Before nose rings, tattoos, obesity, and puberty blockers came to define adolescent experience, The Breakfast Club idealized its insecurities in a nonthreatening showcase that has reached its 40th anniversary. The story of five suburban Chicago high school students — a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), a basket case (Ally Sheedy), an athlete (Emilio Estevez), a princess (Molly Ringwald), and a criminal (Judd Nelson) — who undergo Saturday detention was always a fantasy, but writer-director John Hughes appeared to go deeper. He highlighted social stress, presenting the kids’ vulnerabilities cut off from the outside world, secluded in school life governed by teenage rules of peer-group aspiration and juvenile effrontery.
Many people took it seriously (my “Kidpix” article for Film Comment dubbed it National Lampoon’s Persona, referring to Ingmar Bergman’s intense, meta-cinema psychological drama), but Hughes struck gold by updating Hollywood’s teen-movie formula, jump-starting the most popular 1980s genre.
Decades later, The Breakfast Club looks better than it once did, given how the youth market is now subjected to endless sci-fi, comic book and animation fantasy that has nothing to do with the inner lives of teenagers — a franchise so overworked that this summer it reaps decreasing box office returns. Millennial filmmakers don’t know how to address adolescent (or adult) psychology other than through political indoctrination.
Before “identity politics” had a name, Hughes compartmentalized his characters “in the most convenient terms, with the simplest definitions” (as brainy Anthony Michael Hall puts it in his required detention essay). The film captures white suburban parochialism, the class currently in disarray, subject to legalized pot, body modification, and liberal ideology enforced by the former Department of Education and the media.
It’s a relief that Hughes doesn’t specify identity politics. But “busting identity politics,” as critic John Demetry recently described James Sweeney’s Twinless, might have enriched Hughes’s tale of the students’ personal struggle. That was the subject of 1983’s remarkable vérité documentary Seventeen, by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines (a rare, honest PBS presentation — so honestly recognizable about interracial dating in Muncie, Ind., that PBS eventually censored it).
The personal search for identity and moral comprehension was also the advance of André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds, the finest of all adolescent dramas, which was released ten years after The Breakfast Club and perfected it. Téchiné’s sensitivity to sexual and political awakening and pop music (Del Shannon’s “Runaway” reverberated period longing) transcended identity politics, while Hughes cautiously circled around that American obsession. (The kids whistle “Colonel Bogey’s March” as a nod to their Western heritage, but Hughes’s key support-group, psychoanalytical truth-telling scene is ignited by their smoking dope — a libido-loosening depressant whose legalization in the Millennial era has come back to haunt post-Covid youth.)
Although this is the 40th anniversary of The Breakfast Club and Seventeen, it’s the 30th anniversary of Wild Reeds. Millennial cinema has learned little from these cultural landmarks, but we should. Wild Reeds is everything Breakfast Club is not. Hughes mastered the commercial slickness that manipulates other people’s emotions, encouraging them to identify with movie stars. He was an early, slicker, quirky Cameron Crowe. The Breakfast Club combines the Hollywood alchemy of sentimentality and satire that eventually produced the superior Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
What remains the best thing about The Breakfast Club? The theme song that Scottish band Simple Minds and singer Jim Kerr didn’t write but performed in gossamer, dream-pop fashion. “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” an Oscar-ignored ballad, outdistances affection for the Hughes movie itself. It is the loveliest yearbook-autograph pledge ever composed (credit Giorgio Moroder acolyte Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff). Starting with its Motown evocation (The Supremes hit “Come See About Me”), the song’s aural splendor looks backward and forward, providing both projection and nostalgia.
Although The Breakfast Club title was purloined by political jokester Charlamagne tha God, who disgraced it as the name for his radio broadcast that has become a tool for the Democratic Party’s manipulation of black votes, the song’s beauty survives, impressing itself on Boomer and Zoomer alike as a profound way to regard everyone’s coming of age. “Will you recognize me? Call my name or walk on by?” are lyrics that address Millennial longing and anxiety. It blesses the all-American ethos that John Hughes left behind.