't really want to be like their parents. They want to be responsible whilst still being able to have fun without worrying about the consequences (even the threat to life!), just like teens!
The 'mid-tier' adults are the ones that get turned into the biggest Captain Hook-like baddies - the principals in The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, gleefully wielding their position like a weapon (though with a suggestion underneath that they've been driven vindictively insane by kids like Ferris running roughshod over them!); Bill Paxton's older brother in Weird Science (literally transformed into a giant pile of faeces!); the bumbling criminal duo in Home Alone, and so on.
John Belushi's terrible role model father figure in Curly Sue perhaps straddles the line, starting off as someone fully deserving of whatever slapstick punishment he gets and then becomes the 'parental figure' more fully by the end, though it takes the title child character's intercession to make him into a 'more rounded' character (a bit like the interactions between Kevin and the Robert Blossom old man character in Home Alone, that starts off scary and turns more sweetly sentimental).
But for all of the rebelliousness against authority and need to playact being adults, in the end there's still that submission to actual parental figures or need for the adult authorities to come in, arrest the criminals and restore the order that the kids secretly crave in their hearts. To provide that structure that the kids need to cathartically rebel against, and learn about themselves in opposition to. That's why Ferris is the main character rather than Cameron (who'll have a really bad parental confrontation in his future) in Ferris Bueller's Day Off - he still has a way back into parental love. Its why the freezer-packed grandparents get thawed out without consequence in Weird Science! Its why there's the somewhat comforting scene of all the kids getting picked up by their (various tempered, like little visions of the kids when they are actually adults) parents after the detention in The Breakfast Club (while the rebel has no-one). And why we get the ending of Home Alone of Kevin back in the arms of his mother and ready to celebrate a family Christmas after all.