For my generation, the release of The Breakfast Club was a big event. I didn’t understand how unique it was to have a story told from the point of the view of teenagers, but I’m sure I sensed I was watching something new and different. I know a lot of people who felt empowered or validated by the movie, especially folks who were feeling that they didn’t quite fit in. There was supposed to a character for everyone from the popular girl to the jocks with domineering fathers to the geeks feeling academic pressures to the eccentrics who were the subject of mockery and bullying to the burnouts who were developing early substance abuse problems. Ironically, I never felt that I fit in with any of these categories.
In high school, I was an athlete who abandoned athletics to spend too much time with the burnouts, but my school was so competitive academically that the pressure was inescapable. As you can tell by what I do, I also had a geeky side and like any high school kid I suffered social anxiety about my popularity. I didn’t really identify with the Molly Ringwald role and had more trouble empathizing with her than the other characters. In a way, that made her the most interesting because the movie demanded that I make the effort. I also did not relate easily to the Ally Sheehy role since I wasn’t an outcast or particularly unconventional.
The male characters all offended me to one degree or another, but mainly because I recognized myself in each of them. When they were cruel to each other, I could see how I was at war with myself in a lot of ways. I wanted to pursue each of their paths but was unwilling to commit to any of them, and largely for similar reasons to why they were struggling with their self-identification and confidence. I even recognized some of their ugly behaviors in myself and it didn’t make me feel proud.
I can’t think of another movie that had this kind of power to cause self-reflection, but as much as I enjoyed it as entertainment I didn’t find it comforting or validating. It didn’t send me the message that it was okay not to fit in because everyone goes through the same thing. It told me with new urgency that I had a lot of unresolved issues that I needed to address.
For me, this was the real power and strength of the movie. Molly Ringwald’s essay on her experience watching the movie with her young daughter is excellent, and it focuses on the things the movie failed to explore. In particular, the way girls or women were treated in the movie and others Ringwald did in the 1980’s with director John Hughes is examined. That’s a feature that can only be treated with the benefit of hindsight, but it’s clear now that Hughes did not make the same breakthrough in representing the female point of view that he did in representing the viewpoints of teenagers. The Breakfast Club gave us the opportunity to hold up a mirror to ourselves and become better people. And, while it did go a long way towards getting us to think in a fresh way about how even the pretty, popular girls suffer from objectification, it didn’t really question the way teenage boys treat teenage girls.
It’s very interesting to see Ringwald revisit the movie and it’s assumptions and influence, and also her reassessment of the work of John Hughes.
Thanks for posting that. Ringwald’s piece was really thoughtful, nuanced, and well written.
John Hughes remains such a tragic lost talent. I was in high school in the late ’60s so well before your time and his (it was he end of the draft period but I had always intended to be Peace Corps Volunteer as a family of Kennedy people (you know who you are) and ended up in Ethiopia, which transformed my life forever by its radical plunge into living in a beautiful high mountain environment literally without anything other than a horse and a primitive hut and not much else but having to perform.
As a result, I appreciated how people transform their lives.. I didn’t (and wouldn’t ever) have gone to Vietnam during the war but I feel I served my country in a better way, frankly as a PCV but I always felt the upmost respect for the Vietnam vets. They got so screwed.
So much history. And we have a President who is all about himself and has no sense (or interest) in the history of this country and, most important, has never had to transform his life in anyway until he suddenly became President, which, is way, way too late.
. . . (not proud of it), back in and/or a bit after college iirc. Back then, I found it hilarious, and the transgressive crudeness was very much integral to the appeal and the humor — pretty much the point of it all, and what made it funny.
Still, I was shocked by Ringwald’s quotes from the Hughes-Mann article (even as she acknowledged its satirical intent).
Definitely has not aged well into the #metoo era.
But echoing your recommendation of Ringwald’s excellent piece: thoughtful, self-reflective, and as somebody already mentioned, nuanced. Thanks for the link. Perfect read for this time slot on a lazy Saturday morning (now over, off to work).
Fast TImes at Ridgemont High?
