Divided though we are as a country, perhaps we can agree about one thing: American culture is captive to the 1980s. These days, everywhere we look we find a Beetlejuice sequel, a Ghostbusters reboot, a Michael Jackson Broadway musical. The Beverly Hills Cop, Poltergeist, and Dune film franchises, each representative of moviegoing during the Reagan administration, did not end so much as briefly suspend operations until ’80s nostalgia had become a full-blown contagion. We have become so acclimated to wistfulness for synthesized music, oversized clothes, and feel-good corniness that it is difficult to remember when such yearning for the decade began.

I propose that it was an event some 15 years ago: In March 2010, following the untimely death of writer-director John Hughes some seven months earlier, a six-and-a-half-minute block at the Academy Awards was dedicated to the filmmaker responsible for Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) — cinematic emblems of the decade by any reckoning. Yet, however well intended, the segment was less a tribute to Hughes than an exercise in undisguised sentimentality about an already vanished past. One of Hughes’s directorial peers could have paid tribute to him, but instead the show’s organizers produced a bevy of stars associated with Hughes, the so-called Brat Pack: Matthew Broderick, Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy. A post–Brat Packer, Macaulay Culkin, was thrown in for good measure. All said nice things about their departed director, but for the audience at home what must have been more striking was the sight of these emissaries from their own childhood or adolescence.

The die was cast: Hughes, who died from a heart attack at 59, would be remembered not as an artist or even as an entertainer but as a vessel for narcissistic looking back. Hughes was responsible for some of this branding, but he could not have foreseen the extent to which his films endured not for their liveliness and humanity but for their ability to embody a certain period. Every artist wants his work to last, but how many wish it to be a mere time capsule for those hankering for high school and leg warmers?

That view of Hughes does an injustice to his reputation, because nostalgia never requires its object to be great or even good. The Lawrence Welk Show, Laugh-In, and Jane Fonda workout videocassette tapes may induce nostalgia in those who remember consuming them during a particular season in life, but that is no reflection of their artistic value. Many of the ’80s-era movies and shows were neither good in their original form nor better in their remakes, reboots, and sequels. By contrast, Hughes’s filmography, though not without compromises or concessions to the demands of the highly commercial film industry, reflect a sensibility, not an epoch.

Hughes was born in 1950 in Lansing, Mich., and reared in Grosse Pointe and in Northbrook, Ill. The latter would provide him with a lifetime’s worth of inspiration. “When I started making movies, I thought I would just invent a town where everything happened,” Hughes said in an interview with Premiere magazine in 1999. “Everybody, in all of my movies, is from Shermer, Illinois. Del Griffith from Planes, Trains & Automobiles lives two doors down from John Bender [of The Breakfast Club]. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles.”

Like many enterprising young artists, Hughes had to leave the bosom of his hometown before he could memorialize it in fiction. After an unsuccessful stint at the University of Arizona, he worked in marketing and advertising before scribbling satirical pieces for National Lampoon. Then came the birth pains of his movie career: Hughes wrote a series of serviceable but unremarkable comedies, including two films that bore his magazine’s imprint, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982) and National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983). He had higher aspirations.

John Hughes and his wife, Nancy, were ten years younger than any other parents in their neighborhood, he told Premiere. “So I was surrounded by teenagers until I was 27. I saw how their lives at 14 and 15 were different than mine had been. My generation had sucked up so much attention, and here were these kids struggling for an identity. They were forgotten.”

He responded with The Breakfast Club, juxtaposing five neatly contrasting high school students. You remember the list: a cut-and-dried bookworm (Anthony Michael Hall), a steely jock (Emilio Estevez), an unrepentant weirdo (Ally Sheedy), a beauty with hidden depths (Molly Ringwald), and an out-for-attention troublemaker (Judd Nelson). All that these teens had in common was physical proximity to one another: Each has been consigned to a Saturday-morning detention period in the library of Shermer High School, where the story unfolds in scenes of adolescent confession, absolution, and redemption.

Yet the popularity of The Breakfast Club and his other films of that period — Hughes had already written and directed Sixteen Candles, and he would soon write and direct Weird Science (1985) and write Pretty in Pink (1986) — contributed to the widespread view that, like J. D. Salinger, he was single-mindedly devoted to depicting adolescence. His role in making stars of the Brat Packers reinforced that image. After Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, though, he seldom again focused on the teenage set: Most of his subsequent films are centered on families in which teens make appearances but are not given privileged perspectives. And even in Ferris Bueller, the titular character’s acts of tomfoolery, trickery, and outright deviousness against authority figures have a certain cumulative desperation — a sense of teenagerdom as a dead end.

