As soon as the library door swings shut behind Vernon, the battle lines are drawn. The two good kids, Claire and Andrew, sit together bemoaning the unfairness of their sentence. Bender the big-cocked wild-side denizen (but what’s up with that Madness pin?) pushes Brian the wiener off his seat just to establish his no-quarter-given, no-shit-taken credo from the start. Alison the weird girl sits at the back engulfed in her voluminous parka. They may have ridden out the entire period of detention as islands unto themselves but for Bender’s obnoxious attempts to stir up some communal bullshit. He’s cut dead, first by Claire, which has the effect of sparking an ache for her that he tries to mask as hatred, then by Andrew, who tells him, “Bender … you may as well not even exist at this school.” This has the effect of unleashing Bender’s inner Incredible Hulk, a confrontation-craving beast, hell-bent on taunting and humiliating his cellmates. He sprays derision at Andrew (“I wanna be just like you. I figure all I need’s a lobotomy and some tights.”) and Brian (“Dork, you are a parent’s wet dream … neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie.”). He reserves the heavy artillery in his splenetic arsenal for Claire. “Claire … It’s a fat girl’s name.… I can see you really pushing maximum density.” She gives him the finger and he revels in her reaction. “Obscene finger gestures from such a pristine girl.” She makes the mistake of indicating that she might not be so pristine. “Are you a virgin? I bet a million dollars that you are,” singsongs Bender, launching into the sort of panty-moistening mockery for which the Artist Formerly Known as Prince was once justly famed. “Have you ever been felt up over the bra, under the blouse, shoes off, hoping to God that your parents don’t walk in, over the panties, no bra, blouse unbuttoned, Calvins in a ball on the front seat past eleven on a school night…?”
It is Bender who dictates the movie’s inexorable direction when he asks Claire, “Who do you like better, your old man or your mom?” to which she replies, “Neither, they’re both screwed.” The seed of this parental probing will flower further when Bender is riffing on his colleagues’ lunch selections. He sneers at Claire’s sushi box (“You won’t accept a guy’s tongue in your mouth and you’re gonna eat that?”), Andrew’s healthy-as-a-horse choice, Alison’s Cap’n Crunch and Pixie Stix sandwich, and then he zeroes in on Brian. “Soup, apple juice, p b and j with the crusts cut off.… Did your mom marry Mr. Rogers?” Bender launches unbidden into an impersonation of the happy family life of Brian. “What about your family?” asks Andrew. Synthesized storm clouds gather on the soundtrack. Audiences shrank back in their seats as if Jason was about to hack his way through the door. But something far more fearsome was about to occur. We were about to get a glimpse of the Bender beneath the bluster. “Stupid, worthless, no good, goddamn freeloading son-of-a-bitch, retarded big-mouth know-it-all asshole jerk,” he thunders in the assumed tones of Bender père. “What about you, Dad?” he then yelps, reverting to the voice of blameless Johnny B., flinching like he’s recoiling from a blow. Andrew expresses some skepticism. “You don’t believe me?” Bender rolls up his sleeve to reveal a discoloration. “It’s about the size of a cigar … this is what you get in my house when you spill the paint in the garage.” And so, the once-smirking punk becomes the first of the five to reveal his true colors.
