A Millennial Watches “The Breakfast Club” for the First Time in 2024 (Yikes)

I recently claimed that The Breakfast Club sucks on Threads, which instantly activated the sleeper program in the brain of every Gen X user on the platform and sent them to my post to defend the timelessness of John Hughes films. 

I cannot deny the cultural power that The Breakfast Club holds. This film was the first time many teens and young adults felt validated and seen in a major piece of media. It's preserved in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." With a whopping 89% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.8/10 on IMDb, there is obviously something going for the film. 

What TBC Gets Right

While watching, I was very turned off by Bender's belligerence and sexual harassment of Claire, and Vernon's absolutely unhinged treatment of children in his care. But after hearing a lot of stories of how seeing TBC in theatres impacted so many young adults in the 80s, I had to remind myself that cultural context matters when critiquing a film. I cannot judge a 1985 film by 2024 standards (standards that, according to a small group of replies on Threads, indicate that I am "woke" and "an Acolyte fan"). 

I actually think that The Breakfast Club does a good job on many aspects of the film, so saying that it sucks as a whole was unfair of me - mea culpa, Gen X.  

Character Introductions

The opening monologue of the film lists the assumed archetypes of the characters as, "a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal." Before we even see the characters appear, we know we're dealing with a story about cliques, hierarchy, perceptions, and masks. 

As the characters are introduced on screen, we start with Claire, played by Molly Ringwald. The camera pans up over a shiny, clean BMW, and Claire and her father come into view. She says, "I can't believe you can't get me out of this." Her dad says, "I'll make it up to you" and hands her a packed lunch with a smile and an expression of love. 

Next is Brian, played by Anthony Michael Hall, shown bundled into the front seat of his mother's car with a younger sibling next to him in the middle. The vibe is one of an overworked mother making it work in bad circumstances. She seems stern, asking him, "Is this the first time or the last time we do this?" Brian says, "Last time" and mom tells him to use the time to his advantage and study. She rushes him out of the car with a raised voice, saying, "Well, go!" 

Andrew, played by Emilio Estevez, is in the station wagon next in line, seen in the shot where Brian gets out of the car. Andrew looks disappointed, downtrodden. His dad's tone is friendly, almost jovial before turning into the tone of a lecturing parent. "Hey, I screwed around. Guys screw around, there's nothin' wrong with that. Except you got caught, sport." Andrew says "Yeah, mom already reamed me, alright?" and tries to end the conversation. Then his dad gets upset, asking, "You want to miss a match? You want to blow your ride? No school's going to give a scholarship to a discipline case!" Andrew leaves the car with a huff. 

As Andrew's dad pulls away, we see another student approaching from the trees beyond the parking lot, absolutely clomping his way through the lot without caring that he has stepped right in front of a car that had to slam on its brakes. He doesn't even look. Just keeps clomping. This is John Bender, played by Judd Nelson. He's moody and doesn't give a fuck. 

The car that nearly hit Bender holds the final member of the group, Allison, played by Ally Sheedy. After she exits the back seat of the car, she leans forward as if to say something through the front window and the car drives away, leaving her standing alone in the frame.

Rewatching the opening three minutes of the film to write this, I'm impressed at the character building on screen that gives us clues and hints about these characters' home lives in such a short time. The thesis of the film, that teenagers are not what they seem, has already been set in motion here. 

(Shit, is writing this going to make me like The Breakfast Club?)

The next scene is the school library, where the students are now entering in their order of appearance as they arrived at school. Claire is already seated in the front row of seats, Brian is in the process of settling into the seat furthest from her in the second row, and Andrew enters and  asks Claire if he can sit two seats away in the front row - he stops and points to the chair, and she shrugs and raises her eyebrows. A silent, "Mind if I sit here?" and "Sure, it's no bother to me." 

Bender comes in, clad in a truly bisexual amount of layers and accessories. He touches nearly everything on the library counter as he walks in and steals a notepad. He clomps through the middle aisle of the library, his boots rattling in the silence like a cowboy walking to a duel. With a flick of his hand, he banishes Brian to the left side of the room. Brian wordlessly picks up his shit and moves. Bender turns Brian's former chair into a footstool, sitting in the middle seat and extending his legs out - another canonically bisexual move, so that's two points for Bender.

Allison rushes in last, going around the side of the tables rather than down the center aisle, around the back of the sculpture, and sitting in the absolute back corner seat. She plops into the chair with her back to the room. Everyone else has turned to watch her, and we see Claire and Andrew laugh, while Brian raises his eyebrows in a judgmental face. 

In only two scenes, John Hughes has used every detail  to showcase ONLY relevant information and clues about the students. (Fuck, that's quite good). 

