The Kids Are Alright: "The Breakfast Club"
One of the things that fascinates me about American culture is its almost inconceivable lack of memory. It is, like any culture, arranged around a series of patterns. These are not immutable, and they certainly shift over time, but in the main they are not difficult to discern.
Which fact does not, of course, prevent people from entirely forgetting their existence.
As an example, take a recent speech that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave at a legal conference. Upset by the brouhaha surrounding the court after a draft of an opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, Thomas inveighed against what he claims is a declining respect for institutions in this country. Putting politics and the abortion question aside, what caught my eye about the speech was his assertion that young people today have a "different attitude" toward respecting the law, and that this is a "major change" in our society.
This is a sentiment I see commonly expressed these days, and there seem to me to be two responses to it.
The first takes the form of a question, namely: "How in god's name can you have such a terrifically impoverished understanding of the country you've spent your entire life living in?"
Thomas was born in 1948, which means he was sixteen when activist Jack Weinberg was advising folks to "never trust anyone over thirty," and twenty when the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Muhammed Ali, was choosing to go to jail rather than join the U.S. army and fight in Vietnam, phrasing his disrespect of the draft law thusly: "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?"
Two years later, to choose an event at random from a moment that was full of them – and because it happened to take place in a building that almost a century earlier, my great, great, great grandfather worked in – a domestic terrorist group managed to blow themselves up while making bombs in Greenwich Village; they had planned to use the bombs to destroy an army barracks in New Jersey and the administration building of Columbia University.
This is not to compare Ali's sentiment with either age-oriented protest or domestic terrorism, but simply to point out that when Thomas was young, there seems to have been at least a smidgen of disrespect for law, maturity, and civic institutions circulating in the American ether.
One can find similar examples throughout the history of our nation. It seems clear to this author, at least, that the 40,000 army veterans and their families who camped out in Washington D.C. in 1932 in an attempt to force the government to grant early payment of their veterans' service bonuses, only to be forcibly cleared by General Douglas MacArthur with a contingent of U.S. Army infantry and five or six tanks, were not displaying an "attitude" toward respecting the law very much different than that displayed by our current crop of young folks.
And when John Quincy Adams – late the President of the United States, then serving as a member of the House of Representatives – disobeyed the so-called "gag rule" which prohibited any discussion of slavery on the floor of our esteemed House in the 1830s, it seems almost patently obvious that he was being disrespectful of the institutions and rules of our great country. One might even go as far back as the hoary old Declaration of Independence, and note that there is a certain "attitude" towards established rules and customs – namely, that they sometimes deserve to be broken – baked into the DNA of our nation.
Closer to home, we can also find a second response to Thomas' sentiment. It's much simpler, and goes more or less like this: "Jeez, Clarence, go watch The Breakfast Club."
Written and directed by John Hughes, and released in 1985, The Breakfast Club tells the story of five high-school kids forced to spend eight hours of a Saturday in detention for crimes and misdemeanors they've committed against the school and their fellow students.
The five are a delinquent named John Bender (Judd Nelson), a jock named Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), a rich popular kid named Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald), a mysterious and apparently disturbed girl named Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy), and a nerd named Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall). The cast is completed by the authoritarian vice-principal who rules over them (Paul Gleason) and a cynical janitor (John Kapelos).
The movement of the story is simple. The students all come from different cliques, and all occupy different positions in the horrific hierarchy that is so familiar from so many people's high school experience. Because of this, they're initially antagonistic towards one another. But as the day passes, their resistance to Vice Principal Vernon's aggression, along with the natural human tendency to actually begin to see others as human, rather than representatives of a crowd, when you spend time with them, causes them to begin to create friendships.
Through both their conflicts and their moments of unguarded intimacy, they come to understand a great deal about themselves and their lives. But the end of the day, not only have several romantic relationships bloomed, but they have come to see each other as friends, unified against the difficulties of the world.
This is exemplified by a note that they leave for Vernon. He has told each of them to write a 1,000 word essay about who they are; instead, they manage to convince Brian – as the smartest – to write one for all of them.
He declares in this note that Vernon actually has no interest in who they are and instead sees them, as does the rest of the world, as entirely defined by the roles they play, as jock, and popular girl, and delinquent, and the rest. It's a resounding ending, and a declaration of freedom against authority, both Vernon's and that of the social norms and expectations by which they (and everyone) are bound. They sign the note, in solidarity, "The Breakfast Club."
On the surface, The Breakfast Club is about teenagers working through the kinds of identity issues that tend to plague those years, learning to see each other as individuals and coming face to face with the devastating forces of cruelty.
But beneath this, the film works as an extraordinary analysis of exactly the kinds of complaints Justice Thomas voiced in his speech. To understand this, it's helpful to think through some of the things the kids in the film are confronting, beginning with the horror of becoming an adult. "It's unavoidable, it just happens," Allison notes at one point. "When you grow up, your heart dies."
This is a common-enough observation, but it's worth pausing on for a moment. One of the things that afflicts the kids in the film is a lack of callousness. Their hearts, to put it in Allison's terms, are still alive. They feel things intensely, they believe things intensely, they suffer in ways that as adults – with their hearts calloused-over, with their jobs and mortgages hanging over them – they will be more immune to.
There are umpteen stories about this evolution from young to old. But what gives The Breakfast Club its power is not the fact that it dramatizes this evolution, but that it takes it seriously.
