RIP: Director John Hughes

THR: John Hughes died suddenly of a heart attack today in New York City.  May he rest in peace.

As I have mentioned before, Hughes has been perceived as a bit of a shadow conservative in Hollywood.

But politics aside, the films which made him a household name in the 80′s were very much a part of growing up for people of my generation; not to mention they trained a lens on youth culture in a fashion that until he came along was unconventional in Hollywood.

Hughes’ youth films indeed presented us with a world where parents were often absent from crucial moments in their children’s lives (Home Alone, which he produced and wrote later in his career, is a very obvious example of this focus); a society in which children very often managed a certain transition into adulthood in the absence of parental involvement.  In many ways, sadly, they were a mirror held up to the collective face of modern American society.