It is the burden of all art wielding sufficiently vast influence that its revelatory power will be dampened by the many imitators following in its wake; if the 1971 proto-slasher A Bay of Blood now seems to be packed with cabin-in-the-woods cliches, that’s only because it coined so many of them. In the case of John Hughes’ ur-teen-flick The Breakfast Club, still bratty four decades after its zeitgeist-capturing theatrical run, its headlining truth that teenagers possess depth beyond their broad archetypes has since been re-realized ad nauseam by generations of on-screen adolescents. (Smaller, ancillary truths, such as the binding potential of cannabis to bridge inter-clique divides, are where the film really shines.) Of recent vintage, high school crowd-pleasers Booksmart and Bottoms both learned the hard way that the pretty, popular girls descended from Molly Ringwald’s princess in pink Claire face private challenges belied by their put-together exterior. Arguably, grasping that other people exist just as much as you do is the defining milestone of the puberty years, but it still behooves a present-day viewer of Hughes’ film to remind themselves that he first broke ground on what has come to seem matter-of-fact.
Hughes’ unvarnished take on youth culture, replete with joints and F-bombs, arrived in 1985 to fill a vacuum of movies about young people in which they could see lifelike facsimiles of themselves. To one side, they had the risible attempts from much-mocked after-school specials to address Big Issues, and to the other, the cartoonish raunch of Porky’s and its hairy-palmed ilk. Following through logically on the anti-nostalgic purview of Hughes’ tenure at National Lampoon, where he punctured Rockwell’s wholesome Americana to find a waking hell in the ritual of family vacation, The Breakfast Club dared to admit that everything sucks. (In this stance, it announces itself as one of the earliest gen X touchstones.) And while that sentiment’s accuracy hasn’t been diminished by time – teens have no money, they live with their parents, their sense of self is a whirling cyclone of chaos – its articulation has.
Taken up most prominently by Ringwald herself in a 2018 essay for the New Yorker, the reassessment effort challenging the film’s widely beloved standing has focused on a political coarseness pronounced by the present’s rising tides of sensitivity. At the height of the #MeToo reckonings, Ringwald reframed her character’s dynamic with Judd Nelson’s bad boy, John Bender, as a constant campaign of sexual harassment rather than mere flirting, of a piece with a nasty reactionary streak in Hughes’ work also present in the F-slur spray-painted on a locker in the film’s opening minutes.
As for the casual homophobia, Hughes is guilty of honestly reflecting the cruelty of children in their time (and, as suggested by the new television series English Teacher, ours). The relationship between Claire and Bender can’t be so easily condemned, either; as teens have done since time immemorial, they’ve channeled their begrudging attraction to one another into bickering, junior counterparts to the small screen’s Sam and Diane. His line-crossing crassness is essential to his appeal, as my wife heartily affirmed from across the couch during our rewatch. And though the memorable set piece in which Bender jams his head between Claire’s thighs while hiding under a table represents an unsavory overplaying of his hand, it pales in comparison to the racial caricature of Long Duk Dong, or the lecherous whole of Weird Science.
The faults of The Breakfast Club are less pungently offensive and more pedestrian, a matter of simple misjudgment rather than shifting social mores. The twin successes of Hughes’ screenplays for National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr Mom had earned him golden-boy status at Universal in 1983, and the resultant three-picture deal that launched his directorial career also imbued him with newfound sureness in his voice. In his essay for the Criterion Collection’s reputation-shoring home-video release of The Breakfast Club, writer David Kamp echoes Ringwald’s likening of the character-driven, single-location plot to black box theatre, but the comparison rings truest in the overdetermined, schematic parceling-out of information. The much-lauded scene in which the detention-dwellers share their formative traumas has far more in common with the after-school specials at which the film thumbed its nose than Hughes cared to admit, the broaching of subjects like suicide and parental abuse played in the all-caps register that clear descendant Freaks and Geeks always sagely avoided. Many of the treasured soundbites – “We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it,” being the main offender – pass off doodle-able platitudes as wisdom. (Not to mention the false equivalency about everyone coping with their own struggles when it’s obvious that Bender’s life is materially, demonstrably worse than his peers’.)
Still, the character who gets the rawest deal would have to be Allison, the “basket case” played by Ally Sheedy; while the rest of the gang bare their inner dysfunctions, she reveals that she’s nowhere near as tormented as she appears, her theft and compulsive lying products of being bored and unstimulated. The makeover she gratefully receives from glamour girl Claire in order to win a kiss from Emilio Estevez’s jock Andrew betrays her character in every way, suggesting that her identity was only ever a problem to be solved with conformity to the dullest, drabbest mold. The prescriptive Reagan-era notion of normalcy is of a piece with an overall conservative streak in the final minutes, sold via the anthemic uplift of Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), all triumphant swells diametrically at odds with the aspirations to emotional realism. The boy gets the girl, the girl gets the boy, the dweeb finds his inner man, Bender pumps his fist in victory.
This ostensible paean to the nobility of the losers ends by making them all winners; the film lauded for telling it like it really is wraps up with comforting Hollywood artifice. Modern-day slumber parties watch The Breakfast Club as fantasy, a return to a simpler time of teased-out hair and landline phones, but its appeal – that showing the ways we are broken to someone we can trust will heal both of you – has always hinged on escapism.
