Reeling Backward: The Breakfast Club (1985)
John Hughes' masterpiece, both the lodestone for Generation X and a story of the universality of teen struggles.
“The Breakfast Club” is pretty much the lodestone of my generation, Gen X, the ones who were supposed to not care about anything.
Every generation gets dismissed and stereotyped by the previous ones: the Boomers were self-centered and rebellious, Generation X was apathetic and cynical, Millennials entitled and arrogant, Gen Z ridden with anxiety.
(Well, not the Greatest Generation — they saved they frickin’ world. Though they have been a bit too comfortable with conformity...)
I think “Club” is John Hughes’ best movie and his most important one, too. I wrote in a long-ago essay on another one of his films that his superpower was the ability to present teenagers in the movies as they saw themselves, rather than how society at large preferred to see them. This movie essentially tackles those conventions head-on, then breaks them down into particles so we can understand how insubstantial they are.
You know the story: five teens, very different from each other, show up to Shermer High School in the Chicago ‘burbs early on a Saturday morning for detention. They’re supposed to just sit there and say nothing, and write a 1,000-word essay on who they are for Mr. Vernon (Paul Gleason), the supremely dickish vice principal. Instead, they use the day to scratch at each other’s vulnerabilities, reluctantly reveal their own and possibly change their lives forever.
I love the fact that Hughes, near the end of the movie, attacks the most obvious question himself: are they really going to change? When they see each other in the hall on Monday, will they remember the bonds they’ve formed and step outside their cliques to acknowledge each other and continue this journey?
Claire, the popular “princess” played by Hughes It Girl Molly Ringwald, is brave enough to admit they probably won’t. But their story ends on a hopeful note, including two tacked-on but still meaningful romantic couplings, and we walk away thinking they have a chance.
I’ll note that Brian, the grade-grubbing geek “brain” played by Anthony Michael Hall, is the only one to walk out of the school still unattached. Of course, I identified most closely with this character — people even commented at the time on my eerie resemblance to Hall.
(Sadly, Brian’s solo status also reflected my own.)
We were the academic overachievers, smart kids spurred at an early age to build their life goals around getting into a good college. Our high school careers became a cynical, stultifying chase to get an ‘A’ grade in every class, no matter what. Sometimes, I think we graduated with with the most knowledge packed into our heads, but in many ways we learned the least of our peers.
Judd Nelson as John Bender, the class “criminal,” got most of the attention in the movie’s pop culture afterglow — the sneering rebel who attacks all the other kids’ as sellouts and weirdos, but mostly to cover up a deep ocean of hate for his abusive father — which has translated into a commanding sense of self-loathing.
He was by far the “coolest” kid, which in Gen X terms meant he best affected a veneer of colossal indifference to… everything.
Vernon goes at Bender hard, openly berating him front of the other kids, even challenging him to a fight when they’re alone, knowing that either way he’ll win — sending Bender off to jail or having the pleasure of see him cower. Bender backs down.
Emilio Estevez plays Andy, the wrestling “jock” who is pushed to the limit by his own father, eager for a full scholarship “ride” so he can go to college. (Dad’s dinky pickup truck indicates his ability to pay for it on his own.) Andy has a tertiary alignment with Claire, as the rich kids and the jocks rule the school — ever as it was, ever it shall be.
There’s a lot of memorable dialogue in “Club,” but for my money Estevez gets the best monologue, as Andy reveals the reason he got detention. He randomly attacked some small, thin kid in the locker room (a friend of Brian’s) and tortured him by taping the cheeks of his ass together, resulting in some torn skin. It’s clear even to Andy, not the sharpest tool in the shed, that he did this as a way of attacking the relentless drive from his dad and coaches to always be the best, the strongest. And that means hating weakness.
Andy secretly pines that his gimpy knee will finally give way and his wrestling career will be over, because then all the pressure will go, too. As he talks with deep empathy about how the kid he attacked must feel, the humiliation of having to tell his own father about what happened to him, it’s clear that Andy, college scholarship or not, is going to turn out all right.
Ally Sheedy plays Allison, the “basket case,” aka the weird girl with no friends who doesn’t even speak until past the halfway point of the movie. I guess she would be analogous in most high schools to the drama kids and artists. (Strange that she’s seen as a loner; at my school that group seemed to share the strongest bonds.) We see she has a tremendous talent for drawing — including shaking the dandruff out of her own hair to stand in for snow in a a true multimedia creation.
