The Breakfast Club, Uncle Buck, and Planes, Trains, and Automobile, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Some Kind of Wonderful. these movies defined a decade.

The Breakfast Club, Uncle Buck, and Planes, Trains, and Automobile, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Some Kind of Wonderful.: these movies defined a decade. They were some of the most successful films of the 1980s and remain culturally iconic even today. They are all written by John Hughes.
Looking at Hughes’s work as a whole and you will notice a pattern. Almost all of his films take place or feature the Midwest.
A common piece of advice given to writers today is that they should “write what they know.” Hughes’s success in the 1980’s seems to support this advice. He wrote about the Midwest characters and culture that he knew so well.
John Hughes: “I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn’t interest me. I’m not interested in psychotics. I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Everyman.”
ESSAY SHOULD take this idea of looking at what you know and connect the Midwest 80s mindset in the John Hughes movies to the work of contemporary NY-based painter Mathew Cerletty, who is from Wisconsin.