The Horror of Turning Into an Adult: ‘She's Having a Baby’

As a farewell to the 80s high school-comedy genre he championed, John Hughes’s 1988 feature is a poignant contemplation of growing up.

"The job, the house, the furniture, the fights, those were symptoms. The disease was growing up... and it was happening faster than I'd ever imagined possible."

Everybody who had a fulfilling and joyful childhood knows the pain of transitioning into an adult. Even if you can’t pinpoint the exact moment your childhood ended and your adult existence began, you never forget the exciting yet also terrifying feeling of that realization. When you start having real responsibilities — can no longer spend days doing absolutely nothing with impunity — you begin to see your future as a palpable, disappointing reality rather than a hopeful and endless possibility.

Perhaps nobody knew that mental and emotional state better than writer-director John Hughes — since he went through it multiple times. First, as he experienced it personally in the 1960s, and later as he’s done it on the silver screen through his characters in the handful of teen comedies he’s written and directed in the 1980s. Looking back at them from a 40-year distance, it’s evident they all had a trajectory and a personal agenda that Hughes wanted to accomplish.

Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off all covered a particular stage of being a teenager. Hughes wanted to give them the attention, seriousness, and representation they deserved in a way that’s never been done before. And by becoming an original voice of that generation — even though his films weren’t always well-received by critics at the time — he succeeded.

Through that lens, She’s Having a Baby is a natural conclusion that marks the end period of teenhood and the beginning of adulthood. But if you're not familiar with the evolution of Hughes's movies that preceded it, what you'll find is a messy, disjointed romantic comedy that tries to tell a straightforward story with a non-straightforward approach.

The film begins with a serious conversation that previous Hughes features usually end with: a 17-year-old protagonist, Jake (Kevin Bacon), confides in his best friend, Davis (Alec Baldwin), about the fears and insecurities he’s riddled with just minutes before his wedding ceremony. He asks, “Do you think I’m going to be happy, I mean, honestly?” to which Davis says poignantly, “You want to be a writer. You want to be a husband. Maybe it’ll work out. Who knows?” then they both laugh before we hear the saddest line of the film. “Yeah, you’ll be happy. You just won’t know it, that’s all.” Davis knows the truth that many of us at that age fear to acknowledge: The minute Jake pronounces the “I do” at the altar, their friendship, as they know it, will cease to exist. From that moment, nothing will ever be the same again, and they both know it just as much as we do. That's life.

We instantly see that change in effect. As years pass, Jake and Davis barely speak, completely fall out with each other, and live vastly different lives — which only cross paths by accident, like a funeral in town. Jake and her wife Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern) move into a three-bedroom house in the suburbs of Chicago they can barely afford and become the stereotypical couple they likely swore to never turn into when they were in high school. Of the two, it's Jake who still holds onto his dreams before submitting to the pressure to get a low-level advertising job in the city to support his wife and the kind of life they live now.

But even with a legit job, a big enough house to start a family, and a loving partner, Jake's holding out hope for a different future. He refuses to treat his job as something he’d do for the rest of his life. He says it’s only temporary until he becomes a successful writer. He's putting off the question of having children because he doesn't want to face that kind of responsibility yet. He has a hard time accepting that this is most likely it, and there isn’t much more that awaits him in the decades to come.

Hughes must have struggled with his own reckoning of growing up (it's no wonder why he felt so close to these teenage characters in his mid30s), and he channeled his angst and self-doubt into this character perfectly. Jake repeatedly fights against becoming a boring, resigned, and predictable adult. He longs for excitement and surprise, not being bound by the weighty responsibilities he now has to bear all the time. One of the manifestations is that he begins flirting with a bimbo who's also married too young. It’s not because he doesn’t love Kristy or is unhappy with his marriage and sex life. He’s simply panicking, desperately looking for some irresponsible fun, trying to do something unusual, and hoping it will give him the thrill he longs for.

Watching the character's development, it's sensible that Hughes knew and related to that dizzying feeling intimately. Similarly to Jake, he got married at 20 to his high school sweetheart, Nancy Ludwig, in 1970. The sudden marital duties and the panic of becoming an adult at such a young age were likely eating at him inside the same way we see it with Jake. There are moments in She’s Having a Baby that suggest Hughes wanted to make this film a lot more serious and realistic than how it eventually ended up. It’s no coincidence that most of the comedic fantasy and dream sequences feel out of place here as if he never planned to include them but did it to keep the picture light and fun. To keep his trademark approach and style as a filmmaker intact. Truth is, She’s Having a Baby would’ve worked much better as an existential drama depicting the feelings of a young married couple rather than a semi-serious and somewhat forced comedy about becoming a husband and a father in the suburbs of Chicago.

Yet the reason the film's intimate and emotional ending works so well (despite a hazy and disorganized plot that didn’t necessarily lay out a plausible road to its climax convincingly) is Hughes’s contentment with his own life. Regardless of how much he struggled with growing up and accepting the direction his life was going in his 20s, he eventually found peace and happiness in being a good spouse and a father. As strict and obsessed as he was with writing the best possible scripts and making great films, his family, especially his kids, always came first.

There’s a heart-warming anecdote in the documentary John Hughes: The Voice of a Generation told by director Howard Deutch. He shares that one night at Hughes’s home, he was supposed to do rewrites for Some Kind of Wonderful while Deutch fell asleep. Up all night, typing and chain-smoking, Hughes handed him 50 pages at five in the morning that later became Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But the sweet part is that before Deutch could say anything to him, he ran to his kids’ room to say goodbye to them before they left for school. That was on his mind more than anything else. He was, first and foremost, a family man, and he learned to love every second of it.

Presumably, Hughes knew She’s Having a Baby was going to be his last that touches on the delicate and complex emotions of teenagers and young adults. After that, he leaned into writing simpler, more family-centered scripts that were funny and easily consumable comedies. Yet as imperfect as it is, viewed through the lens of his life and career, and his impact on cinema, She’s Having a Baby is a beautiful farewell to an era Hughes not only defined but cemented for several generations to come.

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In the coming week, I’ll be covering Season 2 of last year’s best surprise summer hit, The Bear, for Paste Magazine, so lurk around there if you’re curious. I’m also going on vacation next week, my yearly family visit in Hungary, so I might have some time to catch up on films and TV shows that I’ve been looking to check out for a while.