‘You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.’
In three minutes, we are able to understand not only that this is a high school movie about troubled teens, but that, as far as Hughes is concerned, it’s the very stereotypes created and established by teen fiction that are the major reason for the travails of the angst-ridden adolescent. We are then treated to what is essentially an exceedingly talky stage play made cinematic by Hughes’s ability to make the most drab and unpromising interiors into bright, shiny, vibrant playgrounds for the head games of unusually self-analytical, articulate and media-savvy children.
In Hughes’s world adults are monsters. For a start, this example of American detention involves going into school on a Saturday at 7 a.m. and spending nine hours in one room, theoretically neither speaking nor moving. And we are introduced to our five protagonists by way of them arriving for detention in their parents’ cars. The pouting princess (Molly Ringwald as Claire Standish) has been made so by a wealthy father who thinks it’s adorable that his precious cut class to go shopping. The brain (the ever-underrated Anthony Michael Hall as Brian Johnson) is ordered to break the rules and study by his hot-housing, shrewish Mom. The athlete (Emilio Estevez as Andrew Clark) is obviously being pushed towards a wrestling scholarship by a macho Dad. The criminal (Judd Nelson as John Bender) ambles towards school in shades and that enduring symbol of existential male cool, the long overcoat, apparently parent-less. And the basket case (Ally Sheedy as Alison Reynolds) is simply dropped off without a consoling or angry word by sinister creatures that we cannot see as they drive away. The scene creates such a feeling of Us vs Them at the outset that you want to see these unfeeling bastards drive straight into trees and over cliffs. Hughes was a master of short, punchy manipulations of audience emotions, of taking well-worn storytelling clichés and breathing new, postmodern life into them. You know he’s setting you up. He knows you know. And we can’t help but join his crusade for youth over adulthood because we all want to be innocent.
From there, The Breakfast Club is simplicity itself. Virtually the entire film is shot on one set, the school library, as the five fight, talk about their feelings, rebel, acquiesce, smoke dope, flirt, bully, confess, dance, fall in love and learn that none of them are what they initially seem, or, more pertinently, that none of them want to fulfil the destinies and embody the stereotypes that their parents and teachers have projected upon them. It’s both a great ensemble acting piece, and a cunning statement about teen fiction itself, and how its exploitation of teenagers has led to the young being labelled and dehumanised by the simplistic fantasies of popular culture. The library is like a jail, and so, Hughes argues, is American teen culture.
Of course, even a prison that big needs a warden. And that unfortunate role goes to Paul Gleason as Dick Vernon, one of the most evil representatives of the teaching profession ever created for the screen. While our students are given so many dimensions over the next 90 minutes you almost want to make them cease and desist being so goddamn complex, Vernon has but one. He hates kids. He loves punishing them. He is almost sexually aroused by the wielding of arbitrary power. He uses the phrase ‘monkey business’ without irony. He is a fascist buffoon for no reason other than the fact that he is over 21 and terminally disappointed with his lot in life. He exists only to be broken, and we immediately know that it won’t take much. Like the adults in Home Alone and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dick is a John Hughes grown-up, which means he’s a deluded bully and no match for the cheek, intelligence and resourcefulness of The Kids. Although you can’t help having a sneaking empathy for Dick when he calls our famous five ‘smug little pricks’ under his breath.
We also pick up quickly that two into five won’t go. And, despite Hughes’s confounding of the most obvious couplings being much of the point of the movie, we know early on that the skinny, plain, nerdy boy ain’t getting one of the girls. Hughes may have had subversive qualities, but the film was a benchmark of the Reagan 1980s, and intelligence wasn’t going through one of its more popular phases. No matter how misunderstood and complex Claire and Alison are, it’s always the Jock and the Bad Boy who pull in these situations, and poor Brian will probably have to settle for being a girl’s quasi-gay best friend for the rest of his days in high school hell.
It’s Nelson’s tough-but-vulnerable-deep-down rebel who gets all the best clothes and all the best lines, mainly at the expense of the all-American wrestler, Andrew: ‘I wanna be just like you. I figure all I need is a lobotomy and some tights’; ‘You’re an idiot anyway. But if you say you get along with your parents – you’re a liar, too.’
