40 years later, there’s no forgetting about The Breakfast Club
Nearly every teen movie of the last four decades owes something to John Hughes' 1985 classic.
Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club Universal Pictures
The late John Hughes once mulled a sequel to his 1985 ode to adolescence, The Breakfast Club. The idea was that he’d pick up years later with the same characters, five suburban teenagers from different cliques who look past their differences and forge some common ground over a long Saturday in detention. Simple minds race with the questions Hughes could answer by reconvening his party of five. Would neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie Brian become a meathead, just like the actor who played him, Anthony Michael Hall? Would the glam-up makeover that outsider Allison (Ally Sheedy) receives at the end of the film take? Would burnout Bender (Judd Nelson) escape the lifetime in Loserville so many assume awaits him?
It was an intriguing pitch, at least for anyone who’s ever wondered who these fictional Illinois kids might grow up to be. At the same time, maybe it’s a relief that Hughes never got around to pursuing the idea. After all, the enduring appeal of The Breakfast Club rests largely on the narrow parameters it sets for itself: It’s just five kids in one room over a single day. To look beyond this mere snapshot of youth would be to betray its eternal present tense. The movie exists, irresistibly, in the moment, just like the teenagers who flocked to it in initial release and the many who have continued to discover it over the four decades since.
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Arguably no filmmaker capitalized more on the teen experience than Hughes, the writer and sometimes director of youth-courting sensations like Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and of course Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But if all those movies could be called quintessential ’80s hits, The Breakfast Club is more timeless, even as it unfolds entirely within a kind of hourglass. The almost theatrical minimalism of Hughes’ scenario transcends trends. He shaved off all the extraneous conventions of high-school movies. There’s no big game, no prom, no graduation, no classroom even. It’s a teen movie that says that the teens alone are enough.
The Breakfast Club Trailer
The Breakfast Club, which turns 40 today (they grow up so fast!), made stars out of its stars – the core members of the so-called Brat Pack that took Hollywood by storm for a few whirlwind years. It’s primarily an acting showcase. When not trading sharp insults, the five deliver tearful monologues — sometimes in a literal circle, à la a drama club. Like their characters, they had their whole lives ahead of them, and it’s interesting to consider the careers that followed: Molly Ringwald becoming America’s sweetheart before decamping for Paris, Emilio Estevez headlining multiple hit franchises, Sheedy reinventing herself as an indie darling. And who could have guessed that Nelson, who arguably delivers the film’s most charismatic performance (all bad-boy bravado, until we get glimpses of the scared kid underneath), would land a comfy network sitcom gig a mere decade later?
The film is an optimistic fantasy of unexpected teenage solidarity. It takes a little suspension of disbelief to imagine that eight hours together could turn “a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal” into fast friends. Of course, Hughes’ script is smart enough to acknowledge the ephemerality of their kumbaya: None of them harbor too many delusions about their connection lasting once the five are back in their respective social circles. That’s the bittersweet power of the Billboard-climbing Simple Minds anthem that both opens and closes the film: “Don’t you forget about me” is a touching plea to immortalize this fleeting day of communion, even once it fades with the ring of the school bell.
The hierarchies of high school don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, The Breakfast Club says. It’d be easier to take that message seriously if Hughes didn’t end up kind of reinforcing them. Allison’s miniature Pygmalion arc — emerging from the bathroom like a homecoming queen, dolled up by Ringwald’s Claire — betrays both the character’s countercultural kookiness and the film’s be-yourself ethos. She only wins the jock prince by fundamentally changing who she is; it’s a preview of the makeover plots of future teen comedies like She’s All That and Drive Me Crazy. And Hughes really does Brian dirty. However much empathy the geek garners with the cooler kids, he’s still doing their homework as they pair off and make out.
The Breakfast Club | Detention Dance
It’s a little ironic that a movie all about looking past stereotypes would codify them so much through its advertising campaign. That famous Annie Leibovitz poster, with the cast huddled together, treats each label the characters reject and rebel against as a marketable brand. The Breakfast Club might be the most influential teen movie of them all, and part of its influence was turning the genre into one big game of opposites attracting. How many seminal teen movies and TV shows after it derived their tension from the clash of cliques, and the supposedly revelatory revelation that jocks, freaks, and geeks aren’t so different after all?
You can see a little of The Breakfast Club in nearly every quick-witted teen entertainment that came after it. While films like Heathers explicitly positioned themselves as sardonic rebuttals to the Hughes school of kids-are-all-right sentimentality, plenty of descendants of the big and small screen simply updated the writer-director’s model for younger generations, swapping the music and fashion and slang, but not the essential spirit. The Breakfast Club’s single day of bickering and bonding bled into everything from Scream to My-So Called Life to the collegiate Community (a sitcom that references the film in its first episode, and arranged a guest spot for Hall a few weeks later).
The Breakfast Club (6/8) Movie CLIP - Lunchtime (1985) HD
It’s also what you could call an essential Gen X text: Before Reality Bites or Singles or the comparably gabby work of Richard Linklater, there was this portrait of five teens divided by social status but united by their shared disaffection and desire not to become their parents. Not that the Latchkey Generation has a monopoly on such feelings. One reason The Breakfast Club endures where some of its ’80s contemporaries don’t is that it gets at the essential identity crisis of growing up: The whole world seems invested in defining you (and your future) at a time when you’re still very much on the cusp of figuring that out for yourself.
You could say that the kids of The Breakfast Club aren’t just rebelling against the boxes everyone wants to put them. They’re rebelling against the pressure to be anything before they’re ready to decide who they are. That’s the real reason a sequel was a bad idea, however appealing it may have sounded. In plucking a single significant day out of the lives of these characters — the kind any kid might mythically inflate in their mind, at a time when every emotion and experience feels massive — Hughes remained true to the embryonic beauty of late childhood, when the possibilities still seem endless because they essentially are. The movie is a freeze frame, just like the one on which it triumphantly, iconically ends.
The Breakfast Club is available to rent or purchase through the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
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