Once his colleagues have partaken of Bender’s doobage (“Yo, wastoid, you’re not gonna blaze up in here,” objects Andrew, but his protestations quickly go up in smoke), they, too, join him on the island of exposed emotions. “My home life is unsatisfying,” reveals Alison, whose witchy weirdness turns out to be a defense erected after years of being ignored by her parents. She also claims to be a nymphomaniac, which inspires a dissection of the sexuality of the lovely Claire. Is she experienced or unsullied? “It’s kind of a double-edged sword,” postulates Alison. “If you say you haven’t, you’re a prude. If you say you have, you’re a slut! It’s a trap. You want to but you can’t, and when you do you wish you didn’t.…or are you a tease?” “She’s a tease,” says Andrew flatly, prompting a classic Ringwald reaction shot of open-mouthed mortification. “Sex is your weapon.… You use it to get respect.” The leering Bender twists the knife: “Are you medically frigid, or is it psychological?” Claire is suddenly faced by a baying mob demanding to know, is she or isn’t she, has she or hasn’t she? “No!” she shrieks. “I never did it!” “I never did it, either,” murmurs Alison with crack comic timing. “I’m not a nymphomaniac, I’m a compulsive liar.” Going on to reveal some of the longing beneath the layers, she whispers, “I would do it, though. If you love someone, it’s okay.…”
Andrew leaps into the pit of revelation, explaining the reason for his Saturday morning imprisonment. “I taped Larry Lester’s buns together.… You know how hairy he is? Well, when they pulled the tape off, most of the hair came off, and some skin, too.… The bizarre thing is, I did it for my old man.… I got the feeling that he was disappointed that I never cut loose.… When I was sitting in Vernon’s office, all I could think about was Larry’s father and Larry having to go home and explain what happened to him and the humiliation, the fucking humiliation he must have felt, it must have been unreal. I mean, how do you apologize for something like that? There’s no way. It’s all because of me and my old man. My god, I fucking hate him. ‘Andrew you’ve got to be number one!… Win! Win! Win!’ You son of a bitch.… I wish my knee would give.” This inspires Brian to tell his traumatic story of how he failed to make the ceramic elephant-lamp that was his shop project light up.
The impediments to their intimacy seem to have broken down. They’ve been stoned and stupid in front of each other. They’ve confessed and sympathized. But they’re not out of the woods yet. The group are whimsically discussing their special talents (“I can tape all your buns together!” declares Andrew, obviously having forgotten his earlier contrition), when Bender ominously hisses, “I wanna see what Claire can do.” She’s hesitant, but her newfound friends encourage her to demonstrate her hidden skill. She sticks her lipstick down into her cleavage, drops her head then looks up, lips newly reddened. The subsequent appreciative laughter is curdled by Bender’s sneering, slow handclap. “My image of you is totally blown.” The others turn on him. “What do you care?” he bleats. “I may as well not even exist at this school.” Claire tearfully tells him she has just as many feelings as he does. Big mistake. Huge. No one has as many feelings as Bender. “You’re so pathetic,” he rages, a nostril-flaring, finger-stabbing, eye-popping riot of insecurity, self-loathing and adoration, “Don’t you ever, ever compare yourself to me.… I like those earrings, Claire. Are those real diamonds? Did you work for the money for those earrings? Or did your Daddy buy them for you?… Do you know what I got for Christmas this year? It was a banner fucking year at the old Bender family. I got a carton of cigarettes. The old man grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, smoke up, Johnny.’” “My God, are we gonna be like our parents?” wonders the shell-shocked Andrew. And here Alison delivers the line that caused some patrons to insert fingers in ears and la-la loudly till the movie was over and others to wonder if someone had got hold of their secret diaries. “It’s unavoidable. It just happens.… When you grow up, your heart dies.” The neglect, abuse and general wrongheadedness practiced by their heart-free parents has brought these five people closer then they ever imagined they’d be.
