It’s the 30th anniversary of The Breakfast Club
this year. 30 years. Wow. I
wasn’t old enough to see it in theatres the first time around, but definitely remember
seeing the previews for it and would have liked to have been allowed to see it on
the big screen at the time. It wasn’t
until a few years later, sitting in a
friend’s basement, that I finally watched the movie on a fresh VHS tape. I was completely enchanted with the
characters in this movie, how real they were, the fact that there weren’t any
real fairy tale endings for them. They
presented problems that my friends faced, that I faced. They were really just all of us. Not that I was exactly like Molly Ringwald,
or Ally Sheedy or Anthony Michael Hall.
There was a little bit of each of them in all of us. And we saw a little of ourselves in each of
their quirks.
By the time I finally did see The Breakfast Club, what many consider
one of the defining films of that decade, I was already well familiar with the
other teen movies of the time. John
Hughes just seemed to get us and he
was making movies with characters that were incredibly real, incredibly
connected to our experiences, to things that we cared about.
Now, I was slightly enchanted with Pretty In Pink at that age, though I find myself more annoyed than
anything these days. I was always more
of a Some Kind of Wonderful
girl. I think part of it might be that I
identified with Watts more than I did with Andi. I wasn’t a complete tomboy, but certainly
more like that than the ultra girly, always in angst, Andi. But Molly Ringwald herself was something to
behold in her heyday. She was the girl
that some part of us always wanted to be.
Something about her spunky red hair and forever underdog status
resonated with me, and with most of the girls I knew growing up. It’s no coincidence that she and Anthony
Michael Hall played parts in so many of those movies. They were the EVERYbody actor. We recognized them. And, as adolescents, that’s a big part of
what we’re all looking for – confirmation that we’re not freaks. That everyone else is just as screwed up and
there’s hope for us after all.
Who am I? It’s the
question we all start asking from the moment we are first capable of abstract
thought. First, we identify as one
gender or another, then as a member of a specific family, maybe a member of a
church or community. But then we start
to label ourselves, or others label us.
Maybe we’re the funny one. Or the
smart one. The best athlete. Or the worst.
Maybe we’re the kid who’s picked last on every team, or the kid who’s
never picked at all. And we start to
wonder if the labels are fitted to us or if they define and mold us from the beginning. There’s no such thing as any perfect label –
we’re all more than what the world sees of us in quick snapshots. This is what Andrew, Johnny, Claire, Brian
and Allison discovered in a Saturday detention.
They had to smoke a little pot first, but they had a real and honest
discussion. It’s almost unheard of for a
group of high school kids to really sit and have that kind of open dialogue in
a group. How frightening. How freeing.
Where someone fits in, or if they don’t, was a recurring
theme in this genre of movies, as much as how the opinions of your social
strata could keep true love at bay. John
Hughs in particular was genius at highlighting this. While he did not direct Some Kind of Wonderful, he did write the script. Like Pretty
in Pink before it, it features a main character from the quintessential
wrong side of the tracks, a quirky best friend, and an unattainable dream – in this
case, the boy, Keith, gets a date with his dream girl. His best friend, the tomboy, Watts, surpresses
her own affection for Keith to help him set up the perfect date. But social restrictions get in the way and
Keith finds himself wondering which girl is really his dream girl. All of that sound kinda familiar? It’s pretty much Andi and Blayne and Duckie
all over again, but I think I prefer Keith’s story. Maybe because I always secretly rooted for
Duckie to get the girl. Maybe because
Eric Stoltz gives such a stellar performance in this one, not to mention that
he was pretty cute back in the day.
Lea Thompson, Marty McFly’s girl, plays Amanda Jones –
popular girl, who realizes she is trapped by her own popularity. She agrees to the date with Keith to feed her
own agenda, but learns something about herself along the way. It’s another of Hughes’ themes – how popularity
is its own kind of trap. How those
caught in its grasp are unable to make their own decisions or make friends
outside their own group – how they feel stuck.
Claire and Andrew in Breakfast
Club, Blayne in Pretty in Pink, and Amanda in this flick all hint at how hard their
lives are, living under a social microscope.
And we all know how cruel kids can be.
These movies don’t attempt to hide that.
They tell us high school, and growing up in general, is a hard, suck ass,
place to be. Those on the outside of the
popular crowd long to have a taste of that world, to date the golden children,
to try on their lives. And, yet, they
learn that these other glittering lives are just as imperfect as their
own. Life is messy – fitting in isn’t
easy, and it isn’t everything, seems to be the message John Hughes and his
peers were throwing out there for us. He
presents this, but never presumes to offer a solution. It’s part of the charm of these movies – they’re
a mirror of our insecurities not a recipe for fixing our lives. In real life, the guy never turns to his best
friend and realizes he’s secretly been in love with her all along. Real life Duckies get their hearts broken
again and again. Good guys sometimes get
kicked in the face.
I was neither an Andi nor an Amanda, and certainly never a Claire. I wasn’t the outcast or loser, but nor was I
the golden girl. Neither prom queen nor basket
case. A friend once told me I am a lot
of Anthony Michael Hall, a little bit of Ally Sheedy, and a tiny bit of Judd
Nelson. It’s the duality of the human condition
– we present to the world as one dimensional, because people see us the way
they choose to see us. But we’re so much
more than that, each of us not one thing or another.
Seeing these movies as an adult, some things have changed
and others have not. Molly Ringwald is
still the every girl, and the conflicts her characters face still ring
true. Just because we’re adults and we’ve
learned how to deal with our emotions doesn’t mean we stop having them. Allison Reynolds might believe that “When you
grow up, your heart dies,” but it’s not true.
We bury these discovered truths and half truths, but we don’t ever
forget them. The things that make the
emotions so true, so raw, so real is the newness of them when we are
teenagers. Everything is fresh, and
everything is important.
Forever, Molly, Anthony, Emilio, Judd and Ally will be
captured and represent a generation. The
movies of that genre, for the most part, stand the test of time. Get past the terrible clothing and the cheesy
jokes. Look to the heart of who they
were showing us. Look back at your own
adolescence. I bet you find plenty in
common with the brain, the jock, the criminal, the basket case and the beauty
queen.
