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.
