The Breakfast Club: The Epitome of 80's Movies

The Brain, the athlete, the beauty, the basket case, and the criminal. These five stereotypes represent the five major characters from John Hughes classic teen movie, the Breakfast Club. Even to this day, it represents one of Hollywood's best attempts at defining, demonstrating, and, in the end, deconstructing, the stereotypes that plague numerous teen movies. The Breakfast Club was both the movie that started the trend and the one who broke it, by proving, for the first time, that a movie about teenagers doesn't have to be a vapid, stereotypical collection of sex jokes and dirty humor. The heart and soul of the movie resides both in its message and in its characters, and, to this day, it remains a classic example of eighties cinema.

The movie begins by introducing its five main characters, each required to spend a Saturday in detention for various misdemeanors. Andy, the star wrestler (played by Emilio Estevez) is there for beating up another student and taping his butt cheeks together. Along with the beauty, Claire (Molly Ringwald) he represents the upper echelon of the high school social structure, and is clearly uncomfortable being grouped with the remaining three students. John Bender (Judd Nelson) plays the criminal of the group, while Anthony Michael Hall and Ally Sheedy play the brain and the basket case, respectively.

Even though the movie starts by introducing its characters as mere stereotypes, within the first half of the movie, real, understandable characters begin to emerge, and the audience gains a much better understanding for why the act the way they do. This is the greatest strength of the Breakfast Club, and of its director, John Hughes. He manages to almost perfectly capture the angst, humiliation, and extreme self-consciousness involved with being a teenager, and translates these feelings into relatable and interesting characters. Bender is a criminal because of an abusive father; both Andy and Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) are grappling with the incredible amount of pressure both their parents heap on them, and the basket case, Allison, is virtually ignored by her workaholic parents. Even the seemingly perfect life of the princess is not all that it seems, as her divorced parents use her as a tool to repeatedly get back at each other. As the movie progresses and the five kids grow closer to one another through a series of mutual conflicts and pranks, we get more and more glimpses into their lives, and the stereotypes that once would have defined them begin to crumble away. By the final moments of the movie, the audience sees them as people, and not clichéd stock characters. Of course, this reality also makes the ending bittersweet, in one of John Hughes's most genuine touches: even though they seem like friends at the end of detention, the "breakfast club," as they call themselves, realize that it won't last. Throughout the movie, numerous subtle hints are dropped that, once Monday rolls around and things revert back to normal, each member of the breakfast club will return to their respective clique, as if nothing happened. John Hughes stays as far away as he can from the traditional, seemingly expected Hollywood ending, where everyone becomes best friends and they live happily ever after. Instead, he leaves it up to the viewer to decide, leaving the ending admittedly ambiguous. And, in doing so, he brings The Breakfast Club closer to reality. It is a movie about real people, and, in the end, it's up to the viewer to decide just what they think these real people will do next.
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