Why Isn’t ‘Hairspray’ Widely Considered One Of The Best Teen Movies Of The ‘80s?

If Hairspray were a person throwing its 30th birthday this week, what peers would be on the guest list? Probably adjacent comedies from its writer/director John Waters, like Polyester and Cry-Baby, both of which also borrow their plots from midcentury pop culture. We’d also can’t leave out the 2007 remake of Hairspray, adopted from the movie’s turn as a Broadway musical, and maybe, so it has someone to talk to, a few different movies-with-singing from the same era, like High School Musical or Rent. Other inspirations might be Harold and Maude (black comedy with a heart of gold), Grease (pompadours and saddle shoes), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (a protagonist that never has bad luck).

Despite the presence of archetypal teen movie moments —first kisses, best friend confessions, blow-ups with parents— Hairspray is, curiously, not widely considered as one of the era’s most adored teen movies. But why?

Hairspray tells the story of Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake in her movie debut), a blue-collar Baltimore teenager in 1962 who dreams of dancing on the local American Bandstand knock-off “The Corny Collins Show.” The film was John Waters’s seventh feature and the meridian line of his directing career. Up until then, his movies featured a group of Baltimore performers called The Dreamlanders and resembled a hybrid of art school semester projects and snuff films. Hairspray was the first of his films that didn’t feature Dreamlander Divine in the lead role (instead Divine plays Tracy’s uptight mom), in addition to Waters’s largest budget to date and first PG rating. While the attitude and themes of his films never change —a John Waters project is, at heart, a black comedy, hyper-aware of cinematic archetypes, and also concerned somehow with fame and infamy— the five movies he directed after Hairspray all starred actors he had not discovered, and contained fewer of the luridly hilarious moments that made him famous in the first place.

It’s tempting yet ultimately moronic to call Hairspray the point where John Waters “sold out,” making sweeter, glossier movies in order to widen his audience beyond his fellow arty iconoclasts. That sentiment that misses the point, twice:

1. Waters’s goal was always celebrity, just on his own terms. (“[Fame] happened with my participation from the very beginning because I’m a carny and publicity is free advertising” he told USC film professor James Egan in a 2011 interview)
2. Hairspray‘s candy-colored setup in entirely in service of the goal of all Waters films–comedy via equal parts sincerity, satire and scuzz.

Hairspray might be a sunny teen fable made during the height of the teen fables John Hughes perfected. But it’s John Waters doing John Hughes the same way Polyester was John Waters doing Douglas Sirk melodramas, or Cry-Baby was John Waters doing Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause.

By setting Hairspray in 1962, Waters first mocks the era’s parochialism and bigotry: The integration plot is played relatively straight. Ricki’s Lake’s best friend Penny (Leslie Ann Powers) and her African-American boyfriend Seaweed (Clayton Prince) getting turned on because segregation makes their love forbidden is played, well, like John Waters. The past also works as a smackdown of the production’s present (the Reagan Era) and its empty veneration of an uncomplicated American past that never really existed. Like Reagan himself, most ’80s teen movies had a thing for the pre-Civil Rights ’50s and ’60s (think Dead Poets Society, Stand By Me, Dirty Dancing) as code for “innocent” and “simpler” times. It’s not clear whether Waters was taking aim at cinematic contemporaries or just being clear (and funny) about the idea that you can’t be nostalgic for mid-century America without being wistful about racism and sexism, too.

To be loved and remembered long after their birth, movies often need to be ground down to the size of catchphrases. Citizen Kane, for example, lives on more as “Rosebud” than “a savage takedown of media barron William Randolph Hearst.” This is both necessary and unfortunate, and possibly why Hairspray isn’t often mentioned in the same breath as The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. These days, the genre of the ’80s Teen Movie™ seems to have been dumbed down to just a “John Hughes type of movie prominently featuring a rueful best friend.”

Hairspray, meanwhile, dips its bobby socks in multiple genres: it can be classified as a teen movie, sure, but also a period piece musical, wicked satire, and even a “John Waters movie” (which, lets face it, has become a genre unto itself). Hairspray wasn’t a box office hit when it was first released —Box Office Mojo ranks it as the 107th most popular film of 1988— but it got a second chance at immortality when it was ported over to Broadway in 2002, which was then followed up by a big budget remake in 2007 (grossing over $200MM worldwide!) and a live TV spectacular in 2016. No shock, then, that it resides in the hearts of a wide slice of its devoted fans as being more than just an ’80s Teen Movie™: it’s a story that belongs to multiple generations of fans, across multiple mediums. And that, my friends, is an even better ending than John Hughes could have scripted.

Kevin Smokler is the author of the book Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to 80s Teen Movies out now.

Watch the original Hairspray on Filmstruck