Encounter with the '80s [S. Worthen

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The Breakfast Club is one of those iconic '80s movies I've heard referred to most my life and never seen - until this evening. I can see why it could be iconic: it takes a fairly straightforward premise and does a really effective job with it. It was just the right length, and plenty happens. There's character development for everyone except Carl the Janitor (and at least we learn more about him).

Also, Alli Sheedy's character reminded me so much of

black_faery, because they superficially look the same. And they're both artists.

Did The Breakfast Club crown the genre of "what happened in detention" and leave it nothing else to say? Or is there a mini-genre of movies, books, and stories inspired by it? (i.e. Is it like a work of Chaucer - with lots of near-contemporary fan fiction, or like a work of Dante, which everyone admired, but no one ever did anything quite like?)

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There are 13 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Some interesting trivia about the film (which I love) is here: http://www.riverblue.com/hughes/trivia2.html

Supposedly Hughes wrote the script in just two days, which is amazing.

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Interesting tidbits. I'd forgotten about Bender's joke. Two days is incredibly short! (But how long for edits?)

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I think I might be close to alone in the Universe in having been kind of underwhelmed by The Breakfast Club, which I think I did manage to see in the '80s proper, though at the tail-end of them in '88 or '89. (I don't think of those years as being quite part of the iconic '80s; New Wave had been bumped from the airwaves by poodle-rock and brainless dance-pop a la Paula Abdul and Rick Astley.) My main problem was that Judd Nelson's character started out a jerkwad and, really, stayed one, and I never warmed to him; all the while the screenplay kept screaming that I was meant to be alternately inspired by his defiance of authority and moved by his abusive upbringing.

That one Simple Minds song was catchy though. It had already been pretty popular in Britain, but I think that movie was responsible for making it a success in NA also.

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If I hadn't read a number of novels in the past year in which the people who fight the most and claim to hate each other really just hadn't figured out they were in love yet, I might well agree with you on the Bender/Claire relationship issue. As was, I could recognize a convention when I saw it and accept it as such. But... yeah....

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I get such feelings of nostalgia when I watch that movie. I can almost smell the corridors with the failed antiseptic smell.

I'm such an 80's kid. It's sad. In reaction I savagely remove shoulder pads from anything I buy now. Trust me, they're still out there lurking on clothing racks.

And have you watched "Pretty in Pink"?

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I haven't seen Pretty in Pink. Or Sixteen Candles. Or St. Elmo's Fire.

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Pretty in Pink is one of my guilty pleasures - especially as they changed the ending. Andrew "no chin" was my preferred 80's pretty boy.

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The Breakfast Club and John Hughes movies were genre-making for telling stories from a teenager's perspective, giving them the voice. I think it was that he got the apathy/futility/craziness of highschool and the American suburbs, too. All those kids have screwed up lives but they're also just regular kids, and the detention setting got them to relate to each other by getting past the highschool social structure.

The bit that bothers me is when Judd Nelson's character just lays into Molly Ringwald when they're all coming clean about their issues, and then by the end she wants to make out with him. But he was horrible to her. I like watching it whenever it comes on. Some of it's cheesy but it's still got its moments.

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The Bender/Claire relationship I could only buy because I already knew, thanks to reading Georgette Heyer novels this past year, that it's a convention - the people who fight the most either really hate each other - or else they actually love each other and are trying to hide it/haven't realize it yet/have a lot of fun fighting with each other.

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It's pretty much already been said, but The Breakfast Club was different from any other teen movie ever made before it - John Hughes made my crazy world make a little more sense to me from 1986-1990.

Pretty in Pink was my favorite. Absolute FAVORITE. Not least because of the effect it had on the teen zeitgeist. After that movie came out, my high school's basketball team captain decided he had a crush on me, for real. I was SO weird, with my 80s hair and my weird vintage/mod/victorian outfits and radical new ideas about makeup, and extremely geeky and nerdy - and this guy ghosted me to my karate classes, around school. It was very exciting for my little group of Thespians (that's what the weird kids were called in my high school, regardless of whether or not you were in the drama club) and I think kind of something for his crowd of jocks as well. We very wisely never, ever spoke to each other. It would have ruined everything. I imagine we both knew life didn't really turn out that way... And he graduated that year.

I love John Hughes movies so much. Still.

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I haven't seen Pretty in Pink, but will add it to our rental list. Thanks for the recommendation!

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My time in detention hall was never as exciting as The Breakfast Club (but it may still be the best 80's movie evar), and there was a marked absence of Judd Nelson. My school offered a choice of early weekday morning study hall (so I'd get my yearbook box and glare at football players for an hour) or Saturday slave labour with the Driver's Ed teacher (usually stacking chairs, but this came with a 2-fer-1 hourly sentence reduction).

I can't claim any exciting rebellious crimes: I was late to school a lot during my senior year. I can now say, hand on heart, that none of it went down on my permanent record.

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my only difficulty was emilio estevez as a wrestler!
i mean c'mon!

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S. Worthen | Weblog

Encounter with the '80s

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October