But are their emotional bonds tighter than their social ones? Brian gives voice to the underlying question: “What is gonna happen to us on Monday when we’re all together again? I mean, I consider you guys my friends.” Claire doubts they’ll ever be buddies in a nondetention scenario. Andrew is appalled at her retort but Claire stands firm. The simmering Bender boils over again. “You are a bitch.… You don’t got the balls to stand up to your friends.” Claire tries to pin the hypocrite tag on Bender, telling him that he wouldn’t take Alison or Brian to hang out with his burnout cronies. Bender, one last time, goes berserk. “Don’t you ever talk about my friends. You don’t know any of my friends and you don’t look at any of my friends, and yo
u certainly wouldn’t condescend to speak to any of my friends. So you just stick to the things you know—shopping, nail polish, your father’s BMW, and your poor, drunk mother in the Caribbean. Just bury your head in the sand and wait for your fucking prom.” Brian can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Then I have to assume that Alison and I are better people than you guys, huh, us weirdos.… I just want to tell each of you that I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t and I will not.” Claire tells Brian it’s different for him because his geek friends look up to her entourage of the wealthy and the genetically favored. “You’re so conceited, Claire,” laughs Brian. Struck, maybe for the first time, that this might be true, Claire claims that she hates to go along with everything her riends say and that Brian could never understand the incredible pressure of being popular. Brian begins to blub. “You think I don’t understand pressure, Claire. Well, fuck you. Fuck you.… I’m here because Mr. Ryan found a gun in my locker.… I can’t have an F. I can’t have it and I know my parents can’t have it. Even if I ace the rest of the semester, I’m still only a B.” Asked if it was a handgun, Brian sheepishly responds, “It was a flare gun. It went off in my locker.” Displaying more of that crack comic timing, Alison jumps in with the reason for her presence at detention: “I didn’t have anything better to do.”
This diffuses the tension. Unfortunately, it diffuses it to the degree that Hughes sticks in a completely spurious dance montage showing off the kids’ syncopation and soloing skills. A mollified Bender returns to the storeroom where Vernon had banished him earlier. Claire, demonstrating the power of popularity, persuades Brian to write the detention essay for the whole group. Then she takes a long, hard look at Alison. What follows is the scene that sickened those in the audience who nodded tearfully at the truth of “When you grow up, your heart dies.” This is the moment where Claire uses her innate knowledge of accessorizing and cosmetics to effect a makeover on Alison, revealing that the ugly-duckling swaddling was hiding a swan. As much as Bender’s histrionics chafe, the remaking of Alison stands as The Breakfast Club’s biggest blunder. Before, she was a unique and unnerving character. After, she was just another simpering, pretty high-school girl with the hots for a jock. You may think you hate Courtney Love but imagine how cheated you’d feel if she cleaned up her act. The effect here is similar. As angelic synthesizers flung lilies in her path, the newly prettied-up, hair-in-a-bow, clean-white-blouse-wearing Alison presented herself to the gawking Andrew. As this coupling is occurring, Claire sneaks into the faculty office with a filthy look in her eyes. She approaches the transfixed Bender and kisses his neck. “Why’d you do that?” he mutters, “’Cause I knew you wouldn’t,” she says, smiling.
Back in the library, Alison and Andrew make out while Brian slaves over the essay. Claire removes one of the earrings that were the cause of a previous Bender explosion and gives it to him. “You know you said before how your parents use you to get back at each other,” he says, “Wouldn’t I be outstanding in that capacity?” And so they go into the cold afternoon, Alison and Andrew, Bender and Claire, Brian by himself but with the satisfaction of having recorded their epiphany that there’s more to them than just simplistic definitions.
“Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday for whatever it was you thought we did wrong, but we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay on who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain and an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours,
The Breakfast Club”
What an overwrought, exasperating film. Parts of The Breakfast Club ring so true that you’d swear John Hughes was editing in footage from security cameras. Other parts (“Smoke up, Johnny”) are like an eternity trapped in dinner-theater purgatory. Though the movie’s detractors, of whom there are, I believe, several, cite The Breakfast Club’s wholesale dumping on parents as the root of all adolescent afflictions as a grotesque example of pandering, I accepted it with ease. It’s not like the film takes place in a holding cell with dealers, terrorists and serial killers bonding and blaming their parents (which is, in itself, a fantastic premise for a movie, and here I am just throwing it out there to the wolves). The Shermer High Five are buckling under angst which can be credibly attributed to the impossibly high—or low—expectations of their folks. Obviously, much more problematic is the way they express that angst. Judd Nelson’s Bender is the train pulling the movie and it’s his bombast that most Breakfast Club critics recall when they reach for the Mylanta.