Social Hierarchy

I've been out of high school for (woof) 18 years now, and I still remember that I was a weird kid, a smart kid, but never a popular kid. So as a weird/smart kid, I often spent lunch periods in classrooms, cleaning mouse enclosures for extra credit I didn't need, cooking an instant meal in a teacher's microwave because I didn't feel like being in the cafeteria, just vibing and talking to a grown adult person instead of anyone my own age. Good LORD, the autism hindsight is 20/20. 

Many of the people replying to my Thread (which said simply, "I'm watching The Breakfast Club for the first time and this movie SUCKS," which I now understand are fighting words) assumed that I must have had an idyllic high school experience if I didn't understand the commentary of The Breakfast Club. And, no... I get it. I'm just saying this story about it was not a good one. But THEN, how are we defining "good" in a story? This is all for the analysis later (jk, this is already analysis, you're trapped) but I did want to clarify that I get it. There's literally a scene about whether or not all these people will be friends on Monday after bonding in detention - it's not even subtext that this is what the movie is about, it's right there in the text. Perhaps I did not like it for other reasons, my guy. 

Discussing Abuse and Trauma

John Bender is the first student to crack and show a more vulnerable side, despite remaining an asshole for the entirety of the film. He does an impression of his home life, putting on the affect of a drunken man and pointing accusingly. With a low voice, he says, "Stupid, worthless, no-good, goddamn freeloading son of a bitch, [redacted slur], big-mouth, know-it-all, asshole, jerk." Then he leans to his other side and says in a higher tone, indicating his mother, "You forgot ugly, lazy, and disrespectful." Turning back to his father's impression, he strikes the mother and yells, "Shut up, bitch!" Next, he impersonates an argument between himself and his father, ending with his father punching him in the face. 

Andrew doesn't believe it, he thinks it's part of Bender's tough-guy image. But Bender pulls up his sleeve and shows Andrew the scar from a cigar burn given as a punishment by his father. Bender is angry at not being believed and goes on a minor rampage, throwing books to the floor and scaling a display table to climb up over the suspended staircase. In a close up, we see that he's breathing heavily and his eyes look sad. 

We go on to learn that everyone here has a problem at home. Andrew approaches Allison to check on her and ask if she wants to talk. She tells him to go away, and he starts to when she yells, "You have problems!" In the ensuing conversation, he asks, "Is it your parents?" Allison's eyes snap up and she looks surprised and emotional. After a long pause, she confirms that what's wrong in her life does have to do with her parents. "What do they do to you?" Andrew asks. "They ignore me." Andrew doesn't minimize this - though it is obviously less physically violent than Bender's home, Allison's trauma is seen and validated. There's no one-upmanship. Just quiet validation. Acknowledgement that it's hard to have to live like that. 

This really does support the underlying message of the film, which is that teenagers have a LOT of shit going on, and though it may seem surface level, unimportant, and irritating as an adult hearing about a child's problems, it's actually no less difficult to deal with than all the adult problems you're dealing with.  

Each character's confession of their pain is heard and witnessed, and even Bender calms down and receives their stories with sympathy. The below video from Screen Bites has clips of all of these initial confessions.

Andrew confesses that he assaulted another student and "the really bizarre thing is that [he] did it for [his] old man" because he wanted his dad to think he was cool. So not only is Andrew dealing with pressure at school to be cool, he is also emotionally competing with his father's younger self. He describes the moment he attacked Larry like it was almost a fugue. "He's kind of skinny, weak. And I started thinking about my father, and his attitude about weakness, and the next thing I knew I jumped on top of him and started wailing on him. My friends, they just laughed and cheered me on. And afterward, when I was sitting in Vernon's office, all I could think about was Larry's father and Larry having to go home and explain what happened to him. And the humiliation, the fucking humiliation he must have felt." 

Andrew describes his father as a "mindless machine that I can't even relate to anymore." He imitates his father. "Andrew, you've got to be number one! I won't tolerate any losers in this family. Your intensity is for shit! WIN. WIN. WIN." Then he confesses, "Sometimes, I wish my knee would give. Then I wouldn't have to wrestle anymore. He could forget all about me." He would trade his status as an athlete - social currency at school - for freedom from his father's abusive treatment. That is a huge thing to see represented in a story about the teenage experience.  

Claire expresses the amount of pressure she's under to maintain her social status and friend group. When she tells Brian he doesn't understand the pressure, he confesses that he was going to get an F on a project in shop and brought a gun to school. But it was a flare gun, and it went off in his locker. The tension breaks and the characters laugh. He was so terrified of having a B average for the semester that he planned a suicide. As one commenter on the YouTube video above said, "It's still pretty dark to consider that if he was a little less harmless, it would have been a really different outcome." 

