• Written and directed by John Hughes
• Starring
  • Anthony Michael Hall
  • Kelly LeBrock
  • Ilan Mitchell-Smith
  • Bill Paxton
• Produced by Joel Silver

No filmmaker has ever targeted himself to teens more perfectly than John Hughes. His mid-’80s quartet of teen movies — Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — told teenagers who they were. After that, he did a couple of comedies aimed at older audiences (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and She’s Having a Baby), his last two directorial projects then went back and focused on pre-teens (Uncle Buck and Curly Sue — hey, make that videobox stop smirking at me!). Since then, he’s confined himself to writing and producing a variety of comedies, but even the profitable ones haven’t managed to resonate so fully with an audience, to define them to themselves.

…And Freud has a conniption.

I think I may be the sole member of my demographic that never saw Weird Science the first time around, either in the theaters or as it caught the first major wave of VCR popularity and rode it out into neverending popularity. (Some would say that that fact alone puts me in another demographic altogether.) From the far-off distance of eighteen years past the point at which I was meant to be the target audience, it’s intriguing to look at how Hughes played with the elements of fantasy wish fulfillment that figure in his other films.

Our hapless heroes are Garry (Anthony Michael Thomas) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith), two sixteenish high school nerds whose social lives are basically confined to each other. Limited to watching the pretty girls from the sidelines while being harassed by archetypal cool jerks Ian and Max (Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Rusler), they take refuge in fantasies and computer nerddom. (This was, of course, the era before being a computer geek became as socially acceptable as it is today. Right?) While watching Frankenstein (the colorized version! Ack!) on TV at Wyatt’s house one Friday night, Garry has a brainstorm: They’ll make their own woman! Not with body parts — but with pixels and bytes and stuff!

The American Ninja sequel you’re glad you never saw.

The intent is just to use Wyatt’s souped-up computer (were they even up to 8086s by 1985?) to make a working simulation model of a woman, presumably so they can practice striking out and feeling stupid in the comfort of their own living rooms. It’s great fun watching the computing speed and interpretive prowess ascribe to Wyatt’s computer, looking back on it from an era in which computers run everything but are still as stupid as a sack of hammers; they just stick any old picture into Wyatt’s pseudo-scanner with Star Trek console lights on it, and the computer understands exactly what they want it to replicate for their model. (Just think if the computer had gotten mixed up and gave her the mind of a supermodel and the body of Albert Einstein!) And then, because they want more computational power, they hack into a government supercomputer. (Over phonelines, with a handset cradle. All the power your 2800 baud modem can handle, geek-boy!)

All of which leads to freak lightning storm which zaps the Barbie doll they’ve hooked up to jumper cables. Hurricane winds swirl the room, red fogs spurt, and when the smoke clears… There stands Kelly LeBrock in front of them, smiling.

“Hair still big? Yes — but not quite big enough.”

Now. The first thing to note here is that, because this is a movie to which teenage boys were supposed to be able to gain legal theatrical admittance, there’s no way Hughes could frankly show us what a couple of teenage boys would do if they had created their own woman. (You might even have to go to Bangkok for that movie.) And that would, on the surface, destroy all chance for this movie to be at all worthwhile as a fantasy fulfillment vehicle. Even the solution Hughes finds is still not completely honest, but it suffices: he immediately defuses her as a sex object. The first thing the boys think to do with her is shower together, but when faced with the reality of it, they’re so daunted even by a woman who’s under their complete control that they leave their pants on.

She (they eventually christen her Lisa) instead becomes almost an alter ego for them, a more confident and assured guide who can take them into places they never would have had the nerve to go themselves. From creation, Lisa is completely aware of her mode of existence, knowing that the boys created her as their ideal woman, and happily (though thoughtfully) living to serve them, though in terms different than as the sex object originally conceived. She takes them out for a night on the town, which mainly consists of taking the two affluent whiteboys to an all-black blues club. By putting them into a situation so completely outside their experience and comfort zone, she subtly shows them that there really isn’t any social situation they can’t handle because, hey, if they can handle this…. By the end of the evening, both boys are completely at home with their newfound friends from “across the tracks,” and Garry even feels comfortable enough to get good and drunk. (The spectacle of Garry, inebriated, speaking all black-like with a bunch of African-Americans who do NOT get offended at it, is something of a shocker. Can you imagine the conniption Jesse Jackson would have at such a scene in a movie released today?)

The man who should have played Popeye.

There are further obstacles along the way — Wyatt’s sadistic big brother Chet (played with militaristic glee by Bill Paxton), and the two cool jerks who dog their steps at the mall — all of which leads up to a huge party arranged by Lisa at Wyatt’s house while his parents are out of town. (Parents, I should note, are no more in evidence as active forces for good in their children’s lives than they are in most of Hughes’ movies. One almost feels they should remain standing off-screen, speaking only in trumpet-muted “wa-wah-wa-wa-waaah” sounds.) Having forced them once to break out of their shells with people entirely outside their social circle, Lisa now forces them into a different, but just as difficult, and possibly more meaningful task: To break out of their shells among their own social peers. And if she has to engineer a break-in by partycrashing mutant bikers (including Michael Berryman!) to force Garry and Wyatt to play the confident heroes that they always wished they were, well then, that’s just what she has to do.

The “conjuring up” of the biker gang is typical of one of Lisa’s other abilities: The ability to create as she was created, crafting cars, money, clothes, fake ID’s, and yes, mutant bikers out of nothingness. When I said this was wish fulfillment, I wasn’t kidding; Lisa is a full-blown fairy godmother by the end, knowing fully what it is the boys need to discover themselves, and being fully empowered to bring the situation into being. Things such as this take the movie out of the category of wish-fulfillment and right into fullblown fairy-tale-style fantasy, wherein things work out the way they do simply because the all-powerful storyteller wills it so.

At least he’s still got his hair.

In many ways, Weird Science is the polar opposite of The Breakfast Club, which Hughes also wrote and directed for release that same year (and with Anthony Michael Hall playing largely the same character, knowingly winked at with the “girlfriend in Canada” line in each movie). Where The Breakfast Club takes a set of outsiders (and remember, every teen is an outsider in his or her own eyes) and brings them to some bittersweet semblance of stable community by forced exposure to their fears of one another, Weird Science instead gives the outsiders a magic genie lamp that allows them to completely control the situation as soon as their fears will allow them to. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off can be seen in some ways as a synthesis of the two, with grandiose wish fulfillment scaled back to within the laws of time and space, but allowing for the creation of a single perfect day for those willing to take charge of their circumstances.

Which may be why Hughes walked away from the teen comedy genre after that — because after having made Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, what else was there for him to say?

A Notable Quotable:

“Lisa is everything I ever wanted in a girl… before I knew what I wanted.”

- Garry

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 2
• pasty white male butts: 1
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 2 (plus 1 in Frankenstein on TV)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Michael Berryman (“Mutant Biker”) played “Starfleet Display Officer” (under tons of latex) in Star Trek 4, and “Captain Rixx” (under blue makeup) in the TNG episode “Conspiracy”
  • Wallace Langham (“Art”) played “Flotter T. Water III” in the Voyager episode “Once Upon a Time”
  • Jeff Jensen (the “Metal Face” mutant biker) did stunts in Star Trek 3