There’s a fun little image circulating around the Internet today that marks a particularly poignant anniversary for those of us of A Certain Age. According to the Anthony Michael Hall voice-over, the Breakfast Club first convened 30 years ago today.
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Don’t worry, this isn’t some Back to the Future Internet scam, we checked the tape. The film itself actually debuted in February of 1985, but for a movie that hits all the right nostalgia sweet spots, this is good a time as any to take a look back at the film to see if and how it still matters today. There are obvious and superficial ways The Breakfast Club still feels relevant as a pulse point of a specific time. There are few phrases more “80s” than the words Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, or Brat Pack. And when you boil the film down to its familiar soundtrack or iconic gestures, you can feel like you’ve seen it without having to actually watch it. Everyone recognizes those dance moves. They might even inspire you to buy a pair of jeans. You’ve seen John Bender’s fist slice through the air. It’s easy and convenient pop-culture shorthand.
But despite the people who might chalk up The Breakfast Club to cheap 80s nostalgia, it’s more than the sum of its easily imitated parts. The Breakfast Club followed in the naturalistic tradition of both Hughes’s first film, Sixteen Candles, and 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High to create a full-blown trend of poignant 80s teen comedies. The other 80s heroes like Lloyd Dobler, Neil Perry, and Andie Walsh can all trace their origins here. In these prototypes.
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The magic trick that The Breakfast Club pulls off so spectacularly is to give us a story that made us feel equal parts understood and misunderstood. The group of “misfit” types is calculated to resonate with everyone watching. Look closely; you’ll see yourself somewhere in there. That gives you a sense of being understood. But you also see loneliness, and pain, and mistrust of adults. The plot of the film, for all its clichés, is actually oddly revolutionary. It opens with this Bowie lyric:
No wonder John Bender threw his fist in the air.
The idea of teenaged alienation and rebellion is nothing remotely new. We’d already seen the kernels of it in 50s melodramas like Rebel Without a Cause or Peyton Place. But what The Breakfast Club created was a stripped down, timeless version anchored firmly in reality. Those kinds of teenaged films are few and far between these days. I don’t mean that in a get-off-my-lawn sort of way. But after a half a decade in the shadow of the Twilight saga, the teen-film scene seems to be all paranormal romance and post-apocalyptic horror. Though we’ve only just begun 2014, all the major teen-film releases slated for this year are based on popular young-adult novels and of those films, only The Fault in Our Stars is free from vampires and game makers.
That’s not to say those sci-fi fantasy properties don’t have their own Breakfast Club echoes. Certainly Katniss’s hand raised in salute to the 12th District, or Tris’s insistence that she doesn’t belong in a preordained group seem more than a little familiar. But it’s in the quieter films (The Spectacular Now, Submarine, The Way Way Back, The Perks of Being a Wallflower) that we see the winking glimpses of our favorite jocks, basket cases, and princesses. Those are the films that will stay with us long after the districts and divergents fade. They’re the best mirror we have, and they’re worth remembering.