Where TBC Sucks

I honestly think that if this film didn't have either of its "romantic" (hard to call it romantic when it starts with sexual harassment) "arcs" (hard to call them an arc when they're just kinda shoehorned in at the end) that I would rate it a solid 4/5. The storytelling uncovering each student's trauma and showing that there's more to a person than surface perception is great. Love it. Excellent work, John. 

But now it's time for me to bitch about the parts of this film that detract from its thesis.

Bender and Claire: Normalizing Sexual Harassment

Bender tells Brian to close the door, and then "We'll get the prom queen impregnated." 

Claire's virginity is talked about so much it may as well be its own character. 

Bender hides under a desk and stares directly between Claire's legs (and so does the camera - John Hughes, why did you make this choice?), then shoves his face between her knees. Afterward, he says it was an accident. 

Claire and Bender have an argument where he says it'll never happen that they would walk down the hallway as friends, and that she should "stick [her] head in the sand and wait for [her] fucking prom," to which she replies, in tears, "I hate you!" and he says, "Good!" 

So all these breadcrumbs of literal sexual assault and harassment lead up to Claire entering the storage room where Bender is being confined by Vernon - and KISSING HIM while giving him tantalizing, virginal fuck-me eyes. He offers up that he would be "outstanding" in the capacity of getting back at her parents for using her to get back at each other. She gives him an enormous diamond stud earring. They kiss again in front of her dad's car, presumably in prime "watching my daughter kiss a multi-layered delinquent" territory. Then Bender walks off and raises his fist to the air in the film's iconic ending frame. 

This message sucks. It sucks now, it sucked in the 1980s, because it SUCKS that women were trained to believe that harassment was evidence that a man liked them. "He teases you because he likes you" is one of the worst things our culture has ever normalized. Fuck this plot line. I know it was normal in the 80s, but it didn't have to be in this film. "Five kids connect and realize there's more to each other than meets the eye" is a perfectly good story without making the abusive bully and the popular girl he harasses for an entire day get together in the end. 

Allison’s Makeover

There are nine thousand articles out there about Ally Sheedy's makeover at the end of The Breakfast Club. It sucked. 

I do, however, kind of buy Allison and Andrew getting together. They had some quiet moments where they definitely bonded, and he was never abusive toward her the way that Bender was to Claire. But I really wish that they had left her style alone. She is worthy of love even in her basket case vibes. 

The makeover is in direct opposition to the apparent thesis of the film that there's more than meets the eye. They literally changed Allison's appearance instead of validating and affirming her as she was. 

Brian, the Fifth Wheel Who Gets Nothing

Everybody gets a kiss at the end of the movie. Allison kisses Andrew. Claire kisses Bender. And Brian kisses the essay he wrote on behalf of all five characters. Everybody should have helped write that fucking essay. Brian was robbed. 

When the students are sitting in a circle, talking about whether or not they'll be friends on Monday, we get into the meat of what some of TBC's fans think is the real meaning behind the film. That this day in detention was a one-time thing, a lightning strike, rather than something that the students actually seek to continue as newfound friends. Which - sure, except for the fact that the popular kids literally tell Brian that they wouldn't feel comfortable being friends with him in public because of their social status. Despite this, he still writes the essay for the five of them, and then at the end of the movie there are two couples... and Brian. Who has not actually improved his mental health at all and is presumably still suffering from the immense pressure put on him to succeed academically, which led to his suicidal ideation.

Somebody needs to talk to Brian. Brian needs help. 

#JusticeForBrian 

Does the Good Outweigh the Suck?

The Breakfast Club was an iconic blockbuster that returned 50x on its budget - a success, by anyone's count. It validates the still-relevant message that cliques and social hierarchy are a huge concern in teenagers' lives and that they suffer from unnoticed levels of pressure and perfectionism to impress peers, parents, and educators. 

The film isn't trying to be a masterpiece, which is actually charming. It doesn't take itself overly seriously, and the entire thing was shot in a high school. It was a modestly budgeted film with a modest plotline. 

The characters didn't really grow, though. They allowed themselves to be vulnerable, and maybe that's growth enough, but I was disappointed that there wasn't a payoff to their vulnerability. Brian doesn't get help for his mental health. Andrew doesn't tell his dad he doesn't want to be like him. Allison only gets noticed and seen by someone when she changes her appearance. Claire has been raised in a culture that trains her to accept abuse. Bender's abusive home life explains his "tough" identity but doesn't excuse it, and he doesn't accept any accountability for hurting others. 

And therein lies the razor's edge for me - does this movie owe me character payoff? Is this coming of age film obligated to wrap things up in their healthiest, most ideal way? Or is its deeply unsatisfying ending even more commentary on the fact that even when you let yourself be vulnerable and witnessed, it doesn't fix your trauma in an instant. Those pressures still remain. 

Ah, fuck.