Is that harsh? This movie was designed to hit with the established teen cinema market that had swollen by the mid '80s into a screaming hormonal rage. It was given as a olive branch between the yet to be nicknamed Boomers and X'ers but also to reflect on the times and how they are always tough on teens. It pretty much does exactly that with a lot of energy, a good ear for dialogue that doesn't patronise the demographic, and a credible arc and round up that ends with a warming freeze frame of defiance. So, why do I hate its guts?
Well, let's spring back to the obviously relevant Elizabethan period of theatre for a second. In Shakespeare's time, love stories were comedies. They had the same formula as modern day rom coms, from meet cute to marriage. Shakespeare wrote his greatest love story as a tragedy. Way to start an arms race. Same thing here. Teen movies were comedies with gross out humour and generationalism and they ended in sex to various degrees of success. John Hughes had already joined this trend with his Sixteen Candles which had all the trimmings (even chucking in an indigestible side of racism for the times). The Breakfast Club, which had been gestating for years, wiped the table.
While his teens are teens their interaction and speech are not branded as teens like they were in Porky's. John Hughes had emerged from the great ick of the National Lampoon movies with an apparently clean bill of social health. The kids are sexual but it's no longer horny boys and walking semen receptors. Sex carries a danger but it's an interpersonal one not a smirking threat. By the same token these aren't just adults in waiting, either. As their conflicts draw out the issues, they reveal the problems of the growing awareness of their age group against the resistance of their parents' generation, as they try to navigate their own way from childhood to the grown up world. None of them wants to be their parents but neither the ambittered old bastard Vernon the teacher. They have themselves to create and that has to be done by themselves, without guidance.
So, Bender's obnoxious feather ruffling that gets everything going really does have to be scattergun and destructive. He doesn't know where he's going, either, but he knows how to clear jungle with a machete. Part of Hughes's effectiveness, here, is to resist all the tropes of the genre, even those he'd added himself in Candles. If it had been five Benders, we'd just get more Porky's. There is a contrivance in the characterisation along very trad personification lines: Bender is the rebel, Claire the popular beauty, Andrew the athlete, Brian the nerd and Alison the weirdo, or resistance, ruling elite, convention and chaos. Peel the veneer of casting and dialogue and it's a medieval passion play. But that's not the problem, here.
Judd Nelson's Bender is so constantly taunting that the movie is over halfway through before you ease off wanting him dead. Molly Ringwald's Claire show's vulnerability believable for her unpreparedness for unusually hard attack. Emilio Estavez's Andrew is all squeaky clean surface and raging confusion a scratch away. Anthony Michael Hall's Brian has the best opportunity of range, sucking up to Bender's power or Andrew's when it rises, in constantly alert self-preservation. But it's Ally Sheedy's Alison who gets to me most personally as she is of the tribe of latchkey fantasists whose creativity in the absence of guidance is all self mythology. Her initial frenetic herky jerky quirks are overplayed but as soon as she is forced into dialogue she works better than any of them. But she is also the centre of the problem with this movie.
Not that it's a bad movie. Hughes keeps the single location interesting as a dynamic space for the kids to bounce around and off each other. His performance direction (apart from Sheedy's overcooked weirdie slapstick) is muscular and nuanced, from Bender's space invasion to Brian's skittish affinity shifts. His management of the arcs within the big arc is impeccable. It's easy to see why this gave him a career as visible and nameable as Spielberg's in the same era. The Breakfast Club is a brilliant movie. It's just a brilliant movie that sucks.
It's not because of Alison's makeover but that's the thing that flings the curtain aside and exposes the wizard as a fake. At the end, after everyone else has been sorted and given their prize for turning up, alpha chick Claire takes Alison aside and art directs her out of her individuality, taming her sub-Siouxsie shag-mop, replacing the near goth eyeliner with highlighter and debagging her anti-sexualising op shop outfit with something out of an Eisenhower era yearbook. She looks like she farts vanilla essence. She approaches the stunned Andrew like a spacecraft floating toward its station dock. A little talk and tweaking and she's ready for the great mangle of adulthood.
Why is this bad if it really only points to a realistic outcome? It's bad because it claims that the conformity that almost all teenagers fall into (whether against the big world or their own peer pecking hells) is not just inevitable but desirable. Alison, who was the the sexiest character of the five through her initial refusal to engage with the others to her barnstorming personal chaos, was more of a rebel than Bender the walking bumper sticker. We've spent one and a half hours with the claim that the conformity of Andrew or Claire or Brian was just wrapping for individualistic rage when all of them were really just longing to get back into the cosy middle only to drag the sole genuine thorn in the side into softened consumable form. It's the mid '80s and this is American punk.
What I mean by that is this: having been completely outclassed in the late '70s by the tougher and more genuinely political British punk, the thing that was called punk in America started copying its style and sound until it attempted to outdo it without getting the point about it being anti-competitive. From this arose the false narrative (now pretty much accepted) that UK punk was the copycat. This prevails because its carriers are culturally dominant and live at a time when preference trumps truth. Ponder that when you watch the cast react to a toke of cannabis as though it's hospital grade meth and the music presages the revisionist rockism of the US '90s.
The Breakfast Club sell us the way to conformity the way that rebellion is always sold when it becomes marketable: it gives its audience the illusion that because they enjoy the onscreen revolt, they are themselves rebels. Bender's freeze frame fist pump might as well be a sales exec celebrating a campaign. It's not just Alison getting microwaved into flavourless sludge as she effectively is, that just lays bare the problem, it's that we're meant to do the same thing in the cinema seat or the beer and pizza night and sing along.
Hughes did have an effect on the teen movie, including the better Pretty in Pink and the pukefest of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Others, under its influence, even did a little better. But, really, what the world of teen cinema needed was Heathers which cleansed the dishonest earnestness with bruising satire. And then Porky's came back in the '90s with American Pie and its clones. Why? Because Porky's was still closer to what the teen ticket buyers had wanted from movies about themselves, "the lineaments of gratified desire". Whenever that happens the real non-conformity will rise again, like 2000's Ginger Snaps or 2023's feloniously underseen Bottoms, before being stamped down by the mainstream. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to locate those ones and, happily, a world of digital memory awaits the adventurous explorer. See The Breakfast Club, of course, but relish Heathers.
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