Nearly 20 years ago, I watched Mr. Mom as a kid who knew Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice and Batman, so I was quite familiar with Keaton as a comedian and an action guy. But when I re-watched this comedy, I actually paid attention to the credits and was delightedly surprised to find that it was written by none other than the 80's icon, John Hughes. Thinking about it now, it kinda makes sense that Hughes would write such a complex, funny, and pointed film; though it is a bit of a departure from his other 80's classic hits like Some Kind of Wonderful and Weird Science.
John Hughes is carved on the psyche of Generation X like a tattoo of a former favorite cartoon character that goes in and out of popularity as it alternates between cheesy and ironic. No one managed to capture 80's teenage-hood better than this man, but it ended up rather inescapably dating his work. Who could forget Ferris Bueller's lament of getting a computer (a green screened beige lump working off of DOS--yeah, it's THAT old), Sixteen Candles' John Cusack not getting sued for sexual harassment when he and Anthony Michael Hall obtained Molly Ringwald's underwear, and the categorically stereotypical teens of The Breakfast Club (none of whom were goth, or hipster, or rapper..or even ethnic). John Hughes IS the 80's for me *even though I was actually in elementary school, but I lived a viacarious teenage pop cultural life through my significantly older siblings*.
That's why I was so surprised to find that Hughes penned a comedy for and about adult life. I knew he did The Great Outdoors, European Vacation, and *poor man* the Home Alone movies (AAHHHHH!), but for me Hughes had no connection with real adult life until I sat down and watched Mr. Mom one more time.
Seeing this movie with my new perspective revealed a fascinating look at the recession that occurred in the first two or three years of the decade and hit the American automotive industry rather hard, a hardship that would be repeated precisely 10 years later. Keaton's character, Jack, loses his job as an engineer at a car maufacturing plant. I remember from childhood having gleaned from the adults in my life that American car makers were in a lot of trouble (interesting how things go in cycles, isn't it?). They were in so much trouble that they were laying off their educated, credentialed managerial staff--something that usually happens just before the end. So, Jack loses his midlevel job, and to make ends meet, his homemaker wife gets a job in the advertising business (apparently she had a degree in advertising). Admittedly, this part of the plot is shaky at best--I mean, how does a housewife who had little or no resume land a job in less than a week; and not just any job, but a rather highly placed, sub-executive one! But, it was understandably done for the sake of setting up the plot of a clueless dad becoming a home maker.
Keaton's Jack manfully rises to meet the challenges of homelife with three kids (one in diapers), obviously assuming that it "couldn't possibly be that hard". Oh, But It Is. Shortly after his wife leaves with his briefcase, Jack is screwing up school drop-off, screwing up the house, and screwing up his wife's carefully created daily routines. The most shallow interpretation of this being, Of Course He Screwed It All Up--He's A Guy. At least, that's all that a lot of the arm-chair opinionizers got out of it then and now. I've seen thinly veiled and openly contemptuous comments about this movie, from parenting blogs to movie sites. The interesting thing, once I began to think carefully about this movie, is that this reaction is the main one I suspect John Hughes was deliberately aiming at. He quite effectively pegged everyone's gender biases with Mr. Mom.
The main complaint against Mr. Mom seems to be based around the assumption that it denegrates stay-at-home dads, which in turn re-inforces gender stereotypes. This is such a shallow and prejudicial view of what is actually a neatly packaged indictment of a nearly static society--from the obsessively self-interested, unethical supervisor to the Ike-Era-esque gender roles. I see nothing deliberately derogative of a man who is clearly out of his element trying desperately to adjust to his new (and nervously unwelcomed) circumstances. How is the chaos that Jack invokes any different from that which develops around all 'new' parents, moms in particular?
So, the assumption is that Mr. Mom shores up stifling gender roles. I call b***s**t. Mr. Mom actually highlights the prejudices and the hardships that accompany the stereotyping of all social roles. Once Jack finds his feet and establishes his own daily routine (personalizing it for his own skill set, rather than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak), he creates a smooth flow in the home and gains perspective on what housewives traditionally experienced: trying to, basically, schedule time with their spouses while everyone rushes in opposite directions.
By the end of the film, Jack doesn't go the predictible route we see in most Baby Boomer movies: decide that the "Rat Race" is inherently destructive and chose to stay in suburban-land and have his life revolve around his household. Think about how many movies from the 60s to today have that as a message, which is cheesy and naive at best. Hughes *thankfully!* doesn't insult our intelligence by going that route. Rather, he has Jack discover the values of homelife that even Jack had been dismissive of, but Jack doesn't decide to forgoe a work life altogether. Neither does Hughes go the overtly feminist route and have Carolyn decide that working outside the home was the truly fulfilling thing. Hughes finds the happy (and more realistic) medium by having Jack gain a deep, new respect for house-folk and Carolyn decide that a part time job would be fulfilling enough. Hughes has his suburban couple find a balance without having his own creation fall prey to a whole different set of stereotypes.
Hughes' savvy uses Jack as the camera that uncovers inveterate social stereotyping. Jack experiences the social snubbing that dismisses home makers in general, not just the male ones; particularly at Carolyn's boss's lawn party. But this is where Hughes shows his talent: the patronizing of Jack not only highlights the dismissive attitudes toward housewives, it also reveals the multifaceted sexism of American society that maintains the rigid, post-WWII images of masculinity--images that have no room for house-dads (think about it, you never saw John Wayne or any member of the Rat Pack pushing a stroller, and there's a reason for that).
Hughes exposes the fact that men like Jack are as trapped by stagnant masculine social roles as women are by traditional feminine roles. Carolyn's boss is representative of those chauvanistic male roles as he condescends to Jack now that Jack is a housedad (read: unemployed/failure). This is particularly played up in an overtly Cro-Magnon way when the boss feels free to make passes at Carolyn; because after all, her husband has been emasculated, right? and she needs a real man. Hughes is showing us that Jack's male gender doesn't make him inherently privileged in all circumstances. *That's a dialogue this country still needs to have, in depth.*
Another thing to remember in this movie (and you'll miss it unless you're paying attention) is that Jack's work friends completely disappear the minute after they're all fired and they don't reappear for the rest of the movie. Jack loses his male comrades, which highlights a sense of suburban exile. You only find out from a couple of brief mentions that his fired co-workers were having as much trouble as he finding new jobs, but there is no indication that they too had become housedads.
Back in fatherhood-land, Jack is absorbed unquestioningly into Carolyn's suburban group of women. Again, Hughes is brilliant because this group of women could have easily objectified Jack same as most of the characters in the film. They don't. Instead, they accept him as he is now, a housedad; only Joan sexually objectifies him. These women don't see Jack as an embarassed failure (as Carolyn's boss did), nor do they see him as a novelty act. They absorb him into their group as an equal and not as a freak or a new toy as we would have expected. I'm still uncertain what all Hughes was highlighting there, but he obviously wanted us (through Jack's presence) to see this suburban house-group as friends and individuals and not types. And isn't it fascinating that Hughes has the women in Jack's life accepting his changed social role without judging him?
I have always had a shelf in my pop cultural childhood reserved just for John Hughes. I love the man's 80's perspective on suburban American life, particularly suburban teenage life. Until I actually paid attention to all those little words filmmakers throw up on to the screen before and after the movie, I never realized that Hughes had turned his camera on 80's adult life as well. I'm glad I did my reading, because now my John Hughes Shelf has a valuable addition.
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