Classic Cinema
The Breakfast Club helps you remember what it feels like to go from suicidal confessions, to flailing 80s style dancing in the average time it takes a teenage guy to ‘rock your world’. And that really isn’t long, trust me
Ever felt like your parents don’t understand you? Do they put pressure on you to achieve? Do they spoil you? Beat you? Or worse, ignore you? Everything is their fault. In fact, all adults just don’t understand kids, because ‘when you grow up, your heart dies’. Or so I’ve learnt from watching John Hughes’ 80s classic The Breakfast Club.
Let me set the scene for you. Five teenagers from different teen film tribes are forced together for an entire Saturday in detention. They spend it belittling each other, getting high, and having emotional outpourings. Then, because there’s a load of sexual energy floating around and it has to go somewhere, they end up pairing off and snogging in a broom cupboard. Apart from a dweeb named Brian. I don’t know about you, but from my experience of teenage relationships, so far, so familiar.
But this isn’t just some shit 80s movie where gawky adolescents sit around, complain nobody understands them and then get off with someone hideously unsuitable.
Ok, maybe that is the bulk of the storyline. So what? The whole reason I love this movie is that it is banal – and we’ve all been there. This is the main essence of why John Hughes films (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink) live on: teenagers haven’t changed, and they never will.
I know it’s easy to wish those days of pimples, mood swings and embarrassment away, but there was some good in there too. Teenagers feel things with an intensity that fades later in life. When you get older, your heart doesn’t die, but it does harden a little. Being a teenager is shit. Sometimes, it’s nice to take an hour or two to look back on all of the bullying, insecurities and mind-numbing pretentiousness, and remember that, for all your teenage failings, you were probably no more of a tit than anyone else.
The Breakfast Club helps you remember, just for an hour or two, what it feels like to go from suicidal confessions, to flailing 80s style dancing in the average time it takes a teenage guy to ‘rock your world’. And that really isn’t long, trust me.
