Searching for a Southern John Hughes
Have I ever seen adolescent life in the American south depicted on screen in a way consonant with my own lived experience?
Here I am in my middle-age years, and I’ve yet to make peace with living in the suburbs. The ‘burbs, teenaged me asserted, with their cookie-cutter subdivisions, country clubs, and chain restaurants, were the very height of inauthenticity and cultural conformity. I arrived at this stance, however, in spite of having spent no meaningful time in either suburbia or major cities. My youth was spent almost entirely in the same house in the same rural southern town.
From where did this anti-’burbs sentiment stem? Mostly my consumption of Gen-X movies like Pump Up the Volume (1990), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Reality Bites (1990), all of which cast a jaundiced eye at suburbia and boomer yuppies. These films also appear to have poisoned the well for me, as I still view them the suburbs in this light even after nearly 20 years of residing squarely within the beast’s belly.1
But this animus towards suburban life wasn’t always the case. Boyhood me, under the influence of filmmaker John Hughes, longed for the ‘burbs. Hughes, the “Teen Laureate” and “Philosopher of Puberty,” endeared himself to audiences with a string of 80s high school dramedies like Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). With their front-and-center treatment of teenage awkwardness, young love, and the choppy waters of high school cliques, these movies were celebrated for capturing something purportedly universal about American teen life.
But Hughes’ idyllic (fictional) suburb of Shermer, Illinois, with its stately homes and tree-lined sidewalks,2 looked nothing like my hometown, where houses often sat on a hundred or more acres with vast cotton fields in between them. Nor did the kids who inhabited these films look or sound like the people I encountered in my daily life.3 For pre-teen me, Shermer was utterly foreign and inaccessible — and thus highly alluring. Could it be that my long-standing distaste for the suburbs was born not (merely) out of emulating slacker rebelliousness but an inferiority complex or ressentiment rooted in covetous boyhood viewings of Hughes’ movies?
That’s a question beyond the scope of this essay. But it does raise a question: Have I ever seen adolescent life in the American south depicted on screen in a way consonant with my own lived experience? None come to mind. Was there a redneck John Hughes or a Deep-South Shermer somewhere out there in movieland that was unknown to me, that I somehow missed in spite of rapacious movie-watching?
In this edition of Material Ghosts, I endeavor to find out.
Methodology
The first step is to set the scope of our study. My methodology here is by no means perfect and may even be controversial. I found on Wikipedia a list of 222 “films set in the Southern United States.” This list, however, is neither exhaustive nor completely accurate. I spotted a number of omissions, like the queer coming-of-age dramedy Love, Simon (2018), set in Atlanta, and the Georgia-set family reunion comedy Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins (1999). What’s more, there are a few films that, frankly, have no business on the list, like Where the Heart Is (2000), which takes place in Oklahoma. Mind you, there are no official or universally agreed-upon boundaries demarcating “the south,” but I can safely say that Oklahoma ain’t in it. So the list is flawed, no doubt. I also limited my search to movies from 1984, the year of Hughes’ directorial debut (when I was 4 years old), and after.
It should be noted that this exercise is not merely about finding films set in the south. Rather, I’m looking for texts that, like the Hughes’ movies, involve teen angst or coming of age and that take place in the present in which they were made. Consequently, we can toss all the period pieces. This thins the ranks considerably: no civil war epics, no civil rights dramas.4
It makes sense that so many movies about the south would be set in the past, as few other U.S. regions are as haunted by their histories. It’s hard to accurately capture the particularities of the south without reckoning with its blemishes. As Faulkner said, in the south, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
For similar reasons, I move that we eliminate films in that most enduring of regional traditions, the “Southern Gothic” genre. The literary exemplars are Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, who populate their works with “grotesques” (people ill, injured, or deformed) and expose in the process the aberrance at the heart of the supposedly genteel south, often culminating with doses of shocking violence. Writer M.O. Walsh succinctly describes it thus:
What holds [Southern Gothic] together is the tortured history of the American south. There is no way around it. From slavery and prejudice through the civil war and Jim Crow, the American south has a past full of inexcusable ugliness.
