Everything Wrong With The Breakfast Club

1. No breakfast foods are featured.

I grew up watching The Breakfast Club, but it had been a good 9 years (emphasis on good) since I had last seen it. So I whacked it in the old VHS player and readied myself for a rose-tinted peek into the 80s. Unfortunately this time, the rose-coloured glasses were gone since I lost them at Laneway Festival last year. The next hour and a half had me cringing so deeply I was in the foetal position by the end of the film. The first thought that came to mind after about an hour of deep cleansing and crying in the shower was “Why did mum ever let me watch this film?” As a young, impressionable girl, was this really the storyline I should have had plotted onto the social schemas of my brain?

(Disclaimer: In this article I will not be dragging my mum. She redeemed herself by showing me Legally Blonde - bend and snap has never failed me).

2. The dance scene. Enough said.

3. Is it just me or is Claire (Molly Ringwald) sexually harassed by Bender (Judd Nelson) the entire film? From start to finish he makes it his mission to taunt her as much as possible about her femininity, her personality, her morals, her face. Spoiler: in the end, he gets the girl.

Even for the 80s the whole narrative feels inflated on the steroid that is high school archetypes and misanthropic folly. This film could be renamed “How to Get the Girl: A guide to objectification, reducing her to a narrative device and exploiting her inherent desire for male attention” and it would make more sense.

4. Not only that, but by the end of the film, Allison’s (Ally Sheedy) story arch ends (if it ever even started) with her makeover and reveal (didn’t realise I was watching an episode of 100% Hotter) where she becomes generically attractive through the clever and innovative use of a white headband and I guess some hair styling tool they managed to find lying around in detention. Also note the intriguing absence of her previously black outfit for one that is Angelic White. Meanwhile she wins the attention of the ever-beguiling Jock, played by Emilio Estevez.

5. If it isn’t already obvious in points 3 and 4, this movie is the antithesis to feminism. Did we really all decide to forget about the first wave of feminism in the 70s just so we could produce whimsically satisfying films about a motley crew of teens in the 80s? Yes. Yes we did.

6. All the necessary high school stereotypes are satisfied.

Popular girl, dressed in pink, seems simple on the outside, is also simple on the inside: Yes

School bully, antagonistic pyromaniac whose trauma is romanticised: Yes

Brainy nerd with no street cred whatsoever: Yeah

Emo goth girl, kind of off-putting, few social skills, eye contact wavers between intense and totally lacking: Mm-hmm.

Jock with appetite: Hell yeah.

Perhaps more disturbingly, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) - the nerdy, straight A’s type, opens up about his intent to kill himself using a flare gun that he had stashed in his locker. It’s problematic that the teachers merely placed him in detention for this and overlooked his true intent with the weapon, not only punishing suicidal ideation but writing it off completely as a minor misdemeanour - akin to cheating in a test or getting into a fight. It is even more disturbing that the film brushed over this issue as swiftly as the fictional school did, reducing Brian’s climactic revelation to a group “therapy” scene where each of the kids has a go at each other and ends with laughter that can only be attributed to mental instability and a lack of support from friends, parents and the school.

Decades later, we can still relate to the pressures of being a teenager. But The Breakfast Club would be so much more powerful as a cult movie if audiences both now and then, could watch this film and really feel known, rather than having a finger pointed at them, getting yelled at for being feminine, problematic, sporty or intelligent, and then be told that the entirety of experience begins and ends in the same place, as the same person.

In conclusion, it’s a fun film and I’ll probably watch it again in another few years when I have undoubtedly forgotten about my first revisitation, and be able to re-experience all the colours of disdain when I finally do.

Oh wait, while there is no real allusion to breakfast, there is a lunch scene.

Half marks I guess.

Be right back, going to find a white headband.