The Breakfast Club (1985)

 

The Breakfast Club

It is a new year for me, 1985, and the first entry is “The Breakfast Club”.

In my youth, there was no way around “The Breakfast Club”. This was a movie everybody had watched, and everybody were referring too. In social circles, but also in media and in countless tv-series and movies. Of course I watched it too, but it took me a bit longer to recognize the significance of it than most. I guess I was not much of a rebellious youth at the time.

“The Breakfast Club” takes place in the course of a single Saturday and except for a few bookending scenes, takes place entirely inside a high school with only seven characters appearing. Five of these characters are high school students there for detention, each representing a different type in the school. There is the “Princess”, Claire (Molly Ringwald), the “Basket case”, Allison (Ally Sheedy), the “Athlete”, Andrew (Emilio Estevez), the “Brain”, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) and the “Criminal”, John (Judd Nelson).

The entire movie is about the interactions of these five teenagers during detention. It plays out as a “kammerspiel” (sorry could not find an English translation, look it up) in the Strindberg tradition, not unlike “12 Angry Men”. To begin with each character is their type, provoking each other by playing on their stereotypes. John manages to throw the discipline teacher, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) into a frenzy, he picks a fight with Andrew and is extremely provocative towards Claire, whom he seems to find a sadistic glee in getting flustered. Allison is plain weird and generally ignored and Brian, the geek, is simply discounted by the others.

Something happens over the course of the movie. While their assignment of the day is to write an essay about how they see themselves, they actually learn things about each other that shatters their preconceptions. Each have their crosses to carry that seem invisible to others and each of them are a lot more than their stereotype. It is a process, but not a guided process. They fight, they shout, tease, mock, but they actually also listens, and that is the exciting thing. They all experience that when you start learning something about other people, it is very difficult to reduce them back to stereotypes.

Each character has a depth that we are unaware of going in and learning this depth, we the audience, are also listening and learning and getting an unexpected understanding of these young people. In hindsight we may think that their problems are predictable, but so what? To these children, they are deadly serious problems. It is why they are in detention, and they are uniquely able to mirror themselves in the issues the others are struggling with. They also realize that they can bond in unexpected ways. Their dance-off or their roaming through the school are good examples.

The question of whether this understanding and bonding is confined to this room or can be extended to the “real” outside world is popped by Brian: “What happens on Monday?”, but instead of the rose-hued, yes, we will all be friends, the five of them have no illusions. This doubt can be construed as depressing defeatism, but I see it as refreshing clarity. They are changed by this experience, maybe even profoundly, but on their own terms and without obligations.

I had a discussion with my wife on whether the movie has aged well. My point was (and is) that these issues are universal and change hair and cloth fashion, this movie could be made today, that it has aged very well indeed. Her argument was that this movie would be wasted on youth today. That the depth and pace and sentiment of the movie would be too deep, to slow and too profound for the tik-tok generation. She may be right and that saddens me greatly. In the compartmentalized world today of echo chambers, the central message of going beyond type and actually listen, is sorely needed. “The Breakfast Club” is an excellent exponent of it and I would encourage any teenager (anybody, really) to watch it.

The five actors became known as the brat-pack and “The Breakfast Club” springboarded them into excellent Hollywood careers. Checking their filmographies you get lists great movies and tv-series over the past forty years. And John Hughes? Well, he was the king of the teenage movie, a status he still holds, fifteen years after his death.

If you have not watched “The Breakfast Club”, you need to fix that gap immediately.