Navigating the ’80s (and Everything After)

On Ferris Bueller, Heathers, and Where My Work Fits In

Over Memorial Day weekend, my 17-year-old son and I revisited a few iconic teen movies from the 1980s—part nostalgia for me, part cultural anthropology for him. We’ve watched a number of them together over the past couple years: Weird Science, Sixteen Candles, and now, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Heathers. It wasn’t an intentional project, but it’s become an ongoing dialogue—one that speaks not just to generational taste, but to identity, tone, and how certain types of humor age… or don’t.

He liked Weird Science more than Sixteen Candles, which didn’t surprise me. Sixteen Candles has its moments, but its depiction of Asian characters in particular can be hard to get past. That film, like so many from that era, operates in a very specific cultural context—one that often treats whiteness as the norm and everyone else as comic relief, sidekick, or stereotype. As an Asian American teen navigating white spaces today—whether it’s asking someone to prom or trying to be seen as a leader by his teammates—he sees some of those dynamics play out in real time. So it makes sense that certain films hit different.

This weekend we started with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and it was a hit. He said it felt surprisingly contemporary. That stuck with me. Ferris still works because it’s light without being weightless. (And to my son’s credit, he picked up on the fact that Cameron is the real main character with an arc.) It’s not just rebellion for its own sake—it’s rebellion with charm, optimism, and joy. The film lets you root for the kid without ever making you feel complicit in someone else’s pain.

Then we tried Heathers.

At first, he was intrigued. The tone, the aesthetic, the strange theatricality—it pulled him in. But by the time Curt and Ram are murdered, he pulled back. The film lost him. He said, flatly, that it just didn’t feel funny anymore. And he was right. The humor in Heathers curdles fast. Its satire is sharp, but its cruelty is sharper. You’re not laughing with the characters—you’re laughing at a world where everything has already gone wrong. It’s smart, it’s provocative, but it’s also alienating—especially if you’re not conditioned to treat violence as irony.

That’s when I started thinking about where my own work lives in relation to these tonal poles. (And incidentally, my son hasn’t read my books… yet. He’s dipped into a few passages just for fun, but hasn’t done a deep dive. Whenever the topic comes up, he quotes that line from Invincible: “Read my books, Mark!” It always makes me laugh.)

The Wake of Expectations is often called funny. Some readers describe it as laugh-out-loud funny, full of belly laughs and biting wit. And I wouldn’t dispute that—it is funny, and it absolutely plays in that space, intentionally so. But I wouldn’t call it “a comedy”. Not because it doesn’t earn the laughs, but because that description is incomplete. The humor is part of the architecture, not the foundation.

And while it has dark, borderline transgressive undercurrents, it’s not a black comedy in the way Heathers is. The humor in my work—especially in Wake—functions more like armor. It’s how Calvin navigates discomfort, failure, self-doubt. It’s not there to shock or to mock—it’s there to keep him upright. And the deeper you read, the more you realize that his funniest moments often come when he’s at his most emotionally compromised.

That makes it a harder book to pin down tonally, especially for readers expecting clarity: is this supposed to be funny or sad? The answer, usually, is yes.

In a way, Ferris Bueller and Heathers represent opposite ends of a spectrum. One offers fantasy without cost; the other offers cost without relief. My novels, I think, fall somewhere in the middle. They’re stories about pain, disguised as funny stories about growing up. The punchlines are real. So are the bruises.

And that’s why I love having these conversations with my son—not just about which movies he likes, but why. Because the question he’s really asking (and the one I keep writing toward) isn’t just what’s funny? It’s what kind of pain are we allowed to laugh at—and what kind still lingers, unspoken, beneath the joke?

Javier

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