Hughes also gives Bender lines which attempt to invent a brand new ’80s hipster slang: ‘Face it – you’re a neo-maxi-zoom dweebie’ (translation: ‘You are a nerd’) and ‘So, Ahab – kybo my doobage?’ (‘Sir – do you still have the marijuana that I gave you for safekeeping?’). As you can probably gather, this gambit failed to create thrilling new catchphrases among the planet’s youth, although Breakfast Club fans are still intrigued by one specific insult Bender throws at Dick Vernon: ‘That guy’s a Brownie Hound.’ This, we BC nerds suppose, can only mean one of two things: a homophobic insult in the vein of ‘shit-stabber’ or ‘fudge-packer’. Or an accusation of paedophilia; i.e. this man chases after Girl Guides and Brownies. Whichever way, it didn’t catch on either.
Nevertheless, a film this talky wouldn’t work unless the dialogue sparkled, and Hughes locates many incisive epithets about the eternal struggles of being a tweener, the best of which include: ‘Everyone’s home life is unsatisfying. If it wasn’t people would live with their parents for ever’ and ‘If you say you haven’t – you’re a prude. If you say you have – you’re a slut. It’s a trap.’
Bender is undoubtedly a Brando throwback with dangerous ’60s and punk tendencies, singing Cream songs under his breath, rocking the plaid shirt look, refusing to lose the battle of wills with Vernon, no matter what the cost. But the important battle of wills is fought between Bender and Ringwald’s ‘pristine’ Claire.
Both are immediately attracted to each other, both are trapped by their personas, and Bender’s initial solution to this is typical of all young men . . . verbal sexual bullying. Bender seeks to degrade her into submission with ‘jokes’ about gang rape and virginity. But Claire’s winning response isn’t verbal, where she mostly can’t compete. It’s all in the Ringwald face – The Pout Of Steel. Her glare is a beautiful symbol of the woman who refuses to be broken by male cruelty, even though she suffers. She takes Bender’s childish misogyny apart with that pale and sallow stare, tames him and leaves him potentially house-broken and ready for domestication. No wonder Ringwald became a teen girl icon of the time, with her ability, in The Breakfast Club and as Andie Walsh in Pretty In Pink, to physically manifest feminism without having to say the word that ’80s girls were being brainwashed into believing meant nothing except looking butch and lacking a sense of humour.
Hughes’s take on class is interesting, too. At one point, a janitor makes an entrance and responds to a Bender insult with a knowing humour that forces a respect from the kids that Vernon is incapable of commanding. And Bender’s verbal supremacy and courage in the face of authority is unmistakable – the working-class social outcast dominates the film. His mirror is Sheedy’s near-invisible Alison who barely says anything at all, yet effortlessly disturbs everyone with her witchy ways and almost joyful embrace of apparent madness. She is entirely classless, of course – but she reinforces the theme that it’s the three middle-class kids-most-likely-to who seem out of their intellectual depth and in desperate need of permission to rebel.
The scene where Vernon locks Bender in a classroom and threatens him with a beating is still shocking in what, up until this moment, has largely been a comedy. And it’
s because the violence is reinforced by Vernon’s loathing for Bender’s working-class background and the sadistic pleasure he takes in predicting the boy’s hopeless, ugly future. To call The Breakfast Club an anti-Reagan movie is perhaps over-egging the pudding a little. But it does display a loathing for middle-class values and the bourgeois obsession with money and status that reaches a peak of genuinely disturbing intensity in this scene.
Nevertheless, affection for The Breakfast Club does come with a healthy dollop of kitsch appreciation. This is because Hughes occasionally loses faith in his audience and allows scenes that overstate the case to an embarrassing degree. The moments when our heroes do their crazy dance bit, and when Nelson starts acting out Bender’s violent home life and ends up chewing the scenery over a pointless splurge of synth music, are the kind of scenes which force you to laugh to keep from squirming. They mark the film for ever as typical, dated ’80s Hollywood, when a desperation for nostalgic values led directors to encourage inappropriate pre-’60s melodrama without the old-school production values (or acting talent) to back it up. Nelson’s a good enough rebel without a cause to carry much of The Breakfast Club, but he ain’t no James Dean . . . or Gene Kelly, for that matter.
