Part 23: A Texpatriate in Shermer, Illinois: Or, You Can’t Go Home Again Unless You’re
Moving to John Hughes’s Mythic Hometown
--January
2018
“Don’t You, Forget About Me…”
—Simple Minds, 1985
While buying ice cream for my
daughters at the corner shop just a block from my home, I am reminded that 27
years ago Macaulay Culkin was filmed here stealing a toothbrush (at what was
then the local drugstore) in John Hughes’s Christmas classic, Home Alone.
My movie friends will immediately
take offense that I referred to this film as a “classic,” and they are
justified in their outrage. It’s not a great movie, though it is mildly
entertaining—especially in comparison to just about everything else on Disney
channel and Nickelodeon this time of year. However, if you don’t have kids, you
wouldn’t appreciate how good Home Alone
is compared to the endless, nauseating stream of lousy programs on these (and
other) infuriating cable channels. Indeed, the so-called “family channels” on
my cable box are littered with endless holiday crap for months beginning in
October, and Home Alone is arguably
high quality compared to most other drivel. To be fair, these channels traffic
in crap year-round—it’s not honest to be critical just of the holiday shows.
(And by the way, my reference to the “cable box” illustrates how stuck in the past
I am…almost nobody has a cable box anymore, much less cable. Nowadays, everything
is streamed, or so I’m told.)
Moreover, myriad cable
channels and Wikipedia, the ultimate online arbiter of all things real and imagined,
will disagree with my movie-snob friends (with whom I typically agree)—for
better or worse—in regarding Home Alone
as a legitimate staple of modern Christmastime entertainment. There’s no
comparison to It’s a Wonderful Life, or
other true holiday classics, in my opinion, but I suspect that Home Alone is at least as ubiquitous as Mircale on 34th Street or A Christmas Story, if not more so, in
recent years. Not that ubiquity is synonymous with quality. Rather, modern
audiences embraced Huges’s film as part of the holiday tradition much like kids
from my era embraced the claymation classic Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer or the animated Charlie
Brown Christmas. Home Alone is obviously
inferior to these predecessors, but that’s just this humble Texpatriate’s
opinion.
Regardless of debates about
Culkin and this John Hughes franchise, I was standing on sacred ground—at least
for folks who grew up with movies the way I did in the 1980s. After all, as a
kid in the 70s and 80s, the films of John Hughes—and the physical landscape in which
they were filmed—had an oversized influence on me and my understanding of those
weird, painful, wonderful years between elementary school and college. And I
suspect I’m not alone, though few will likely admit it.
Some Kind of Wonderful
A couple years ago I
purchased a home on Chicago’s North Shore in the village of Winnetka, Illinois.
When I first moved to Chicago twenty years ago, in my mid-20s, I never would
have imagined that I would live in suburban Winnetka. It’s a beautiful village
along Lake Michigan about 16 miles north of downtown Chicago. My city friends
will scoff at my new address…”too homogeneous, too snobbish, boring, etc...” I
concede these and other criticisms, but it is a surprisingly friendly, diverse
neighborhood. In truth, I love my new home and my new neighborhood. It ain’t
perfect, but something about this village just feels right.
Just then it hit me: in moving to Chicago’s North
Shore, I effectively moved to Shermer, Illinois—that fictional anytown, USA setting
of Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Pretty
in Pink, She’s Having a Baby, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, National Lampoon’s
Vacation, and Breakfast Club. And
for that reason, Shermer, er
Winnetka, feels extremely familiar. After all, Shermer is the locus of
virtually every major movie of my misspent youth. As
author Kevin Smokler explains in his book Brat
Pack America, “If anyone can claim it, John Hughes is the cartographer of
Brat Pack America. Thanks to his imagination, Shermer, Illinois, became its
capital city.”
As a teen growing up in
Duncanville, Texas, Hughes’s characters always felt very authentic to this
young Texan. Indeed, Shermer was actually quite similar to Duncanville—a
comfortable suburban enclave immediately adjacent to a major city—but was much
more homogeneous. The characters from The
Breakfast Club could easily have walked the aisles at Duncanville High
School in my day, only there would be much greater diversity plus Texas accents.
Still, Hughes’s fictional town felt authentic in its representation of suburbia
during this period—lots of stupid teenage hijinks but all playing out within a
relatively safe, contained place far removed from the dangers of the big city
in the 1980s.
When I finally
moved into a home in the town that served as Hughes’s backdrop a couple years
ago, I discovered that it actually feels
like the hometown of my teens—or at least the teens I lived out in my head and
on the silver screen. In some ways, I feel more “at home” here than at any time
since I left Duncanville in September 1989 to attend college at SMU. Though to
be totally honest, I have always felt liminal. Out of place. Betwixt and
between. Even, if not especially, growing up in Duncanville.
Located in University Park—a swanky section of North Dallas—SMU,
just 30 minutes north, may as well have been 30 hours away from Duncanville. SMU
was wonderful, a whole new world, but my classmates didn’t exactly know what to
make of me. During my freshman orientation I recall a fellow classmate—a
graduate from Highland Park High School or Hockaday or some other elite school
in North Dallas—sharing that her parents instructed her never to drive south of
the Trinity River. My rejoinder was that in Duncanville we only drove north of
the Trinity to buy beer (as Oak Cliff and Duncanville were dry).