Adulthood came for John Hughes. He welcomed its attendant responsibilities and privileges, bound up in a sense of home: Shermer, Chicago, the Midwest in general. In the comedy-drama Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), the pursuit of home is foundational to the narrative: Winding his way home to Chicago with Thanksgiving imminent, marketing executive Neal Page (Steve Martin) must contend with winter weather, canceled flights, uncomfortable lodging and public transportation, mislaid rental cars, and a gabby mustachioed shower-curtain-ring salesman, Del Griffith (John Candy). Page sustains himself with periodic calls home to his wife (Laila Robins), tucked away in a red-brick house, resplendent in gently falling snow, fragrant with the aroma of turkey and stuffing, and noisy with the peaceable hubbub of three small children.

As it turns out, Neal has what Del is missing — a home — but, in Hughes’s conception, the two men are strangely equalized: Neal’s temporary state of “homelessness,” owing to his desperate travel circumstances, sensitizes him to Del’s actual state of homelessness when he learns of it. Even Hughes’s lesser films reflect the call of home: In the original National Lampoon’s Vacation, the vacation in the title refers to a trip taken by the Griswold family to Wally World. By the time of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), which Hughes wrote but did not direct, the “vacation” is a holiday break spent at the Griswold home. The comedy stems from the intrusion of unwelcome guests, including Cousin Eddie. The duty of watching over one’s hearth and home is at the center even of the tacky, kid-oriented blockbuster Home Alone (1990), which, again, Hughes wrote but did not direct.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not only one of the most satisfying of all modern Hollywood movies. Its elevation of the attainment of home to an almost spiritual status is a frank expression of Hughes’s internalizing of middle-class American values. Although Ferris Bueller would rather be the eternal prankster than a plodding grown-up, Hughes placed himself solidly on the side of growing up in She’s Having a Baby (1988). There he depicts marriage and family formation as intimidating but worthwhile steps. The family of newlyweds Jake (Kevin Bacon) and Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern) have their doubts. “People don’t mature any more,” Jake’s grandfather says. “They stay jackasses all their lives.” But Jake and Kristy cleave to each other in the manner prescribed in scripture.

In one of the most strikingly pronatalist scenes ever committed to film, Kristy is seen hovering over a bathroom sink while contemplating the disposal of her next birth control pill. She gives up the pill. Even when her husband is found to have fertility problems, she remains determined to carry a child. (She succeeds.) At one point, Jake says that he has drifted into a career and backed into fatherhood, but drifting into and backing into the stuff of life is better than skipping them altogether. The fights, the stresses, the temptations to overcome — they’re all worth it, Hughes says. He himself was happily married with children. She’s Having a Baby, which he dedicated to his wife, is a terrific movie, but it was not the cultural sensation of its teen-oriented predecessors. In Hollywood’s eyes, Hughes had been better off attending to the mischief and misery of adolescents. Showing artistic courage, Hughes made movies that reflected his own settling down and settling in.

Curly Sue, the last film Hughes wrote and directed, was a confection worthy of Chaplin: a homeless child (Alisan Porter) and her vagabond parental figure (James Belushi) intend to swindle, but then are civilized by, an upper-class attorney (Kelly Lynch) — who, in turn, is humanized by her drifter charges. Hughes was always attuned to the differences between kids who wanted for nothing and kids who wanted for everything, between white-collar professionals and blue-collar workers (or societal dropouts). The film is shapely and good-natured in the manner of his best works; the score by Frenchman Georges Delerue has the same overly sweetened quality — sickening but irresistible — as Chaplin’s own score for Modern Times. This fairy-tale-like film is a long way from the über-contemporary patina of The Breakfast Club.

Hughes ended his career writing and producing a series of professional, impersonal family films, including a live-action version of Hank Ketcham’s comic strip Dennis the Menace (1993) and remakes of Miracle on 34th Street (1994), 101 Dalmatians (1996), and Flubber (1997). These are no great shakes, but Hughes seems to have decided that living a good life was more important than making another good movie. He had long set his movies in Illinois. As he was making his last stand in show business, he decided to again make his home there. Neal Page would be proud. In time he left his movie career for dead. He told Premiere that he had been writing more “Shermer stories,” not for the movies but in short-story or novelistic form.

To belong to the same generation as the characters in The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is to risk noticing nothing more than the films’ music, clothes, and affect. Perhaps those of us who were too young to experience Hughes’s heyday as it unfolded can more clearly see that his films are no more tethered to their times than John Ford’s and Frank Capra’s were to theirs. For a while, Hughes held up a mirror to the zeitgeist. After a spell, he offered a window into his own soul. His message was clear: marriage, children, a place you love, a home in which to rest your head at night were the things that gave life substance. The shameless gags and excessive sentiment in which he communicated these ideas only meant that they reached a wider audience.

Writing about Hughes in 2015, P. J. O’Rourke, while admitting that he didn’t know how his friend voted, made the case for his deep conservatism: “Walking across the family room in your stocking feet and stepping on a Lego (ouch!) was the fundamental building block of society,” O’Rourke wrote. It would be a fool’s errand to guess what Hughes’s political inclinations were or what they might be today; he died in the first year of the Obama administration, an eternity ago in sociopolitical terms. Yet we know from what he left behind that he prized the permanent things. He gave us not nostalgia but wisdom.