“The Breakfast Club” is back in my life.
Last week, on my daughter’s 12th birthday, we went to Hot Topic at the mall so she could buy herself a “Breakfast Club” tank top, featuring Judd Nelson’s sullen, bad-boy mug beneath the movie’s title.
Entering Hot Topic was like walking back into my own middle-school years. The store seemed to employ the same kindly, punk-rock clerks and still sells humorous T-shirts and other amusing curios. I once thought the shop was a haven of ironic cool, a place my parents wouldn’t understand.
However, on my recent visit, the music irritated me as I browsed – it was something very loud and shouty – signaling that I probably don’t belong there anymore, either. But my daughter wanted to go spend her birthday money, and I promised to do whatever she wanted for her birthday, so there I was, surrounded by T-shirts sporting the faces from one of my all-time favorite movies.
For those of you who haven’t seen or even heard of “The Breakfast Club,” it’s a John Hughes movie that came out in 1985 about five high school students who spend a Saturday in detention together. All five are from different cliques – there’s “the brain,” played by Anthony Michael Hall; “the jock,” played by Emilio Estevez; and “the basket case,” portrayed by Ally Sheedy. Molly Ringwald plays “the princess” and Judd Nelson is “the criminal.” At the movie’s start they are hostile and view each other with disdain; by day’s end they have bared their souls and bonded. They’ve become the Breakfast Club.
My daughter, Lux, became aware of the movie’s existence when the teen sitcom “Victorious” did a spoof-tribute to the iconic film. Lux wanted to see the real movie, and I decided to let her watch it with me, despite its R rating. Today, I think the movie would be rated PG-13. For parents who are considering watching it with kids, there is one scene of pot smoking, talk of virginity and some cursing. It gave Lux and me a lot to discuss, and we both loved it.
It’s interesting that this movie still speaks to kids today, because the social hierarchy seems more fluid now than it was back in the 1980s. It’s cool to be a brain or technology nerd, and some of these “nerds” are jocks at the same time. I doubt there are any kids at our school considered “criminals.” There may be a few “basket cases,” and I’m sure there are “princesses,” but the lines don’t seem as clearly drawn as they used to be. Of course, I’m now on the outside looking in, and it’s likely I’m missing a lot.
I went to a really unusual high school in terms of cliques. At Las Vegas High School in the late 1980s, students came from numerous ethnic and religious backgrounds. One of our school’s student presidents was from Guam. Another was Mormon. The homecoming queen was African American; the runner-up was Filipino. There wasn’t enough sameness to create the solid cliques found in most U.S. high schools of the era. I was a band geek, but playing instruments right alongside me were cheerleaders and football players, students who typically wouldn’t be caught dead in the marching band.
Despite my diverse high school experience, “The Breakfast Club” still touched a nerve when I saw it.
I think that’s because the power of the movie can be found in watching kids speak honestly about life and sex and love, about their parents and school. Their cliques set up their characters and provide the audience with a shorthand to understand them. Then this understanding is upended throughout the course of the movie as they shed their personas and become real human beings, sharing the same worries and sadness and joys as the rest of us.
Teenagers are great artistic vehicles because they tend to feel every emotion tenfold, and this can provide a lot of drama. But many of these oversized emotions still exist in adults; they’ve just been minimized to the point of being manageable. Sometimes it can be restorative to watch teenage angst on film in order to remind ourselves of the emotional landscape we once traversed, and to better understand what our kids may be feeling right now.
Contact the writer: hskyler@ocregister.com and twitter: @heatherskyler