However, I’m quite certain that despite our differences and
cultural baggage, we were both fluent in the lessons and myths of John Hughes’s
America. She was from a wealthy part of town and I was from the “wrong side of
the tracks”—or in my case, the wrong side of the Trinity River. No, I wasn’t
poor, but in her mind Duncanville might as well be in Arkansas. Hmmm…isn’t this
Hughesian encounter reminiscent of Pretty
and Pink or Breakfast Club? Only
a kid from the 80’s with romanticized memories of youth would immediately jump
to that reference. Naturally, I did, because movies were my cultural markers,
my way of understanding the actions, thoughts and emotions of people around me,
for better or worse.
As the child of divorced parents living in suburbia in the mid-1980’s—a
worn movie cliché in itself—I subconsciously coopted select characters from
favorite movies to complement my cohort of high school friends. Few friends
shared my family experiences and fewer still understood the complex and often
painful emotions I confronted when I came home each night from school. Movie
characters were one-dimensional and at best they were cold comfort during the
emotional rollercoaster that is high school, but at least on screen—albeit
usually the small screen via VHS tapes rented from Video Safari—the story-lines
were universal. I saw kids confronting the same bullshit I experienced, albeit
in superficial storylines that all wrapped up neatly in 90 minutes.
Nevertheless, I could relate to these characters, and I suspect I was not
alone.
“Life moves pretty
fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
--Ferris Bueller
Now that I effectively
live in Hughes’s fictional suburb of Shermer, these memories often come
flooding back—though typically in positive ways thanks to distance and time.
Indeed, most days I can’t drive to work much less the grocery store without
passing at least two iconic locations featured in Hughes’s oeuvre. The Home Alone house is just a few blocks
away, as is the home featured in the final scene of Planes Trains and Automobiles (Hughes’s best film, in my humble
opinion). So are many scenes from Risky
Business—though not a Hughes film, but certainly a classic of 1980s Brat
Pack culture. Close friends of mine share a fence with the owners of the house
where Sixteen Candles was filmed, and
countless local friends were “extras” in this classic. (Apart from its casual
racism, among its many flaws, I believe this film actually is a classic.)
So, a
few weeks ago I had an epiphany: I
realized one reason—perhaps the
reason—I love my new home so much is that I now live in a quasi-mythical place.
My little nook of the North Shore is actually a part of my generation’s
collective, shared memory. Gen-Xers all have the same collective Hughesian
shorthand when thinking about or observing these places, from Ferris Buehler’s
Chicagoland to over-the-top Christmas decorations on the Griswold family home
(from Christmas Vacation). Which memory
is real and which is from a movie? Or to quote a commercial from the 80s, “Is
it live or is it Memorex?” (Remember cassettes?)
For me, it’s getting harder and harder to
determine. As a teen, movies were as much my reality as anything else I
experienced in the mid- to late-1980s. I lived inside them and watched them
over and over. Movies provided an escape, but they also created the context in
which to contemplate the silly, dumb, fun, heartbreaking, painful, and downright
messy reality of being a teenager. All the laughter,
tears, anger, joy and pain of adolescence could be sublimated by obsessive
movie watching. In hindsight, it was a safer outlet than drugs and reckless
behavior. It’s not that I didn’t indulge in the more-than-occasional reckless
activity, but it was somehow muted thanks to my favorite outlet: movies.
Now that I’m raising a teenager in Shermer, I am reminded daily
of both the beauty and absurdity during this critical stage of childhood. Only
my daughter’s version of Shermer lives inside an iPhone. What in the hell will
her reality be as an adult reflecting on this period in her life?
Now I have
unexpectedly returned to that familiar place—and it is so very odd. Indeed, the
false narrative of my childhood regarding what life would (or should) look and
feel like as an adult—built on a combination of real and perceived experiences coupled
with compelling but artificial scenes from 1980s movies—is now essentially fulfilled,
and I’m literally a fortysomething character living out childhood fantasies. As
I write this I realize just how pathetic that is. Have I literally become Clark
Griswold? Apparently, the answer is yes.
In her New York magazine article, Jennifer Senior explains, “Why You Never Leave High School.” That’s especially true now thanks to Mark
Zuckerberg. In it, she explains, “Until Facebook, the people from my
high-school years had undeniably occupied a place in my unconscious, but they
were ghost players, gauzy and green at the edges.”
On the contrary, characters
from Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles are still clear and
present in my mind thanks to AMC, TNT, HBO and the other 300+ cable TV channels
we pay several hundred dollars each month to watch. And that is especially true
for me, an unrepentant, former movie-obsessed kid with an after-school job at
Video Safari. Indeed, the movie characters from high school are permanently
etched into my psyche. Throw in the fact that my parents were divorced and I
spent far more time studying the works of John Carpenter, John Hughes and
Steven Speilberg than solving quadratic equations or reading Animal Farm.
Leaving the ice cream shop and walking the short block back
home, my mind begins to drift, as it usually does thanks to a hyperactive
imagination fueled by caffeine and nostalgia, and I wonder if I can find Ferris
Buehler on TBS or HBO when I get back home?
