Daily Archives: March 29, 2015

The Brunch Club

Posted on by
Reply

Okay, so I have now seen the entirety of The Breakfast Club, and I feel compelled to talk about it.

Why? Because I loved it, essentially. I have no problem AT ALL seeing why it is considered a classic film and an iconic film of the 80’s. It does the ensemble drama thing extremely well. The characters are all recognizable types, and yet they don’t feel stereotypical. They feel like real people, people who know, maybe even people you’ve been.

And of course, they are of my era. They seem exactly like the sort of people I knew at the time. They dress like people of my era, they talk like people of my era. They all seems so…. normal to me.

And that makes the drama penetrate all the deeper. I almost feel like I went to school with the characters.

My favorite scene was the one where Molly Ringwald (Claire) tells the brutal truth about how they will all go back to their regular lives and have nothing to do with one another once their group detention ends.

That’s the truth laid bare. And yeah, that’s a really shitty thing to do, especially to Brian the nerd. He is the one who would suffer the most from everybody just going back to their lives like none of it had ever happened. He’s the lowest status member of the club… even the basket case with no friends ranks higher than a nerd… and also the most vulnerable and sensitive. He wants to keep the cool friends he thinks he has made.

And the thing is, we don’t really know what happens after the movie ends. Maybe they do stay in touch. Maybe they don’t.

But I would understand if they didn’t. They all have their roles in their peer group. That is the context of their lives. Everything they know about who they are and where they fit in comes from their peer groups. Expecting someone to leave that and risk not ever being able to go back is asking one hell of a lot of a human animal.

And while Brian says that he would never reject the other four if they met in the school halls, I am not sure that would be true. If all his nerdy friends were there, I think he would be just as prone to wanting to preserve his position in his peer group and would feel compelled to say something about how he and the others aren’t friends, they just “know each other”.

Even us low status types have our status and our role.

The one most likely to be able to stay friends with the others is Allison, described by the film as “the basket case”. I think that’s a tad harsh. She’s definitely kinda nuts and has a deep need to be dramatic and mysterious and dangerous. But I don’t think she is a “basket case”.

It’s just that goth and emo didn’t really exist in 1984. So they didn’t know what to call her.

Speaking of Allison, boy did I ever hate it when she got the preppy makeover from Clair. It’s like Clair took a really interesting, unique girl and put her through the conformity meat grinder and out popped some boring chick who looks like a million other girls.

Yuck, yuck, yuck. Give me back the interesting version of her! Sure, she’s nuts, but at least she’s an individual.

Moving on, the movie’s villain (inasmuch as it has one) is clearly the “criminal”, John Bender (no relation). He is the one who acts as the agent of chaos that adds the energy to the system to enable change. Of course, he does it by being an abusive asshole with an entire lumberyard’s worth of chips on his shoulder and attacking everything and everyone in sight, so he is not in any sense a good person, but he ends up being the one who pushes people’s limits and thus getting the truth out of them.

There is also their hardass teacher, Richard Vernon. Mister Vernon. Hard to believe that there were ever teachers that could get away with being that aggressive. I can’t imagine any of my teachers acting like that. I have seen enough references to that sort of teacher in things to believe that there were really guys like that out there, but I never met them.

It’s just so un-Canadian.

And counterproductive. If I had met that kind of teacher when I was a teen with a head full of testosterone, I would have made it my full time occupation to destroy him. He would have been my nemesis, and I would have done whatever I could to fuck with him in every way possible.

I am not saying that would be justified. He’s a man trying to do a very tough job and I respect that, even if I think he is going about it the entirely wrong way.

But I know what I was like as a teen and I am positive that the only reason I didn’t have any behavioural issues is that nobody was messing with me. I had no such convenient a lightning rod for all that anger as a Mister Vernon.

Instead I had…. nothing. In high school, I was a ghost. No friends, no peer group, wandering around the edges of what was happening but never truly being a part of any of it. I went to class, did the work, went home. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I wasn’t completely invisible. In class, I sat at the front and asked (and answered)questions. The typical ghost sits in the back and avoids attracted attention. I… did not.

Like I have said before, I am a strange blend of extroversion and introversion. In many ways, I am incredibly shy. But in the right contexts, I have total self-confidence bordering on arrogance, although of course, I don’t see it that way.

I have total faith in my intelligence and creativity.

