Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

Against all odds (seriously, I didn’t think it would happen after the 15th…) here we are talking about our 16th Annual Winter Marathon.  And yes, while we have traditionally done films highlighting the career of a single director, there have been several instances where the marathon theme has been different – the Man With No Name Marathon (OK, those were all Sergio Leone), the Star Wars IV, V, VI Marathon, the Film Noir Marathon…and now the 1980s Teen Movies Marathon.

I was a teen in the 1980s, so when the idea came to me to do this theme, I was 100% on board – especially as I was shocked that exactly zero of the three best teen films of the ’80s (no, you can’t contest that) had already been presented.  I don’t know how that happened.  So I fixed it in one fell swoop in glorious Blu-Ray (OK, for the second film it was HD streaming from Netflix, but the quality’s the same.)

We started with the film that seems to be widely considered the “best” film of the entire genre.  That’s not to say the most poignant (that’s Stand By Me) and it’s not to say the most fun and rewatchable (that’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), but from an auteur standpoint, the best.  And that, of course, is the 1985 John Hughes masterpiece, The Breakfast Club.

There are a couple of interesting things about The Breakfast Club.  Well, obviously, there are a lot of interesting things about The Breakfast Club, which is why it’s so highly regarded, but there are a couple that I care to mention off the top.  The first is that the film never gives any particular explanation for its title.  Sure, the film ends with the characters self-eponymizing their group with it, but why they should use that particular turn of phrase is never explained…and as nobody eats breakfast in the film, it remains a bit opaque.  While it’s neither here nor there, some Dr. IMDB sleuthing suggests that in Hughes’ own high school, those given detentions were referred to as The Breakfast Club, which isn’t exactly an answer to the question.  You can’t fool me, it’s Breakfast Clubs all the way down!

Another interesting thing about the film is that it has very little plot.  It is, effectively, a teenage character study.  There’s only one primary set, there’s no Hero’s Journey, and to the extent that anybody changes in the film, it’s not the result of outside events, it’s the result of talking, arguing, fighting, opening up.  The film is, for all intents and purposes, a giant therapy session.

It starts like this:

Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois, 60062. Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did *was* wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.

And the majority of the action takes place here:

Mr. Bender, with a slice of pimiento loaf, in the library

It’s the library of a suburban Chicago school (suburban Chicago is where John Hughes loved to set his films).  As you can gather from the opening narration, there are five students who all run in different crowds (if they run in crowds at all) gathered here for a day-long Saturday detention. With the exception of a few scenes, the whole film is set here.  Because what high-school students could possibly be expected to spend a full day in detention without daringly running through the halls – or in one case crawling above the ceiling tiles?  None.  The eventual partial destruction of various portions of the set would certainly, in the real world, have drawn the ire of school administrators far and wide, but you can’t really be expected to re-imagine Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? without breaking a few plates.  Does anything ever come of that property damage?  We don’t know, but the movie doesn’t pretend to care, and that’s OK.

Richard Vernon, Vice Principal.  Crime: Dereliction of duty, Breaking into classified school files, Being an adult

Our group’s sole (outside) antagonist is Richard Vernon, the school’s vice-principal and day’s taskmaster for the ne’er-do-wells in Saturday detention.  Vernon doesn’t seem to relish his job – at least not this part of it – and I can certainly think of about 276,581 things I’d rather be doing on a Saturday morning and afternoon, than babysitting some snot-nosed teenagers.  But then again, he really does seem to relish it when he hands out a seemingly infinite series of future detentions to Bender (“I’ve got you for the rest of your natural-born life!” he says, though perhaps he could have gone with, “I know what you’re thinking.  Did I just assign you six detentions, or only five?  You gotta ask yourself, Do I feel lucky?  Well, do ya, punk?”) Vernon’s role in the film begins with him laying down the law that will ultimately be completely ignored, and assigning the students to each write a 1000-word essay on “who they think they are”.  I’m pretty sure that I got a better writing prompt in the tedious essay examination I took to test out of having to take a writing course in undergrad, and that prompt (whatever it was is now thankfully lost in the mists of time) was bad enough that I wrote the worst essay of my life.  Still passed.  Ahem.  Vernon’s role in the film then basically devolves into giving the kids random cup checks while otherwise paying them so little attention that they manage to smoke a series of joints without him even noticing.  Thanks, Dick.  You were iconic, and we all hated you.