And it’s a big disappointment, in terms of the movie’s sexual politics, when Alison gets her guy because Claire gives her a cutesypie makeover. I suspect I am just one of many who boo that scene, and not simply because it reinforces the idea that girls must conform to male standards of femininity before a man will deign to fuck them, and that that, in the end, is all any woman wants. It’s also because Ally Sheedy looks far hotter in all the ‘black shit’. It’s one of the most sexist and aggravating ‘ugly duckling’ rip-offs in screen history. Like I say, Reagan ’80s.
But Hughes does pull off most of the stuff that matters. For example, the vast majority of ’80s youth films date horribly because the fashions are so bad, and quite obviously have been chosen by people who only see kids when they’re in other films. The clothes and hairstyles in The Breakfast Club have barely dated at all, and everything about the film exudes a genuine knowledge of and fascination with the detail of being a teenager – not just circa 1985, but from any era you care to name. At one point, Hughes makes superb silent comedy out of nothing more than the kids’ packed lunches and the perennial food fads of the young. Hughes’s best movies were made out of spot-on observation, and I suspect the concerns of The Breakfast Club’s five protagonists will make as much sense and provide as much pleasure to 21st-century teens as they did to the 1985 model. Hell – even the gloriously shallow, trebly ‘new wave’ synthpop has come back into fashion.
This is among the many reasons why I love The Breakfast Club, and why its faults – or rather, the bits I don’t personally agree with – are part of its excellence. I’ve watched it many times, and no amount of familiarity with the text renders the film mere entertainment. It’s a work of art, to argue against and agree with. It makes you shout at the screen as much as laugh or cry with recognition. It is provocative and dissuades the viewer from being passive. Its key scene is not the typically gung ho ’80s, much-parodied and copied, air-punching ending. It is the part where, for a full 20 minutes of screen-time, five actors sit in a semi-circle and bond and break over the agonies of parental and peer pressure. The scene is a masterpiece of movie dialogue, and one of the finest ensemble acting scenes on celluloid – one that none of the actors came close to again – because it dares to risk both boring its audience and being seen as pretentious. But, if you watch the scene – and if you have, watch it again! – you’ll see that it explores every single one of the key themes that the movies in this book are concerned with.
That’s an extraordinary achievement for one 92-minute movie set in one featureless building. The Breakfast Club is, in its tacky, plastic, manipulative, hugging and learning way, an absolute bloody masterpiece. Now excuse me, won’t you, while I watch it all over again.
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF
1986
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jennifer Grey, Jeffery Jones, Edie McClurg, Charlie Sheen
Dir.: John Hughes
Plot: Spoiled brat’s dodgy sickie makes truancy into Great American Triumph.
Key line: ‘Incredible. One of the worst performances of my career and they never doubted it for a second.’
A friend of mine recently made an excellent observation about this most hardy perennial of teen comedies. We were talking about the book – and incidentally, in almost every conversation I’ve had about Stranded. . . the first movies mentioned are either Grease (see here), The Breakfast Club (see here) or good old Ferris – and my mate observed that one’s attitude to the character of Ferris Bueller gradually altered as one got more wrinkly. ‘When I was a kid I thought he was a cool hero,’ he said. ‘But now I’m in my forties I see the guy as an obnoxious arsehole.’
There was always an obnoxious arsehole element to Ferris Bueller, but this is why the choice to cast Matthew Broderick in the title role was absolutely key. There is something so easy-going and sincerely pleasant about Broderick that he is almost impossible to dislike, even when playing a craven hypocrite like Jim McAllister in Election (see here). Apparently, the only other actor strongly considered for Ferris was John Cusack. Anyone who has sat through the preening self-regard and relentless puppy-dog ain’t-I-cuteness of, say, Cusack’s turns in Say Anything. . . and High Fidelity will surely agree that we would not be talking about this film if Hughes had gone for pin-up over actor. A huge part of what makes Ferris both funny and bearable is that Broderick is just a little too wimpy, girly and unsexy to be a teen superhero. There’s an if-he-can-do-it-so-can-I, nerd’s revenge element to his entire performance.