The film does not condescend to its teen characters. It refuses to make fun of them. It allows them to be clever and ridiculous, perceptive in moments and misguided in others, full of energy and contradiction. Which is to say that it presents the intensity of youth as a condition of life, something that virtually everyone goes through, and thus no less (and importantly, no more) valid than the predicaments and knowledge that come with adulthood.
And one of the points the film makes about this inevitable youthful intensity is that it bristles against the rules and institutions it finds itself in, precisely because those are designed to control it. To phrase it as a direct answer to Justice Thomas, in the view of John Hughes, rebellion is a fact of youth, rather than an affliction of certain benighted generations that won't do what their elders want them to. It is as natural as the weather, as is the conflict between it and the rules laid down by society.
So that is one part of the equation of the film. But there is another part, which is the role of the elders in this eternal conflict.
There are a pair of moments in the film that touch on this. The first takes place during a series of establishing shots that set up the location of the school before the action begins. These include images of lockers, of banners encouraging school spirit, of the cafeteria where the kids eat, of the trash they leave behind, and of the despairing and funny things they carve into their desks or write on the wall. Included in this mix is a shot of the school's "Man of the Year" plaque celebrating the recipients of this award from each past class. Front and center is a photograph is a young Carl Reed, the cynical janitor played by John Kapelos.
It's a fleeting moment, but it begins to establish something vital: Carl was once a kid like the ones in the story, with his own dreams and triumphs, and he has now – as we all must – entered the adult world with its realities and difficulties.
This linkage between youth and age is further developed in a scene between Carl and Vernon. During a dead moment in the afternoon, the two men share a beer and a conversation in a storage room in the basement of the school. As with the shot of Carl as "Man of the Year," this scene creates a direct analogy between the adults and the kids: the men are downstairs drinking beer and talking about their lives, while the kids are upstairs smoking pot and doing the same thing. Both classes of people, that is, adults and kids, are looking for release and connection.
Beyond this, though, the scene helps to work out the dynamics of the movement from youth to adulthood. Vernon declares that he's been teaching at the school for twenty-two years, and "each year, the kids get more and more arrogant" and then goes on to claim that "the kids turned on me." Carl, wise soul that he is, sees the truth more clearly. "Listen Vern," he scoffs, "if you were sixteen, what would you think of you, huh?" The sentiment is as humorously lacerating as it is perceptive. The progression of age, that long slow jump from one side of the fence to the other, is inevitable. And if we're not careful, we become what we used to scorn.
In this, it answers Allison's fear: Yes, some of you will have your hearts die when you get older. Some of you will turn into exactly what you used to hate. And others, like Carl, will go from the glory of being Man of the Year to the workaday life of being a janitor; hopefully you will accept that fall – if fall it is – with the equanimity that he does.
In The Breakfast Club, what stops this all from descending towards platitude – kids become adults, so what? – is that it's not presented as some desiccated morality play or distanced observation about the world, but a painful, human event, and one based on a terrifyingly complex set of interactions. Not only do the kids see that they may lose their hearts, and not only do the adults live with the threat of becoming bitter towards what they used to be, but the younger generation is actually the product of the older.
The kids around us, that is, are formed in reaction to people like Vice Principal Vernon and Carl; even more directly, however, they are the creation of their parents' successes and failures, attentions and neglect.
In this, the film captures something of the sentiment that Philip Larkin lays out with unsettling precision in his poem "This Be The Verse":
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
At the opening of the film, we see this dynamic played out as each student arrives at school. Brian's mother berates him for doing poorly in class. Claire's father assures her that she's amazing and popular. Andy's dad reinforces his notion that his physical dominance is the only important thing about him. And these forces are further explored as the film progresses, through the discussions the kids have with each other about their relationships with their parents.
The idea is clear: not only do kids grow up to be adults, many of them losing their idealism along the way as they are faced with the realities of mature life, but the adults shape the kids through their transmissions of the pains of their own failures, and the victories or losses of their own dreams.
But where Larkin is cynical in his closing – Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself – Hughes is hopeful. And this is the heart of the film's wisdom, and of its response to the lamentations of Justice Thomas.
Wisdom does not lie in Larkin's (admittedly complicated and perhaps even cheeky) urging of the rejection of the cycle of youth and adulthood. And it certainly does not lie in Thomas's position, which seems to be that actual maturity consists in some kind of belief in the inviolability of the institutions surrounding us.
Instead, wisdom lies in the recognition that to be human is to be first young and then old. These two conditions, and the others that make them up (childhood and adolescence, young adulthood, the "prime of life", old age, etc.) cannot be said to be better or worse, any more than a creek can somehow be said to be better than the river into which it flows. They are facts. More precisely, they each have strengths and weaknesses, failings and blind spots, things they are good at and things they are able to see that are obscured to the other side.
In other words, what Justice Thomas is declaring, in essence, is that he, being mature, is right, while they, being young, are wrong. He's declaring that his team should be listened to while the other should not, which is not wisdom but arrogant recalcitrance.
For it is not simply that the young will always tend to rebel; it's that there is deep human value in that rebellion. It's the value of intensity, of belief, of having a heart that has not yet died. And to dismiss it, particularly when you've become its target, is to admit that you've begun to forget the entire course of what it is to be human. This is no better than the youth dismissing everything that the aging have to offer, with the one caveat being that the youth might be granted a bit of a dispensation since they haven't yet experienced the other side. All of this is what John Hughes understood, and what comes out so clearly in his film.
In the end, the moral of this story seems fairly simple. When you want to hear about the law, go talk to a Supreme Court Justice. But when you want to hear about people, and about the truth about human life, go talk to an artist.
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