But we loved all of your charges.  And they were:

Brian Johnson, Brain.  Crime – Bringing flare gun to school

Brian Johnson, the narrator of our opening (and closing) lines is the smartest of the bunch.  He’s quiet and mild-mannered, and he’s presumably on his way to straight A’s and a full ride to an Ivy.  In fact, he’s the sort you might expect never to find in Saturday detention.  Certainly, he never imagined it.  (I can sympathize – I never imagined getting a detention either, but when everybody in the whole 8th grade math class but me was acting out and Ms. Lamb finally had enough and screamed, “OK!  WHO WANTS A DETENTION!” did I think she would give one to meek little old me for sarcastically raising my hand?  No.  No, I did not.  Yet I got the horns on that day, let me tell you.)  But pressure is what pressure is, and one B+ could ruin the trajectory of Brian’s entire life, and desperately disappoint his parents.  So, when he received an F on an “elephant lamp” project in shop class (you pulled the string coming out of the trunk, but the light didn’t come on!) he was brought to despair, and since random school shootings were not yet quite in vogue (despite the “I don’t like Mondays” graffiti prominently featured in the film’s open!) he decided, instead, to bring a gun to school in order to kill himself.  A flare gun.  He never acted on it, but the flare gun was found, and young Brian got the all-day horns.  Is Brian a bit tightly wound?  Yes, but by the end of the day he has loosened up enough to not only take it like a champ when Bender quickly hides his baggie of pot down the front of his tighty-whiteys but even to partake in the wacky weed a bit himself.  Brian is the only one of the five detainees who doesn’t manage to hook up with another detainee by the end of the film, but we can be reasonably confident that he’s going to go on to found a major tech company and end up paying $18M a year in alimony to a Brazilian supermodel whom he cheated on with a fat suburban housewife who wouldn’t give him the time of day back when she was the treasurer of the Astronomy Club at Yale.  He’ll be fine.

Andrew Clark, Athlete.  Crime – Taping a classmate’s buttocks together in the locker room

Our athlete, Andrew Clark, is a top wrestler at the school but just like Brian is desperate for his parent’s (specifically his dad’s) approval.  Andrew, forced to listen to endless stories about how his father-the-model-high-school-athlete-whom-his-son-should-absolutely-emulate ruthlessly pranked the kids at his own high school, and boy oh boy was he a cool guy for doing it. (You could say “They all [thought] he [was] a righteous dude!”)  And so, with a dearth of pranks under his belt the buttock-taping incident came to pass, bringing Andrew to detention with the rest.  It didn’t work out so well, as it turns out Andrew’s father only likes pranksters who don’t get caught (important detail that Andrew failed to grasp), and the whole idea that he might lose a wrestling scholarship over the incident only exacerbates relations.  Andrew finally comes to realize the error of his ways, even sympathizing with the kid he cheek-adhered, imagining not only how much tearing the tape off of his hirsute hinder would hurt, but also the embarrassment of the kid having to tell his own father what had happened at school that day.  (This, of course, is a false fear.  I was once folded, jack-knifed, and stuffed so deeply ass-first into a trash can that I had to tediously set up a resonance-frequency wobble to slowly but finally topple the can so I could crawl out.  Do you think I told my parents when I got home?  Fuck no!)  Andrew eventually hooks up at the end of the day with Allison, whom you’ll meet next.

Allison Reynolds, Basket Case.  Crime – Nothing

Allison is the character who is the most difficult to get a grip on.  If you were to tell me that she didn’t speak for the first act of the film, I wouldn’t be surprised.  I mean, honestly, you could simply define the opening moment of the second act as the first time that Allison actually speaks and you’d probably be OK.  She’s quite the eclectic loner – she wears a fur-lined parka indoors, she snorts pixy sticks, she makes pencil drawings of winter scenes and then decorates them with the snow of her own dandruff.  All three of these are things I would never have done as a teenager.  Well, I mean, I never owned a fur-lined parka, so that kind of crosses out number 1.  And I couldn’t draw to save my life (my stick figures come out with eight toes on each hand and a case of scoliosis), so however poorly my Head&Shoulders was working, number 3 was also off the table.  And yeah, just between us, I kinda did number 2 multiple times.  (Off a mirror?  Naw, man, straight from the paper tube.)  But the experience wasn’t all that great, to which I may be able to proudly attribute the fact that red-tinted sucrose is definitely the most illicit substance I’ve ever snorted.  Allison, following an unsurprising theme, also has a pretty lousy relationship with her parents – in her case, they ignore her.  So she resorts to being a compulsive liar (when she talks at all) and kleptomaniacally stealing anything she can, hiding it in her giant purse just in case it’s useful for when she finally decides to run away.  Why was she given Saturday detention?  Well, she wasn’t.  She just didn’t have anything better to do so she showed up.  (Vernon did a bang-up job of taking attendance. Or counting to four.  Because he never seems to figure this out.)

