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October 25, 2015 by Karen Jensen, MLS

Sunday Reflections: John Hughes, John Green, The Teen and Me

October 25, 2015 by Karen Jensen, MLS   Leave a Comment

papertownsMy adolescent years were lived to the soundtrack of John Hughes movies. To this day I still defiantly throw my fist in the air when Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds comes on the radio. At the same time, the closing letter begins to recite itself in my brain:

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us… in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Correct? That’s how we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.

I wanted to be Andie Walsh, the resourceful teenage girl from the wrong side of the tracks who makes her own glorious prom dress as she gets to choose between all the various guys in her life that seemed to desire her. She chose wrong, Duckie was obviously the right choice, but we can argue about that some other day.

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John Hughes spoke to the heart of my teenage self, seeming to perfectly capture all the hidden fears and desires that I held inside my heart and didn’t quite have the vocabulary to give voice to. I wanted to belong, I wanted to be confident, and I needed to know that somehow we would all make it out of this alive. I wanted to know that at the end of it all I would, in fact, be not only able but willing to defiantly throw my fist up into the air. John Hughes offered me a sort of hope that the adults in my life couldn’t seem to muster.

This year, my own daughter became a teenager an entered into middle school. I dropped her off on her first day with a hopeful prayer that it would go much differently then it went for me. I loathed being a teenager and still bear some of the inner scars that came with those years.

During the summer I took her and her friends to see the Paper Towns movie, based on the book by John Green. For me, it was an okay movie – until I had a moment of revelation. I looked over at The Teen and saw tears silently creeping down her cheeks as the main character delivers one of his closing lines about Margo Roth Speigelman:

What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.
Read more at http://quotesberry.com/post/101087067167/25-paper-towns-quotes-by-john-green#6h1WyRcrKAZGxCdT.99
This, I thought to myself, is her John Hughes moment. In these words she sees something reflected from herself, her life, her struggles. I saw her connect with the screen and in doing so I saw myself, all those years ago, making those same connections.
We talk a lot about how the world likes to denigrate the things that teenage girls love and the ways in which they love them. I remember exactly where and when I was when I first saw Duran Duran in concert. I was in the 10th grade. It was at Six Flags on a school night. A Thursday. And yes, I hyperventilated for a brief moment after it was over. For me, this was a moment in which I had a brush with greatness. My ordinary life had become, if even ever so briefly, something much bigger than it was. I felt cool. I felt empowered. I felt like maybe life could be more than fat checks in the mirror as you bustled out the door for another day of school then homework then Thursday nights in front of the TV. That night held the promise of something bigger and better than whatever my reality currently was.
In that moment, watching her watch Paper Towns, I didn’t care what the critics of the movie had to say. I didn’t care what the critics of John Green and his role in the world of YA had to say. The only thing I cared about was that she was having her John Hughes moment and that I could understand. She’ll probably have other John Hughes moments in her lifetime. There will be more movies, more books, more songs that become the soundtrack of her life. And years later, after she survives adolescence, those moments will bubble once again to the surface and she’ll remember who she was in those moments.
“But then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” – Paper Towns

Filed under: Sunday Reflections

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About Karen Jensen, MLS

Karen Jensen has been a Teen Services Librarian for almost 30 years. She created TLT in 2011 and is the co-editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Services with Heather Booth (ALA Editions, 2014).

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