She’s also a kleptomaniac — stealing Brian’s wallet and Bender’s switchblade — and a compulsive liar. When she finally speaks, she eggs Claire on into revealing her own virginity by making up an elaborate fib about sleeping with her therapist. Allison clearly enjoys getting a rise out of people as much as Bender.
Watching the movie for the first time in probably 20 years with my own sons, I wondered how they saw the rift between teens and parents portrayed in the movie. Andy and Bender outright despise their fathers, and say so; Claire is used as a pawn by her wealthy parents, clearly heading toward divorce; Allison is completely ignored by hers (also rich, as evidenced by the Cadillac she’s dropped off in) and retreats further into her shell; Brian is pushed by his mom to use the nine hours of detention to find study time.
“My god, are we gonna be like our parents?” Andy wonders, the dismay in his voice clear. Claire insists no, and Bender nods in agreement, but Allison is the most prescient.
“It's unavoidable. It just happens.”
I was struck by a parallel discussion that goes on by Vernon and Carl, the wiseacre school janitor played by John Kapelos, who shuts up the mouthy kids by telling them he goes through their lockers and knows all their secrets. (He also seems to know Brian, though the source of this relationship is left a mystery.)
Vernon insists the kids have grown more rotten and obstinate in the 22 years he’s been teaching, but Carl says it’s they who have changed, not the kids. This observation, almost a throwaway moment against the backdrop of the teens’ weightier conversations, helps underscore the notion that the kids’ foibles and challenges are universal, even if the circumstances change with the times.
A few things I noticed that never really struck me before:
Bender’s outfit — trench coat over military boots — in punctuated by a button on his fingerless gloves that reads, “Not Saved.” There’s also a streak of blueish grey in his forelock, probably a dyed affectation.
Hall, despite playing the dweeb character who is physically cowed by both Bender and Andy at different points, is the tallest of the three actors.
The humorous contrast of the kids’ lunches, which keep getting funnier with each unveiling. Claire has a prim little bento box with sushi; Brian a thermos of soup and crustless PB&J; Andy a virtual slop trough including three sandwiches; Allison sabotages her sandwich, tossing the olive loaf meat over her shoulder to fill the bread with Pixy Stik dust and Cap’n Crunch. Bender, the only true poor one, brings nothing.
The biggest laugh line (for me at least) is Brian’s response to being questioned on why has a fake I.D.: “So I can vote,” he says, without a hint of irony.
Claire, after an apparent hookup with Bender in his closet prison, hands her one of her diamond earrings as a gift/token/promise at the end. Bender is quite up front in suggesting that having a delinquent like him as a boyfriend will do wonders to P.O. her parents, thereby reclaiming for her a measure of her power in the family dynamic.
It’s amazing that Brian’s offense, bringing a gun to school, only merited him one day of detention instead of arrest — even though it’s eventually revealed to have been a flare gun. (A background shot shows a burned-up locker where it apparently went off.)
The much-criticized transformation of Allison at the end, courtesy of Claire’s makeup and styling skills, and subsequent kiss with Andy, reads better in light of their long one-on-one conversation where he’s the first to get her to drop her defenses, by setting down his own. It’s still a classic teen-movie moment: an awkward girl becomes pretty when she takes off her glasses, or in this case moves her hair out of her face.
Ringwald and Hall were the only actual teenagers when the movie was made, 17 and 18, respectively, with Sheedy and Estevez 22 and 21, and Nelson the old man at 25. This is about par for the course for teen movies.
Things all build up to the final confrontation between the quintet, lounging in the upper level of the library where they had been ensconced, revealing their biggest secrets to each other. It’s basically 20 straight minutes of just teens talking from their heart, and something I can’t even imagine in a film today.
“We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all,” Andy says, in what could be the movie’s entire theme summed up.
“The Breakfast Club” ends as it began, with the reading of the collective essay they were directed to pen:
“Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us — in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.”
They passed this task off to Brian, who’s so satisfied with what he wrote he smiles and punches himself in the arm encouragingly (since there’s no one around to do it). As an inveterate Brain, I’ll leave things by nothing this screed is only 94 words long, not even a tenth of the way to meeting the assignment, and surely would not pass muster with any serious educator.
My God, we really do become our parents, don’t we? And maybe that’s the way it should be — if we can all just relax a little with our kids and let them bloom.