Few films are more cherished than John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985), the story of five troubled high schoolers who bond in weekend detention. Decades after its release, the movie continues to enjoy adoration from old and new viewers, and is often cited as a defining work of the 1980’s and of the high school genre. Who doesn’t like The Breakfast Club?
Well, I don’t. And before you click away from that heresy, hear me out in this short essay, in which I’ll lay out my reasons for disliking the film. My points, I hope, aren’t of the snobbish variety; no one claims this film to be a cinematic masterpiece, and I don’t intend to criticize it for not being such. My central issue with the film is that although it purports to debunk the convenient, lazy stereotypes that adults use to define kids, it in fact relies on those very stereotypes for its entire entertainment value.
I’ll begin my critique with the observation that my friends who like The Breakfast Club (so all of my friends) nevertheless dislike two scenes in the film. Perhaps you, too, even if you like the film, will agree that these two scenes are worthy of criticism, which will start us off on common ground.
The first scene is near the end, when the characters pressure Brian to write the required essay on behalf of the entire group. The second, even more reviled, is also near the end, when Claire gives Allison a makeover to look “pretty,” wooing Andrew.
I’ll get to this second scene later; for now I want to focus on the first, the one in which Brian is forced to write the essay, which might seem to be a strange way for the film to end. After all, haven’t the characters just learned to respect Brian as a relatable whole person, not merely an academic performer? Wouldn’t it be appropriate, given this poignant lesson, for the five new friends to share the duty?
This incongruence is only emphasized by the content of the essay that Brian then writes, which claims, despite what the other four have just done, that “each of us” is “a brain”:
“You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal.”
Now, if Brian writing the essay for everybody were the only moment in which the movie fell back on the characters’ supposed “types,” rather than showing their capacity to transcend those types, I’d be inclined let it go as harmless, maybe even cute. But Brian writing the essay is actually harmonious with the rest of the film, since The Breakfast Club paradoxically leaves us with memories of the characters fulfilling the labels bestowed on them by the adults.
In one scene, for instance, Allison, the basket case, is drawing a picture and uses her dandruff to simulate snow. The audience has a laugh: what a weirdo! Later, Allison confesses that she was never assigned detention; instead, bizarrely, she chose to attend. More guffawing from us (and the other characters): the girl is crazy!
But, again, aren’t we supposed to be watching a movie about how the kids’ labels don’t adequately describe them? Comedic moments like these are just ammunition for the Mr. Vernons of the world: they pigeonhole the characters into lazy stereotypes. If Allison is indeed more than just “a basket case,” why is she repeatedly shown to be…such a basket case?
Likewise, Brian is purportedly more than a nerd, but he’s written in the screenplay to be kind of a nerd, isn’t he? He lies about his virginity, sycophantically counts Bender’s detentions, and has a fake I.D. so that he can vote. It’s all real hilarious; nerds are funny. And yeah, he does everyone’s homework at the end. Classic!
Hughes would have us believe that the kids’ stereotypes have been foisted upon them by dismissive adults, but he has written the characters to exactly embody those labels, engendering suspicion that the adults, in fact, are justified in using them. Are we really going to vilify, for example, those who think of Claire as a “princess”? She is a princess, as exemplified by every scene she’s in. At one point, she opines that for her and Andrew, being seen with the other three takes more courage, because the friends of the other three “look up to us.” When Brian and Bender call her out, she cries. If she’s more than a princess, it’s not by much.
Even the characters’ silly dance moves fit their respective stereotypes.
You might object that although, yes, the characters have familiar quirks, the important thing is that all of us mutually recognize one other’s quirks—sure, laughing at them when appropriate—and thereby develop real affection for each other.
But in The Breakfast Club, the recognition isn’t mutual: one character, in fact, is never the brunt of the joke. That would be Andrew, the jock. He’s the “normal one” in the film, always a staple of 80’s entertainment, which means he’s the only one with any insight, while the other characters are oblivious to their assorted weirdnesses. When Andrew recounts the bullying deed that landed him in detention, he’s tearful with remorse—a far throw from Bender, who regrets nothing, and Claire, who can’t seem to wrap her head around the fact that she’s a spoiled brat. Andrew has all the important lines; for example, he interrupts a silly Bender/Claire shouting match to wonder, touchingly, “My God. Are we gonna be like our parents?”
Andrew is the audience’s stand-in. He’s troubled, sure, but stable, self-aware, able to steer the plot toward catharsis for all. It’s as if Hughes couldn’t quite free himself of the prevailing assumption that he wanted to challenge: that the cool kid is the center of the action.
So of course Allison is made up as a pretty girl in the end. What, was Andrew going to go goth or something? Ew, that would’ve been so weird! We are Andrew, so the movie caters to him and us.
Thus, no real shedding of stereotypes occurs in The Breakfast Club. The movie wants to transcend social labels, but it also wants to emphasize them for entertainment purposes (just like a high school jock would), and given the choice, it always picks the latter. The result is an exploitative movie.
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For most fans of the film, though, this is all beside the point. That’s because what really constitutes the cherishability of The Breakfast Club isn’t deft debunking of stereotypes, but rather sweet, sweet nostalgia.
In the opening shots, Hughes’ camera, with 80’s pop music pumping, roams through the school to remind us how life used to be. The cafeteria, the hallway clocks, the student graffiti, the prom stuff, lockers with gay slurs. The effect isn’t glorification, per se, but it’s certainly wistful: “Yup, that was high school, alright…”
The characters that we subsequently meet are just more of that: reminders of bygone days. Days when the cool kids were cool, the bad boys didn’t give a shit, the principal hated kids, and nerds did everyone’s homework. And there was always that crazy girl who didn’t talk to anyone—remember that?
But this is a sad way to reflect on our youth. When we were actually in high school, we didn’t think like this. It was clear, then, that everyone was a unique individual with unique traits and a unique story. It’s only now, after the fact, that these labels carry meaning for us, because the world that we lived in for four years is too complex to remember all of it clearly. The nuances of high school life, formerly observable every day, aren’t accessible to us anymore. So we need these labels—jock, criminal, princess, brain, basket case—as memory crutches: they enable us, long after graduation, to tap into the nostalgia we want so badly.
Thus, I interpret The Breakfast Club and similar movies as peddling a kind of psychological trick. They offer us a false nostalgia, a nostalgia founded on simplicity and generalization, then absolve us of our caricaturing by exposing caricatures as unnecessary and malign, and inviting us to nod in agreement.
It’s fun for many to turn the movie into a game: which character are you? Are you the princess? Are you the nerd? Which one?? But let’s be honest: when we enjoy the movie we are, in fact, Mr. Vernon, the insidious labeler. He’s disguised in the film as a cartoonish grump, so it’s difficult to recognize ourselves, but take away that disguise and we’re left with the one truly relatable character. That’s to say, his flaw is our flaw: that being older now, we can’t, as much as we try, remember high school as anything more than a bunch of “types” just trying to get through it all.
Sincerely yours,
–Jim Andersen
For more criticism of beloved movies, check out my commentary on Avatar.
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