Double Feature

My husband and I had an 80s double feature last night: Heathers and The Breakfast Club, in that order. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, bury your head in the sand, and wait for your fucking prom.

My husband had never seen Heathers before. (I know, right?) I had forgotten Shannen Doherty was a Heather (she’ll always be Brenda to me, and I was ALWAYS team Kelly).

I digress. It’s a Winona Ryder/Christian Slater vehicle, so most of the other actors are just . . . costars. The acting is okay, but the beauty of this cult classic is how it captures the Gen-X angst of the Cold War (We were born into it; the wall was up before we were alive, and we all saw it come down, decades before some orange clown started ranting and raving monosyllabic moron maxims about building one.).

No spoilers.

I could probably recite The Breakfast Club script, from “Vodka” to “neo-maxi-zoom dweebie” to “Two hits. Me hitting you, you hitting the floor.” to “Answer the question, Claire!”

Claire does answer the question, as well as the bigger question that everyone else is afraid to answer: No, this doesn’t change anything. On Monday morning, everything will be the same as it always was.

Brian takes it beyond existential dread into existential awareness: he knows that’s a shitty thing to do to a person, and he won’t do it. The wimpy little geek takes a moral stand, and his reward? He gets to do the assignment for the group while the cool kids hook up. I wish he had taken the fuck you of it a bit further and called out everyone, or, ideally, just written “Fuck you” across the entire page, but that would have been ill-received at the time.

Don’t you forget about me.