It’s everything else that I have a problem with….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Who am I?

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve just started watching The Breakfast Club (I’m around a half hour in) and I thought I would take inspiration from it.

In the movie, five teens are given a full day’s detention and an assignment : write one thousand words about who they think they are. Hmm, let’s see… write a thousand words of deep self-examination about identity.

Yeah, I think I can handle that.

It is a very difficult question for me, however. This is no easy assignment for me. That is the exact reason I am choosing to do it. The challenge and depth of it fascinates me.

So let’s start with the basic and mundane details of me. I am Michael John Bertrand, son of Larry and Betty Bertrand of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. I have three siblings, Anne, Catherine, and David. I grew up in Summerside, and went to Parkside Elementary School, then Summerside Intermediate School, then Three Oaks Senior High.

I was born around 10 am on the morning of May the 19th, 1973, in Prince County Hospital. According to witnesses, I was a healthy and happy baby, just a little on the quiet side.

But this is not a biography. I feel the pull of turning this into my life story. It would be so much easier to do than answer the uncomfortable question of who the fuck I really am.

Because I don’t know. I have no true image of myself. Years of toxic self-loathing and lack of real world experiences have thus far prevented me from developing one. I just plain don’t know who I am.

But who does, really? In this modern chaotic age, with all the external sources of identity torn away?

Especially for me, because I have never even had a full time job, let alone a career. Never finished a degree, so it is not like I had to figure out what to do with my life then go for it. I don’t feel close enough to my family (in both sense of close) to get identity from them. No religion either. No party affiliation, no team, no movement, no subculture.

I am a being without external support.

I know a few things about myself. I know I am a nerd. Nerds are my people. I knew that instinctively when I first had a chance to have a group of nerdy friends in college. Nerds are a varied lot, but just knowing someone else is a nerd means I know that I have far more in common with them than with 90 percent of humanity.

It’s amazing, really, how nerds just naturally occur in modern society, like homosexuals, and are then drawn to one another. Nobody has to make that happen. We are a self-sustaining emergent phenomenon.

I also know that I am a writer, and not just because I write this thing every day. I also enjoy writing, and I like to think I am damned good at it as well. I have that deep need to communicate and that feeling that I have something I want to say. But I am too shy and/or antisocial and/or badly under-socialized to tell it to people in person, so I write it down instead.

That way, instead of talking to one or two people, I potentially reach thousands or even millions of people and have a real and lasting effect on their lives, all from the comfort and safety of my agoraphobic little nest here.

It’s big talk for small people.

So obviously nerd plus writer equals science fiction author, although I have also written fantasy. Basically, I just grab whatever bag of metaphors and plot elements seems to fit eh story I want to tell.

Sometimes that’s science fiction and sometimes it’s fantasy. If I want to get deep into things like ghosts or Heaven or magic, I am obviously going to go for fantasy rather than science fiction.

I suppose I could do what Doctor Who does and just write whatever story I want and then tack some science-y explanation on wherever it seems to fit. Those aren’t really ghosts, they are… um… spectral energy beings from another dimension!

What do I have besides nerd and writer. Well, I am definitely an intellectual, which on first blush seems like the same thing as being a nerd but the reality is far different. You think a room full of professors would admit they have anything in common with a convention full of nerds? And how about all those people in opera and the theatre?

Nerd is merely a subset of intellectual. A big one, as it turns out, but still. We are not the only kind of intellectual.

We’re just the best kind.

Besides nerd, writer, and intellectual, I only have descriptors. I’m highly intelligent. I have a lot of raw talent. I suffer from depression. I am obese. I’m funny. I’m charming. I have a big personality. I’m gay.

But what does that all add up to in the end? I have no idea. I get the feeling that I am not the sort of person to whom labels stick. I am just too complicated and multifaceted for that. Which is great for rugged individualism, I suppose, but it does not help much with the identity question.

So I am stuck wondering who and what the fuck I am. So much potential, so little realization, and even less resolution.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. I don’t consider myself a bad person for not knowing, nor do I think everybody but me knows and I am the broken loser who doesn’t. It’s not a question that I feel I absolutely need the answer to.

It’s just that I would really like to know. I am very tired of this identity fog of mine and the effort it takes to hold my shape against the onrushing chaos of identity death. Maybe I should just let myself fall apart and see what happens.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.