Claire Standish, Princess.  Crime – Ditching school to go shopping

This film has no end of stereotypes (I’m not calling this a bad thing) and Claire as the princess is about as stereotypical as it can get.  She’s prudish, and snotty, and stuck up.  She gets dropped off for Saturday detention in a BMW.  She brings sushi to detention for a bag lunch.  Her first line is to suggest that there must be some mistake, because she obviously belongs in the bourgeoisie detention.  I think we all know what her parents’ problem is – they’re rich, and they’re enablers.  Claire is the kind of girl that we all thought needed to be taken down a peg.  We’ve all known them.  For instance, I recall my freshman orientation at high school, when the group I was in was being led around by legitimately the hottest junior in the school, <name redacted because Google exists…but I remember you still>.  Now one might imagine that a freshman like Brian Johnson would have no chance with a junior like Claire Standish, and one would probably be right, which may be why I decided to light that lottery ticket directly on fire – and when <name redacted> was mumbling a bit too much in her explanation of just what you could buy at the Student Union I decided to throw a $1 word at her: “Enunciate!”  She was confused by the Scrabble Challenge so I tried to make it easier for her: “E – NUN – ci – ate!”  Oh, <name redacted>, I never really knew ya!  But you were at least as hot as Molly Ringwald.  Anyway.  For the enormity of Claire’s flaws, she’s still got some surprises in her.  Because despite all of her obfuscation in trying to avoid admitting that she’s a virgin, she can also be brutally self-aware and blunt.  When after our detainees have all bonded Brain Brian asks what happens on Monday, whether they will still be friends, it’s Claire who doesn’t lie when she says, no, she’ll pretend she doesn’t know him.

Brian: You’re so conceited, Claire. You’re so conceited. You’re so, like, full of yourself. Why are you like that?

Claire: I’m not saying that to be conceited. I hate it. I hate having to go along with everything my friends say.

Brian: Then why do you do it?

Claire: I don’t know. I don’t – you don’t understand. You don’t – you’re not friends with the same kind of people that Andy and I are friends with. You know, you just don’t understand the pressure that they can put on you.

She’s wrong – all of our protagonists have immense pressure on them.  It’s kind of the point of the movie.  But in the moment, when everybody is singing Kum-Ba-Ya over the devil’s lettuce campfire, it’s only Claire who will actually admit the truth.  For some of them at least, this is a one-day stand.  Perhaps not all, as Claire finishes the film by putting one of her (real) diamond earrings into Bender’s already-pierced lobe, establishing them as a having a potential future.  But we haven’t met Bender yet.  So let’s fix that.

John Bender, Criminal.  Crime – Pulling a fire alarm (is that it?)

I’ve already gone through four of our five protagonists in the order they were listed in Brian’s opening narration.  But just like a good storyteller, Brian saved the best for last.  All the trivia on The Breakfast Club suggests that Emilio Estevez was originally cast as Bender (he was also originally heavily considered for Ferris Bueller, another thankful near-miss that will be relevant later in the Marathon) but as Hughes found it impossible to cast Andrew, he asked Estevez to move into the wrestler’s role.  This opened up the Bender role for consideration by some mediocre fits such as Nicolas Cage and Sean Penn, and the leading disaster-casting-preference of John Cusack.  In the end the relative unknown Judd Nelson got the role, and it was the role of a lifetime.  He has never touched it again.  Ignore Nelson’s gray patch coming from his widow’s peak (he was 26 at the time of the film…not exactly unusual for a teen movie of any era) and focus on the acting and the role.  Bender drives the entire film, starting out as the antagonistic rebel who dares to defy Vernon (sometimes quietly enough to not be caught doing so) at every step, and, once his personality is able to overcome his persona, the heart and soul, crooked as those may be, of the newly-formed Breakfast Club.  It is Bender who removes a screw from the spring mechanism on the library door, preventing Vernon from propping it open to keep an eye on them.  It is Bender who needles the entire crew, cruelly, to be sure, into intensifying their initial disdain for him into bona fide hatred, before showing a crack here and there that allow him to become accepted in his own way.  It is Bender who leads them on an impromptu mad dash through the halls to pilfer his locker for a baggie of weed – and who, after taking the fall for all of them to prevent the others from being caught, gets locked in a storage closet by Vernon (pretty sure that’s a lawsuit 30 years down the road) and crawls through the ceiling just to rejoin his new friends (and smoke out a bit).  Bender, like everybody else, has his own parent problems, this time with an abusive father.  He acts out how nice and Leave-It-To-Beaver he imagines everybody else’s home life to be before acting out his own:

