THE '80s, HIGHSCHOOL AND "THE BREAKFAST CLUB"

I thought long and hard about what to include in “nostalgia” week. I have quite a few – cinematically very important – period pieces lying around just waiting to be reviewed (I am, it must be said, shamefully behind on my review-writing. This is particularly sad because I am by no means behind on my viewing so some projects have had to be abandoned because I couldn’t remember them with sufficient clarity. I feel guilty, you can probably tell. It won’t happen again.) Then I thought, which is the one period that we all remember, think about and discuss be it with fond or not so fond memories… High school. And I have, close to hand the high school movie that almost single handedly started the genre up. It is a cornerstone in any case and a wonderful little time-capsule from the ‘80s. Its name has been sort of forgotten but when you watch it you realize that so many films after it have been modeled round it that its spirit definitely lives on. I am talking about The Breakfast Club.
In every high school – or most of them anyway – there is at least one teacher that is hot stuff on discipline and this school is no exception. Saturday morning, 7.00 a.m. sees five students seated in the library for detention. They seem to be a cross-cut of the school, one of them is slightly mad, one is the school “jock” from the wrestling team, one of the geeks, one of the popular girls and the school trouble-maker. Trapped in school together for nine hours on a weekend is no fun, not least because these five are from completely different “worlds” in high school terms. By the end of the day however, a lot will have changed and the five “criminals” may have learned more than they ever expected to…
Yes, I know the whole trope of unlikely characters coming together and figuring out they are not so different after all isn’t exactly new. The thing is though; this film is one of the first “high school films” that explored this. It’s other major advantage over its copies is the fact that thanks to good directing and strong acting from the young cast, the film is able to explore the whole high-school world with greater honesty bordering on brutality. It’s like I say about nostalgia, we mostly look back at high school with memories that are sometimes a lot fonder than they actually deserve to be. This film does an excellent job of reminding us of the cliques, the “boundaries” and how important it all was back then. It also has a peculiar spectacular quality that means it is very much a performance we are watching. I don’t mean this in the sense that it is difficult to form emotional bonds with the film, it isn’t at all but it is also an excellent reminder of the fact that we can never go back to high school. We can only look back in, from the outside. Whether we would actually want to go back in there or shudder at the thought is irrelevant, the point is that it is an excellent portrayal of time gone by. Think of it as a brilliant moving snapshot. With no Photoshop to smooth out the pain and the fear though…