Though his opening scene’s obnoxiousness was entirely entertaining, he was the only one of the group whose descent into self-pity elicited no sympathy. When Emilio Estevez and, especially, Anthony Michael Hall opened themselves up to public scrutiny, few viewers could have failed to succumb to the sob rising in their throats (and if you did, apparently your heart had died). Didn’t we know people just like that? Weren’t we people like that? And if we weren’t, wouldn’t we be nice to them if we ever came into contact with them?
Had Hughes, ever ecologically minded in the recycling of his plots, been fully attuned to the desires of his audience, he would have whipped out a Breakfast Club 2: Monday Morning sequel in time for the next semester. This is a movie that screamed out for a follow-up episode, because even though it froze on Bender triumphantly punching the air, who really believed his relationship with Claire could get over his insecurity and the peer pressure of her friends (I know that’s what Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful were both about, but still…)? And would Alison really have ditched her old, weird ways? A decade later, I’m still guessing. As riddled with faults as it undoubtedly is (I mean, they just start dancing…), The Breakfast Club featured the best work that any of its cast would ever do and it stands as maybe the most powerful example of its genre.
* * *
“So what do you little maniacs want to do first?” purrs Weird Science (1985)’s Lisa, the mainframe genie magicked up by Gary and Wyatt, the two computer geeks desirous of something to fill the void in their thrillfree lives. Seconds later, Lisa’s in the shower and so are Gary and Wyatt, pressed up against each other, standing in their shorts, gazing dumbfounded at the lush acreage of fabulous womanhood undulating inches away from them. They are not alone in their discomfort; John Hughes is also in that shower in his shorts, utterly confounded by his creation.
No one is better than Hughes for wringing comedy out of mundanity. Think of the way he strip mined ordinary circumstances for slapstick in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Home Alone and the Vacation movies. Remember that extended scene of boredom in the early stretches of The Breakfast Club? Judd Nelson sets fire to his boot and lights his cigarette off the flame. Anthony Michael Hall shifts his crotch then suctions his pen top to his upper lip. Emilio Estevez plays with the hood of his sweatshirt. Ally Sheedy wraps a thread around her finger, cutting off the circulation, then sketches a landscape which she decorates with a dandruff sandstorm. Removed from the everyday world, Hughes starts to struggle. Weird Science is glaring testimony to the limited workings of his imagination. “I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize!” declares hormonally imploding Gary (Anthony Michael Hall—still growing) of the perfect woman he and timorous accomplice Wyatt (gravel-voiced Ian Mitchell-Smith) are creating from input as varied as the shape of a centerfold, the brain of Einstein, the ingenuity of Houdini and the ironic cool—remember this is 1985—of David Lee Roth. The duo jack their computer up to a Barbie doll, strap a pair of bras round their heads and are rewarded by a freak electrical storm that amazingly gives life to their addled notion.
The result is Lisa (Kelly Le Brock, acting with her lips), the Hot Sex Bomb as Fairy Godmother. They’ve created a monster, but they don’t know what to do with her, so she makes it her mission to bring popularity to her stumbling, mum
bling mentors. She changes their geekwear to sharp duds, morphs their clanking excuses for cars into chick magnets, then works on instilling some confidence into the quaking pair. This first step on this journey involves a scene that became teen movie de rigeur ever since the Animal House boys foolishly dropped in unannounced on Otis Day and The Knights. Lisa takes Gary and Wyatt to a down-and-dirty blues dive where, of course, on their entrance, the music ceases and every mostly black head turns their way. “What’s a beautiful broad like you doing with a malaca like this?” demands one of the pimp-attired regulars, seeing Lisa with the uncomfortable Gary. “It’s purely sexual,” she replies, breaking the tension. This paves the way for Hall to reprise the Mudbone impersonation he debuted in The Breakfast Club, only this time at excruciating length.
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