With this in mind, I’m eliminating Southern Gothic films like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), and Sling Blade (1996). After all, Molly Ringwald’s tribulations tended to involve high school crushes; she never had to come to terms with the slave trade or poll taxes.
Onward. Because my aim is to identify movies that speak to common or universal experiences within the specifics of place, I’m also going to toss out “fish out of water” films wherein someone not from the region and ignorant of its quirks and customs attempts to acclimate to it, often to humorous results. The protagonists of these texts are not representative figures of the south but outsiders. So out goes My Cousin Vinny (1992), Doc Hollywood (1991), and the like.
Now for a part that might ruffle some feathers. As I mentioned before, where the south begins and ends has long been debated. Is it whatever falls below the Mason-Dixon line? States that aligned with the Confederacy during the civil war? Anywhere where folks speak with a drawl? I can’t hope to settle the matter here, but I’m making two potentially controversial calls nonetheless: I’m throwing out Texas and Florida.
Why Texas? Because that state has its own unique iconography — the cowboy, the oil derricks, the flat expanse, the cultural intermingling of America and Mexico, its preference for beef barbecue. Though many might disagree, I suspect someone from Mississippi has more in common with someone from West Virginia than with someone from Texas.
For similar reasons, I’m withholding Florida from consideration in this exercise. Geographically speaking, Florida is most certainly part of the south. But most southerners and many Floridians will tell you that that state is an outlier, culturally speaking. It was a place that was largely uninhabitable until the invention of air conditioning, and that innovation sent cold-state retirees and theme park moguls on a mad dash to buy cheap frontier property in the mid-20th century.5
The result of this is a place that bears little resemblance culturally and topographically to other states in the region. Apart from some pockets of north Florida, one would be hard pressed to hear anyone speak with that characteristic southern drawl. Nor is there an equivalent to Florida Man elsewhere in the south.
My final cut is also likely to stir some, for I am also setting neo-noir films to the side. The movies of the classic film noir period of the 40s and 50s (e.g., The Maltese Falcon [1941], Double Indemnity [1944], The Big Sleep [1946]) were mostly set in major cities and often involved in-over-their-head detectives and seductive femmes fatale. That tradition was later revived as postmodern pastiche, relocating these thrillers to different environs, with the south being a key one. Think: Body Heat (1981), The Big Easy (1986), and Wild Things (1998).
Once again, my rationale for exclusion is these films’ preoccupation with history. Neo-noirs self-consciously deploy the tropes and style of the midcentury films and place them alongside icons and stock characters from the region. This is why New Orleans, with its French Quarter balconies and brick streets, and Florida, with its marshes and alligators, are such frequent settings for neo-noir films. Moreover, many of these films tend to blend conventions from the Southern Gothic and noir traditions, making them doubly citational. Consider Angel Heart (1987), Eve’s Bayou (1997), and the first season of HBO’s True Detective. All are haunted by the history of the region and the literary and cinematic representation thereof.
A Digression
So after all of these cuts, it leaves us with only 62 movies out of the original 222. The trends within what remains are fascinating:
Popular novelists like John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks, whose works are set in the south and are frequently adapted for the screen, are well represented. Sparks’ southern-set movies number 12, and Grisham, 10. Tangent: Nicholas Sparks adaptations seemingly have but one movie poster:
It’s not just noir filmmakers that gravitate to New Orleans. More than a dozen of our remaining movies are set there. Given the city’s instantly identifiable aesthetic and its penchant for debauchery, it’s no wonder it makes an attractive movie locale.
Films by Black directors or featuring predominantly Black casts are well represented. Here are just a few examples: School Daze (1988), Drumline (2002), Beauty Shop (2005), Hustle & Flow (2005), and ATL (2006). To this point I shall return.
The Short List
To return to the question at hand: are there any teen/coming-of-age films that are
Set in the south (but not Texas or Florida)?
Set in the present?
Not neo-noir or Southern Gothic?
I count only 9 possibilities — and even some of those are a stretch. They are:
The aforementioned Atlanta-set Love, Simon (2018), about a closeted teen boy who is forced to accelerate his coming out after a classmate threatens to out him.
Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988), a comedy about Black sorority and fraternity life at an HBCU in Georgia.
The Delta (1996), an indie romance set in Memphis about a doomed relationship between a closeted white teenager traveling down the Mississippi River with a Vietnamese immigrant.
Another indie, First Love, Last Rites (1997), starring Natasha Gregson Wagner and Giovanni Ribisi in a languid, sexually frank love story set in Louisiana.
All the Real Girls (2003), a poetic story of first love and heartbreak set in rural North Carolina.6
Another Atlanta-set movie, Drumline (2002) concerns a talented-by-raw snare drummer in an HBCU marching band.
War Eagle, Arkansas (2007) concerns a pivotal moment for a young man faced with the decision to pursue a baseball career or remain in his small Arkansas town with his best friend, who has cerebral palsy.
Ballast (2008), a contemplative drama about three Black residents coping through a tragedy in rural Mississippi.
ATL (2008), starring rapper T.I., about impoverished brothers who find solace at the skating rink.
Of these, Love, Simon hews closest to the Hughes formula: it’s breezily paced and mixes laughs with heartfelt sentimentality, albeit with a queer twist. Plug in some straight kids and it would fit right in with Hughes’ output.
What’s most intriguing about the films that emerged from this exercise, though, is how the bulk of them, without aiming to do so, fill in Hughes’ lily-white, heteronormative, or classical, crowd-pleasing blind spots. Four center the experience of Black people (ATL, School Daze, Ballast, Drumline), of which two are set within the world of historically Black institutions. The closest Hughes ever got to racial inclusivity is his appalling caricature of Chinese exchange student Long Duck Dong, played by Gedde Watanabe, in Sixteen Candles.
To my recollection, no queer characters — closeted or out, protagonist or supporting role — appear in Hughes’ work as a director at all. In our sample here, we find five (The Delta, Love, Simon). It’s also telling that while Hughes sought to depict the quintessence of teenage tribulations through classical storytelling, four of the films here opt for a more lyrical, elliptical, unconventional approach (All the Real Girls, Ballast, The Delta, First Love, Last Rites).
This is not to say that any of these strategies are necessarily better than Hughes’. For one, it’s not exactly fair to critique a filmmaker most active in the 80s and early 90s for being out of step with today’s cultural standards — no critics that I can find called him on these choices contemporaneously. And Hughes’ commercial success and enduring popularity are in no small part thanks to his movies’ accessibility, which we cannot say for Ballast and other arthouse indies.
It is revealing, though, that in searching for a southern equivalent or approximation of Hughes’ supposed universality, we find instead only the specificity of people, places, and experiences that far less frequently wind up on American screens. This suggests, then, that the south, unlike the suburbs, is too particular and too peculiar to be made generic. There can be no southern Hughes because the south itself is singular, thus resisting attempts to make it universal or one-size-fits-all. In cutting 222 films down to nine, we substantially widen the scope of what it means to come of age.
Why did I choose to live there? It’s a long story, Dear Reader. When my wife and I married, we worked many miles apart in opposite directions and chose what we expected would be a temporary location convenient to both of our commutes. But then came a recession and grad school and kids. Even after our financial position had changed, we elected to stay put for the sake of our children, who had made close friendships with the neighbors and liked their schools.
Hughes’ films are so enduringly popular that in 2021 the Chicago Tribune published a quiz asking readers to match photos of houses with the movie in which they appear. I got 10 out of 11 right.
This is one of the few instances where I, a cis-het, able-bodied, white man, did not see myself reflected back on screen. (Poor me!) Many critics have noted how overwhelmingly white Hughes’ fictional world is — even Hughes’ muse and star, Molly Ringwald.
Sadly, it also eliminates Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), a movie set in Austin, Texas, in 1976 that best approximates what my high school years in late 90s Georgia were like (the beer-drinking and driving more so than the paddling and hazing).
Florida’s current population is over 22 million. But it was solidly under 5 million residents until 1961. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/florida/population
Dazed and Confused gets the details of my high school social interactions right, but All the Real Girls and George Washington (2000), both directed by Arkansas native David Gordon Green, are the films that best capture what the south feels like to me.