{"id":6513,"date":"2009-08-11T21:56:55","date_gmt":"2009-08-12T02:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=6513"},"modified":"2009-08-11T21:56:55","modified_gmt":"2009-08-12T02:56:55","slug":"the-eighties-and-the-midwest-who-we-think-we-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/08\/the-eighties-and-the-midwest-who-we-think-we-are\/","title":{"rendered":"The Eighties and The Midwest: Who We Think We Are"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"breakfastI was going to write a very compelling piece on What Commissioner Kappos Should Do About Tafas<\/em> (which I care very, very much about in my scholarship and which\u00a0is actually more important <\/a>than this particular blog post), but I got distracted again.\u00a0\u00a0 This time, I was mourning the death of John Hughes, the filmmaker behind Sixteen Candles<\/em>, The Breakfast Club<\/em>, Pretty in Pink<\/em>, and Some Kind of Wonderful<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I love John Hughes.\u00a0 I do.\u00a0 I almost missed Hurricane Katrina descending on Oxford, Mississippi, because there was a John Hughes retrospective on the same day.\u00a0 I had more important things to do than pay attention to rather persistent hurricane warnings, as well as my sister and my Grandma Rosa (who were all kind of suggesting to me that a major weather crisis was heading my way).\u00a0 <\/p>\n

In fact (guilty confession!), I may have set up my entire fact pattern for Question Two in Property this year around Sixteen Candles<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 All of my Property students will have answered a question involving Sweet Sixteen Way, Samantha Baker, and the immortal Jake Ryan.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I may have loved The Breakfast Club<\/em> the most.\u00a0 I stopped counting the times I have seen the movie at seventeen (this was when I was sixteen).\u00a0\u00a0 I think that The Breakfast Club<\/em> worked best because it actually inverted a key copyright doctrine, the scenes a faire doctrine.\u00a0\u00a0 Put simply, the scenes a faire doctrine states that copyright protection will not be accorded to a scene or character type that is common to a particular genre (so, a cop movie that involves a frenetic car chase cannot be seen as something perhaps worthy of copyright protection).\u00a0\u00a0The Breakfast Club<\/em> is all about subverting the particular stereotypes of the high school movie genre, and indeed ends with the immortal words of Brian Johnson:<\/p>\n

Saturday, March 24,1984. Sheerer High School, Sheerer, Illinois, 60062. Dear Mr. Vernon, We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did *was* wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an 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, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t You Forget About Me!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I was getting all nostalgic about my childhood and early adulthood again, I recalled my earlier post on Michael Jackson and Prince<\/a>.\u00a0 I realized that everyone I have been talking about this summer is\u00a0from the Midwest: Michael Jackson (Gary, Indiana), John Hughes (Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and the imaginary Shermer, Illinois), Prince (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and Madonna (Bay City, Michigan).\u00a0\u00a0 What was going on with the Midwest in the Seventies and the Eighties?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I am temperamentally a Southerner.\u00a0\u00a0 A colleague of mine, Debbie Bell, once described the difference between Southerners and Midwesterners as \u201cSoutherners have an instinct for excess.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0However, I am certain that all of the above Midwesterners have that particular excess.\u00a0 I am putting this out to the Marquette Community.\u00a0\u00a0 Why was the Midwest the center of it all?\u00a0 What was it about the Midwest that spawned the greatness that was the Eighties?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was going to write a very compelling piece on What Commissioner Kappos Should Do About Tafas (which I care very, very much about in my scholarship and which\u00a0is actually more important than this particular blog post), but I got distracted again.\u00a0\u00a0 This time, I was mourning the death of John Hughes, the filmmaker behind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}