Whooh boy, it was rough reading that. I absolutely hated high school, and less than a year after high school had finished, and I had traipsed around England for a few months to get it out of my system, “Breakfast Club” impacted our generation. I thought highly of John Hughes. Then in 1989, I landed a job as a back waiter at a very successful Italian restaurant in Chicago that was home to a whole bevy of Northwestern trained actors including the young Stephen Colbert. One night I was assigned to help with a party of six where everything had to be done perfectly because the guy at the table was launching “Planet Hollywood” and the restaurant chain I worked for was warming up to that project as investors or consultants. When I approached the table I stopped dead in my tracks. It was John Hughes. I had to calm myself. Taking that man’s order for a blueberry gelato was nerve racking. He liked the service despite a parade of waiters fluttering past his table trying to get face recognized for his next casting call. It was sad to see co-workers groveling like that. They couldn’t talk to him so they would throw facial expressions his way to get noticed. At any rate, he liked the headwaiter Joe’s service, and I was Joe’s back waiter, so he always asked for “the two Irish guys.” On about the third time waiting for him, I sauntered over to the table, and dining with him was none other than Allie Sheedy. That took the air out of my lungs. She had just married an actor from England, and the pair of them were chain smoking along with Hughe’s wife (it was 1991.) Ally was such the little flirt though. The way she ordered espresso was utterly mischievous. We had this mutual Celtic naughtiness going on, and Hughes picked up on that. Those were very fond memories. I can forgive him for sophomoric dumb sex humor. It was an entirely different era, and many of us have had the good fortune to mature more, and become more sensitive to our social tapestry, and we’re all better people for it.
John Hughes’ earlier work as a short story writer (as well as a more general satirist) for National Lampoon was much raunchier and more risqué but foreshadowed all his cinematic work.
(It was also the bridge to Hollywood for him, since the Lampoon wanted to follow up Animal House‘s template of basing its next movie on fiction from the magazine and selected Hughes’ “Vacation ’59” as their template for the Chevy Chase movie (with Anthony Michael Hall as Chase’s son) and Hughes’ screenplay got him the entrée to start directing.)
I think The Breakfast Club is brilliant, and I’ve thought so continuously since I first saw it while a college freshman (when it came out). I feel vindicated that it’s held up and is so highly regarded now. The screenplay is so skilled and refined that it doesn’t betray its depth — the novelistic ability to paint an entire unseen world (the daily fabric of life at the fictional Shermer High School) is reminiscent of Salinger’s best work.
The entire project is a class act start to finish; it rewards repeat viewings. (And, incidentally, contains one of the best extended monologues in cinema, delivered, incongruously, by Emilio Estevez.)
Well, oddly out of place really.
Never saw it – on purpose. The 80’s remain a cultural nadir, of which it was very apparent at the time. Breakfast Club was St Elmo’s Fire with a better sound track.
This is like comparing Godfather III to its predecessors. Worse really, because St. Elmo’s Fire is one of the most insufferable pieces of shit ever made and every character in that movie should have been blown up with TNT and burned in a gasoline fire.
The Breakfast Club came out the year I graduated college. Even though I was a few years older than the target audience, I thought it brilliant and saw it more than once.
Read Ringwald’s article this morning and thought she made some great points. Stuff that wasn’t on my radar at the time. Was just amazed that a writer and director could do such a great job of capturing the awkwardness and alienation of high school in a way that ultimately stripped away the differences and the shame, leaving me feeling inspired.
I’m sorry to say I related to the Anthony Michael Hall character most strongly. Was definitely a nerd but also something of a stoner, self medicating my shame and embarrassed torment over being myself. Was a super painful time, and of course I didn’t get at the time that I wasn’t all that unique. My experience was probably worse than most but there’s certainly far worse still. I never contemplated suicide and consistently believed my future would be better.
Looking back, what I see is lost opportunity. I was actually a kid with so much more going for me than I realized. Was not an athlete but was fairly good looking. Not gorgeous but very cute. Lots of girls were interested but I couldn’t grok it and I was truly living the old Grouch Marx joke. The moment someone expressed interest, no matter how much I might have pined for that interest before, a girl’s approval communicated to me that something was obviously wrong with her and I ran the other way.
Went on my first date at 17. Didn’t really have a girlfriend until I was 19. That’s when I lost my virginity. None of that would have been that bad had I not married her, thinking no one else would ever love me. Was not a good relationship. Would have been fine as a first experience but it wasn’t a good candidate for anything more.
Fortunately, was blessed many years later when, in early thirties, I met someone truly incredible. She was only 19. I was 31. That sounds creepy but I don’t think it was. She was unusually mature and I was quite immature. It was more like I was 25 and she was 22. She was my second wife. Blew that relationship too but it was beautiful for a few years.
In my thirties, I did a lot of therapy and developed some self confidence. Then I began to have fun. Dated a lot of lovely women. Married again at 43 and third time’s the charm.
Getting back to John Hughes and his films, I still think they’re genius but they no longer have much resonance. They’re the kind of films one outgrows. As a tortured youth, it felt like he was telling my story but in a way that was so much better. Now if I were to watch them, they’d seem more of a sociological survey.