But, if a spoiled and smug middle-class boy who is good at everything, delights in humiliating those around him, and bullies and manipulates people into doing things that momentarily keep him entertained does lose his appeal as one has kids of one’s own and sees the effect that type of force of nature can have on an impressionable mind, then the balance provided by FBDO’s second banana becomes the thing that keeps you loyal to the movie. Alan Ruck, as Ferris’s neurotic and deeply unhappy sidekick Cameron Frye, is one of the most disturbing, haunted performances in this book, taking a daft slapstick picture about cool kids sticking it to bumbling adults into realms both more real and far more dark. There is something broken and near-insane about the depths of Cameron’s pessimism and pain in FBDO, something poignant and authentic enough to make one believe that sending a car crashing through a plate glass window to die a violent and ignominious death will either save this boy’s life, or end it. Thankfully, John Hughes wasn’t too interested in sequels (save Home Alone; let’s not, eh?), which allows you to direct your own. In mine, Cameron stands up to his authoritarian father (an all the more frightening character for never appearing onscreen), uses all that darkness as fuel to do something extraordinary with his life (while Ferris becomes Jim McAllister, the boy who peaked too soon) and eventually marries Mia Sara’s Sloane, who finally understands that she was only banging Ferris for shallow, school-status-related reasons, and that all her real connections in this movie are actually with Cameron, who, like her, is just being dragged along as cheerleader witness to the desperate acts of an empty narcissist.
Ruck, extraordinarily, was already in his late twenties by the time he played Cameron, which makes the uncanny way he taps into shared memories of teenage fear and self-loathing even more admirable.
In even more bizarre John Hughes-potential-miscasting-disaster shenanigans, Hughes originally cast Ruck in The Breakfast Club when he was intending to shoot the film independently. If you’re figuring that must have been for the Anthony Michael Hall part, then get this: both Hall and Emilio Estevez turned down the part of Cameron before Ruck was cast. That’s right . . . Emilio Estevez. How the fuck would that natural macho jock dumbass have played the most vulnerable and deeply wounded teen in mainstream movie history? Even with Hughes
pictures, you can’t help feeling that this Making Great Movies lark is more down to luck than judgement.
As you’ve probably worked out, I’m assuming that everyone who has bought an entire book about teen movies has seen FBDO, and doesn’t need a big plot rundown. This stupidly popular Chicago kid throws a fake sickie from school with his girlfriend and best mate. They have unlikely triumphs and disasters. The school’s dean Ed Rooney (Jones) tries to catch them and expose Ferris to his doting and gullible parents. The kid’s jealous sister (the wonderful Grey) has an opportunity to dob him in, but decides that she cares for her smug git sibling after all. The adult world is gratuitously humiliated by one brilliant boy. The end.
The movie’s most loved moments lie in brilliant comic and tragic set-pieces, a memorable ensemble cast, and use of dodgy ‘new wave’ instrumental pop that worms its way into your brain and has become so recognisable that anyone wanting a handy shorthand for taking the piss out of ’80s teen movies just puts on The Beat’s ‘March Of The Swivel Heads’ or Yello’s ‘Oh Yeah’ under a montage of someone running through gardens.
So the question becomes: why is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off so much more lovable than other similar teen movies?
One thing that is striking is its love of the modern world. In the majority of teen movies, what the writer(s) and director want to say, more than anything, is that the world today is going to the dogs. To this end, they use teen issues as a jumping-off point for their own angst about class, race, technology, modern people’s crap taste in music and film, suburbia, small towns, big cities, their own rubbish childhoods or that general disillusion about once believing they could change the world, and now knowing they can’t. Hughes seems entirely uninterested in any of this. Whatever angst turns up in FBDO – mainly from Cameron and Jeannie – is actual, honestto-goodness, adults-don’t-understand-because-the-past-never-happened teen angst.
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