The Brunch Club

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.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.