“The Breakfast Club”, 30 Years Later: A Conversation Across Generations

Editor's Note: The following is a piece by Amanda Ann Klein, an associate professor of film studies at East Carolina University and the author of "American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, & Defining Subcultures (University of Texas Press, 2011)." It combines a critical appreciation of John Hughes' 1985 drama "The Breakfast Club" with conversations she had with her students about the film. We are pleased to publish it here.--Matt Zoller Seitz

Thirty years ago this freeze frame gave me goosebumps on my prepubescent arms. I was, like all children that age, desperate to understand what teenagers were like. My older brother, himself a teenager, was inscrutable—all locked bedroom doors and hunched shoulders. But “The Breakfast Club”’s teenagers were clear as day—their identities communicated through everything from the cars (or lack of cars) that drop each of them off at the door of Shermer High School to the lunches they eat (Sushi? Really, Claire?) to their reasons for getting a detention (Allison [Ally Sheedy] quips “I had nothing better to do”). I examined the starkly displayed identities—the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal—and I wondered where I fit.

Thirty years ago, there was no DVR, no Netflix, no pirated movies to watch online. The TV was the soundtrack to our boredom, as we waited patiently for something to happen. In the 1980s, me and my friends were latchkey children and TV was ambient. When friends came over, we’d watch whatever movie was on at the moment, changing the channel to MTV during the commercials, hoping for a Madonna video, then back to whatever it was we’d been watching. When Breakfast Club was on, we always knew all the lines.

Thirty years ago, Principal Vernon (Paul Gleason) asked his five teenage charges “who do you think you are?” as a detention punishment. In the essay that bookends the diegesis, Brian, the Brain (Anthony Michael Hall), balks at the question: “We think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are.” The answer, though, is stunningly simple: “You are white.” I could only see this in hindsight though, through the lens of a PhD in critical media studies and lots and lots of time.  And what I saw, only many years after first falling in love with this film, was that this love was inextricably tied to my suburban upbringing, to the fact that, when I watched the film as a child, its myopic whiteness was invisible to me in that way that whiteness usually is to white people.

So when I decided to teach the film in my “Teenpics and American Youth Culture” course, thirty years later, I was sure my students—part of the largest, most racially and ethnically diverse generation in U.S. history-- would find its homogeneity a bit off-putting. You see, Millennials are constantly told they are post-racial, post-gender, and post-sexuality but, after working with this generation for years in the classroom, I know most of them are too smart to believe the fairytale the media tells them about themselves. In fact, today’s youth are far more adept than Generation X or the Boomers or anyone else who came before us, in recognizing both the presence and the absence of diversity. One side effect of being told over and over again that your generation doesn’t see race is that, well, all you see is race and identity.

I have taught “The Breakfast Club” twice now to Millennials, students even too young to have watched the movie on TBS on a lazy Saturday afternoon, and what surprises me is that they love it. They love it the way I loved it when I was a teenager. They are rife with affect for this text. As one African-American female student said “I’ve seen the movie a million times. I love it. The first time I watched I understood it just as I do today… I think it was because I grew up in the suburbs and I just, like, get what they’re saying. I know they have a good life, but there are things that they’re missing.”

I should point out here that the students in my upper-level seminars are well-versed in media criticism and even critical race and gender theory. They do not blindly accept ideological messages. For example, a white male student explained in a blog post “because every character in “The Breakfast Club” is white, Hughes is able to create a portrayal of suburban Chicago free from all racial prejudice and discrimination, one of the main reasons for economic disparity in America both in the 1980s and today. Without this racial element, Hughes can quite safely get away with bridging the gap between the upper and lower classes in the film (portrayed by Claire and Bender, respectively) within 2 hours by presenting their class differences as completely superficial and easily overcome.”