Historiann resembles that remark!

Great analysis. John Hughes’s 1980s high schools were like Woody Allen’s or Jerry Seinfeld’s New York, where the only “ethnic diversity” is Jewish/not-Jewish. (And in Seinfeld, even that divide was suppressed!)

We’ve had a bit of a Hughes “brat pack” marathon here as well on Danish TV.

“The Breakfast Club” was my favorite.

…but I watch these films now with a mixture of nostalgia and trepidation.

I think Watanabe was the only non-white character in any of Hughes’ movies, not counting the Black and Latino ex-con parking attendants in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Watanabe’s character in “16 Candles”, Long Duk Dong, a Chinese exchange student, had the character theme song, “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, supposedly a song about male masturbation. I guess Chinese, Japanese, same thing for Hughes.

Just the other day, “Gremlins 2″ (not a Hughes film) aired, and there was Watanabe, playing the goofy, camera laden Japanese tourist. Where his role in 16 Candles, was admittedly funny, in so far as we can laugh at overtly racists stereotypes, here it was just one very bad joke.

Furthermore, the Hughes films represented an utterly deceptive portrayal of class in America. Basically, all of America was white and middle class, with a comfortable “average income middle class” that lived in suburban harmony with an upper middle class who all play golf and drive luxury European automobiles. Oh, there are of course a few “others” from the “wrong side of the tracks” like Ringwald’s character in Pretty and Pink, and Judd Nelson’s Breakfast Club character, representing the working class. There characters and others like it, so the message goes, wouldn’t be working class had their parents just stopped drinking or cursing the system. It’s hard for me not to see Hughes as part of the cultural “White washing” of a whole generation of teenage Reagan-era suburbanites.

However, films like Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” make me long for the “innocence” of the Reagan years.

Never trust a word he says.