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Tuesday, November 8. 2011

Don’t You Forget About Me

Remember the movie, The Breakfast Club? Released in 1985, it ushered in the era of the “Brat Pack,” the generation of actors who were the top of the hip Hollywood scene of the 1980’s. Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez were its teenage stars and John Hughes, who wrote and directed what many consider his best movie, cemented his place in cinema.

Oh, I don’t know, as good as it is, when you look at his credits there are a few chestnuts in there, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, one of the greatest films of all time! Who doesn’t want to be Ferris Bueller? If you weren’t a wisenheimer before seeing Ferris Bueller, you aspired to be one — at least just a little.
 Ben Stein in one of the iconic moments of the film: “Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?”

So, John Hughes has a string of hit films to his credit, the two best being The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Sadly, John Hughes departed this Mortal Coil August 6, 2009, but he left behind a legacy that won’t be forgotten.

It’s been decades since last watching The Breakfast Club, mainly because I hate watching good movies that have been censored for television and then interrupted for commercial messages. Monday it came on one of the HBO channels, uncut and uncensored.

The buzz about the film at the time was that it was the coming of age film to define the era of the Brat Pack: A different style of dress, a different kind of music and a new attitude. It was, but every generation has their coming of age film that defines their generation. American Graffiti, Easy Rider, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause to name just four that I’ve seen.

And who can forget American Pie? There’s another coming of age classic. But what’s so special about The Breakfast Club? Well, for one thing it speaks to every generation as it comes of age. If you read the message boards for the movie on imdb.com there are comments and reviews from people who weren’t even born when it was first released in 1985, yet it still resonates with the generation that first saw it 26 years ago.

Most from my generation, the one that came of age ten years earlier, liked it because it spoke to the disparity between the different castes common in most high schools, especially public high schools. The big deal about the message of the film was not just the different castes, but how that disparity was approached: from the view that all five characters felt trapped by the roles that had to play to be members of their particular cliques.

The film took stereotypes, made them almost unbearably exaggerated and then deconstructed them for a feel-good moment at the end when all five students walk out of the school as a team, as opposed to the beginning of the film when they walk into the school one at a time.

To refresh your memory: there is the pretty and popular socialite girl (Molly Ringwald), the popular jock (Emilio Estevez), the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall) the goofy girl (Ally Sheedy) and the criminal (Judd Nelson).

The stereotype that gets left out of this film says a lot about the filmmaker and us, as a society. The one faction from high school that isn’t represented in the film is the average student that doesn’t aspire to be in any clique and just does their best to graduate and hopefully go to college or get a good paying job. Just like in real, adult life, the silent majority is rarely noticed.

I really didn’t identify with any of the characters, although part of me wanted to be the bad boy, John Bender. Bad boys are always portrayed as the coolest and pretty girls always seem to like bad boys best. Jocks always get the prettiest girls because they are the sports heroes. Few girls like nerds, until they grow up to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

All the boys want to be with the most popular girls, but avoid like the plague the weird girls, until they become Playboy Playmates or hot and sexy actresses.

And that is the core of The Breakfast Club: the angst we endure while in high school. The pain of that awkward time remains with us forever. Boys — men — for instance, understand a character like Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) in the film American Pie trying to masturbate with a warm apple pie because we all did something ridiculous in an effort to have an orgasm. As we get older we refine our techniques.

In the age of the Internets and new synthetic materials, we get all kinds of aids to jack-off and some life-like (I’m told) devices in which to do it. A man almost doesn’t need a real woman anymore. And we sure as Hell don’t need to try the vacuum cleaner anymore. Not that I ever did …

With The Breakfast Club, anyone and everyone can understand the inner pain of feeling like we don’t fit in, no matter how much we appear to fit in with whatever clique, or no clique, we belong, whether we knowingly join that group or get dumped in it by everyone else.

I was one of the “stoners” in high school, one of the “hippies.” But I secretly wanted to be one of the people who smiled everyday without being high. When I was in the school play I met some of them and they were really nice people.

But just like The Breakfast Club suggests, on Monday we — I — went right back to that comfort zone where we knew the rules and the role we played in our little clique, where our silent desires, fears and resentments took over just like they did every day in school. The Breakfast Club puts all that out there for us, better than any movie has before or since.

Now, nearly 40 years removed from high school, it brings out yet another angst-filled moment with the most useless, but most often asked question to ourselves: “If I could go back and do it over again …” There’s no point to asking “What if,” other than to fill our hearts and minds with regret.

What’s done is done and the best we can do is accept it. if we can make restitution to those we have harmed, then we can do that. One of the moments in the film that struck me was when the jock, Andrew, recounted how he had humiliated a smaller, weaker student, all in an effort to impress his jock friends, and more importantly, his dad. Many of us have little skeletons like that in our closets and they creep out to haunt us from time-to-time.

So, it’s time to move on. The Breakfast Club is a great film, quite entertaining, over the top at times, like when they’re dancing throughout the library, but one I might watch again in another ten years, just to remind myself I was a teenager in high school once, a long time ago.

Posted by Tim Forkes in The Arts at 12:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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