The Breakfast Club

Directed by John Hughes

Released 1985

Watched for this review August 12, 2010

Five disparate, suburban kids from Shermer, Illinois find themselves stuck in a Saturday detention together. They are Claire (Molly Ringwald), the princess, Andy (Emilio Estevez), the jock, Bender (Judd Nelson), the criminal, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), the brain, and Allison (Ally Sheedy), the basketcase. They are presided over by the principal, who feels that they don’t respect him (which they don’t), and that is their fault and problem (which it isn’t). Despite their apparent differences, as the day goes on they find out they have more in common than they think.

I’ve reviewed this movie three times. I keep watching it—despite not liking it all that much—and my opinion on it keeps evolving. I first saw it around 1987, when I was 15 and a sophomore in a suburban high school. For obvious reasons, the movie resonated with me. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the characters. However, I understood it, I understood the characters, I could relate, on some level, to everything that happened in the movie. Yet, I never did like the characters, as, by and large, I never liked any John Hughes’ characters that weren’t primarily comedic. To me, even as a 15-year-old, they seemed like spoiled, suburban brats who needed something to complain about. I knew these characters very well, and maybe that was the key problem.

That opinion remained steadfast for the next 20 years of my life with one key difference. I began to understand and appreciate how elemental The Breakfast Club was for and to my generation, for better or worse. This was our movie. Would I have preferred another movie speak for my generation? Yes, I suppose so, but this movie did represent the majority of my generation, and frankly, there weren’t that many quality movies made during that period of time. In short, regardless of how I felt about the characters, I came to respect the movie for what it was.

Now, I am 37. My views on my place in the world and my generation’s place in the world and in history have evolved. In effect, I look at The Breakfast Club a bit differently. I still don’t like the characters. I still feel they are suburban brats who should man up and tell their parents to piss off (if not at the time, then as soon as they got out of their parents’ reach). Nevertheless, when I see The Breakfast Club, I look at it in the same way that I look at The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is another “classic” that I don’t love all that much. Most books or movies present an official hero or heroes, and that hero(es) has a clearly defined and understood world view. More than that, the writer or director has a clearly defined and understood view. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain is working his mojo out as he is writing. In fact, he begins the book with the following famous line: “PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” He’s telling the reader up front that he doesn’t know much more than anybody else, and anybody attempting to find any great and final meaning or moral will indeed, “be shot.”

In retrospect, we can see that Twain is a racist, but at the time, he was a forward thinking abolitionist. However, given his background, one can’t expect him to raid Harper’s Ferry etc. Twain was working his racism out in his life and through his writing, trying to reconcile everything he knew and had been taught with everything he was coming to find contradicted his background. Twain’s characters are racist, but Twain knows his characters and can relate to them. He understands why they are racist and is empathetic.

There is an element of that with Hughes. His characters are the suburban brats we all know they are. Yet, Hughes understands his characters. He understands why they are the way they are, and he is empathetic. Just like his characters, he is trying to work through his own role in this, which is surprising given that Hughes is a Baby Boomer and not a Gen-Xer; most Boomers have no sympathy for Xers.

Speaking of which, The Breakfast Club shows the fruits of the Baby Boom. Most specifically, the idea that one shouldn’t trust anybody over 30. That was the Boomers’ youth-worshiping mantra. The question is what happens to people who believe that when they are no longer young? That is a question to be dealt with on another day, but it does seem that every generation since the Boom has adopted their philosophy. In Roger Ebert’s review of the movie, he noted that “The only weaknesses in Hughes’ writing are in the adult characters: The teacher is one-dimensional and one-note, and the janitor is brought onstage with a potted philosophical talk that isn’t really necessary. Typically, the kids don’t pay much attention.” Ebert is missing the point. Hughes’ movies (his early movies) are not told from an omnipotent point of view. They are told specifically and only with the teenager in mind. And the teenager, post-Boomer, sees most adults as “one-dimensional” or full of “potted” philosophy. This is the true fruit of the Boom. Much as the adults in The Breakfast Club see the children as they want to see them, so too, do the children see the adults as one-dimensional.

I also recall reading Pauline Kael’s review of the movie in which she notes (correctly) that the only two likeable characters are Brian and Allison. One would like to think that Allison, the “basketcase”—or perhaps a better word would be misfit—was as she was by choice and took pride in being who she was. Yet, at the end, Allison allows Claire to “clean her up” and help her to be the pretty, pink deb that was always apparently inside her. This, in turn, appeals to Andrew, who wouldn’t have gone for her with her former “black” look. With this in mind, one thinks of The Breakfast Club as being less about rebellion and teen angst and more about conformity and fitting in. At one point, this idea was problematic for me. The common question to ask is, “Is Allison a sell-out?” This was a popular word during my generation, yet is it more appropriate to ask whether this is true to the teenage spirit? Teenagers aren’t about rebellion; rather, they are about fitting in. All teenagers want to fit in somewhere, whether it is with the popular group or their own group. If Allison had been beyond that, she was beyond her fellow Breakfast Clubbers and would have been somewhat bored by their inane nonsense. Besides, my generation was a reactive generation, but we weren’t an outwardly rebellious generation. In closing, I don’t have an answer, but once again, it falls in line with Huck Finn, a book without any real answers.

One more element of my original thinking on The Breakfast Club that has remained true is that despite the characters’ protestations that they won’t grow up like their parents, they will. They may have a harder time getting there than their parents did, but in the end, all of the fundamental issues and institutions will still be the same. Unfortunately.

I still don’t like The Breakfast Club. Pauline Kael probably put it best when she described The Breakfast Club as “a movie about a bunch of stereotypes who complain that other people see them as stereotypes.” Still, that is what my generation had become (and still often is), and, on some level, I have to appreciate an unvarnished view of a bunch of assholes. I don’t have to like it, and I don’t have to sympathize with it as John Hughes does. But I do have to respect it.