Father: Stupid, worthless, no good, goddamn, freeloading son of a bitch. Retarded, big mouth, know-it-all, asshole, jerk.

Mother: You forgot ugly, lazy and disrespectful.

Father: Shut up bitch! Go fix me a turkey pot pie.

Bender: What about you, dad?

Father: Fuck you!

Bender: No dad, what about you?

Father: FUCK YOU!

Bender: NO, DAD, WHAT ABOUT YOU?!?

Father: FUCK YOU!

<Pantomimes getting punched in the face>

We wouldn’t be blamed for thinking Bender is exaggerating a bit, and Andrew certainly doesn’t buy it, but Bender won’t have any, pulling up his sleeve to show him a scar on his forearm. “Do you believe this?  Huh?  It’s about the size of a cigar.  Do I stutter?  See, this is what you get in my house when you spill paint in the garage.”  Andrew can hardly even look him in the eye, and we can’t blame him for that, either.

I don’t think I ever really knew a Bender.  At least, not in the empathetic way that our film brings us to see him.  My Benders were less relatable, and they inspired less pity.  The Bender that must have himself broken into the local elementary school one weekend, then later, seeing us and openly taunting us for nothing more than rollerblading/playing basketball on the school grounds, must have been the person who subsequently called the cops to report a school break-in – the broken windows around the corner we didn’t know anything about nearly sealing our fate…that Bender was not so redeemable.  Another Bender tried to pick a fistfight with me one day during passing period for who-knows-what reason.  The hilarious thing is this: I don’t even remember it.  I only know about it because of a chance encounter some 20+ years later with a former girlfriend, who brought up the scene at one point in our conversation as if it should be one of the most memorable moments of my life.  Racking my brain, the best I can come up with is that I know, in a topographical sense, where it happened.  But the details of the event – and to be perfectly honest the name of the Bender – have all been washed away.  She asked me if I remembered the incident with so-and-so and even the name was nothing more than a flicker in my memory.  I gather he took a swing at me.  And I gather that when he did it, he hoped for more haptic feedback, and a bit more rent-free time in my head than he got.  Really, these weren’t Benders.  They were Aces.  (For more on Ace, see Stand By Me.)  Benders redeem themselves because we realize that deep down, despite all their tough guy personae and their attention-grabbing stunts, they’re really just damaged souls trying to break out of purgatory.  Maybe Aces are too, they’re just not yet ready for redemption.  But our Bender?  Despite tearing apart library books (poor Molière) and damaging doors and falling through drop ceilings and decorating the abstract art in the library with pimiento loaf, he finds that redemption.

The Breakfast Club could have been populated by any stereotypes you’d like.  We didn’t have a band geek, or a cheerleader, a D&D nerd, or a pregnancy dropout, but any of those could have stepped in to the roles above and the film wouldn’t have been fundamentally different.  But none of them could have replaced Bender.  Bender was the sine qua non of the movie.

And finally, we’ve come to the end of the film.  You may recall that each of our detainees were tasked to write a 1000-word essay on this day.  None of them did.  (In a hilarious irony, when I sat down to write this I thought that with the sparse plot of the movie I’d be hard-pressed to break half that…and I’ve nearly quadrupled it.)  But Brian did write a short missive on behalf of them all.  In a slight update from the opening sequence, it goes like this:

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain…and an athlete…and a basket case…a princess…and a criminal.  Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.