September 15th
5:30pm
Dickey Hall 109/Faculty Lounge
“Nature Abhors the Old: Learning from Emerson, Learning from John Hughes”
Dr. Richard Angelo
There is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew,
germinate and spring. Nature abhors the old, and old age seems
the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it many names,
—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all
forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia;
not newness, not the way onward.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“Circles” (1839)
This paper, still incomplete, employs a few leading ideas from Emerson to interpret four films directed and/or scripted by John Hughes--The Breakfast Club (1984), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Home Alone (1990) and Dennis the Menace (1993).
“Nature abhors the old” brings the villains into focus together with the point of their humiliation at the hands of the boy hero. But Emerson’s pithy little formula also explains the dramatic necessity of including profoundly alienated characters like Ferris Bueller’s sister Jeannie (Jennifer Gray) or Mr Wilson (Walter Mathau). The same force, the same aversion, which ultimately spells defeat for the likes of Mr. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) guarantees that those initially estranged characters will experience the restoration of their “youth” by the time the credits roll. To borrow a phrase from Stanley Cavell, they take a step that turns them from “confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and sociability.”
The paper is part of a larger study of the educational imagination.
Copies of the paper are available in advance at: Education.uky.edu/EPE
