Top 5 Reasons "The Breakfast Club" Is a Horrible Movie

Top: Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez.

Middle: Ally Sheedy and Anthony Michael Hall.

Bottom: Molly Ringwald.

February 15, 1985, 35 years ago: The Breakfast Club premieres in theaters.

According to the film, on March 24, 1984 -- the date on the essay read at the beginning and the end of the film -- there were 5 students in an all-day Saturday detention at Shermer High School in Shermer, Illinois, a fictional place apparently in the northern suburbs of Chicago:

* Brian Johnson, "a brain," played by Anthony Michael Hall.
* Andrew Clark, "an athlete," played by Emilio Estevez. 
* Allison Reynolds, "a basket case," played by Ally Sheedy.
* Claire Standish, "a princess," played by Molly Ringwald. And...
* John Bender, "a criminal," played by Judd Nelson.

At the time of filming, Hall and Ringwald were 16, Estevez and Sheedy both 22, and Nelson 24. So only the 1st 2 in this sequence were age-appropriate.

They are watched over, in the school's library, and not especially well despite his boasting, by Richard Vernon, an assistant principal, played by Paul Gleason. I suspect the character was named after John Vernon, who played Dean Wormer in Animal House, as well as the Mayor of San Francisco in the 1st Dirty Harry film.

There are only 8 credited actors in the film. The other 2 are Ron Dean, as Andrew's never-named father; and John Kapelos, as Carl Reed, a janitor. Gleason died in 2006. The rest are still alive, and all 5 "kids" are now older than Gleason was at the time of filming, 45. Sports connection: Gleason played Mr. Cushman, the Yankee executive who interviewed George Costanza (Jason Alexander) for a job with the team in the Seinfeld episode "The Opposite."

Years earlier, Gleason appeared in 4 different episodes of Adam-12, playing a different police officer each time. He also played cops in the films Fort Apache: The Bronx and Die Hard (humiliated by both the terrorists and Detective John McClane), and on TV shows Cagney & Lacey, Dallas, Remington Steele and One West Waikiki. He also played James T. Kirk. No, not that one: A U.S. Army Major in the 1979 film Women at West Point. He also played corporate spy Clarence Beeks in Trading Places.

So he was used to playing lawmen, other authority figures, and alleged tough guys. He parodied his Breakfast Club role by playing an older, but no less nasty and ego-driven, Vernon in the 2001 spoof film Not Another Teen Movie.

The kids go through the day, resisting Vernon and each other. John and Andrew verbally abuse each other. Both verbally abuse Claire and Brian. Claire tries to verbally defend herself, with little success. Brian, as the weak, skinny nerd, is in no position to successfully respond. Allison barely makes a sound, let alone interacts with the other 4, for the 1st half of the movie.

Each of them ends up baring his or her soul, showing that their chosen personalities are the result of how their parents have treated them. They begin to see each other not as stereotypes, as Vernon sees them, but as human beings with feelings.

In the end, instead of each of them following directions and writing an essay about "Who you think you are," there is one joint essay:

Dear Mr. Vernon:
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong, but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are.

You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...
and an athlete...
and a basket case...
a princess...
and a criminal. Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours,
The Breakfast Club.

We never find out Vernon's response. This is what it should have been:

Dear Punks:

I've reviewed the security footage. Clearly, you learned nothing from your time in detention. I am shocked and dismayed that "the athlete" and "the brain" decided that violence was a solution. So you got one thing right: You ARE all criminals. Furthermore, Bender, I have you on record making a rape threat to Claire. And since you've been held back so many times that you are now past age 18, you are going to be charged as an adult. And do you know what they do to rapists in prison? Brian, I don't know what they do in prison to boys who bring guns to school, but if I don't do something about this, here and now in 1984, it could become a problem in our schools later on.

I won't press charges on any of you for the pot smoking, but, Andrew, colleges will care, so you can forget about that wrestling scholarship. Beats wrecking your knee, doesn't it? As for Claire and Allison, at your detention next week, I'm going to show you "The Blackboard Jungle." It's a movie from 1955, about juvenile delinquents. So you'll see who's really in charge of a school, and why they're worthy of respect. Besides, it's a better movie than any you've seen this year. I'm going to use the "bull" analogy again. They say the strongest bull is always the first to the slaughter, but not if he is smarter than the butcher. You may be criminals, but you're NOT butchers. Sincerely,
Richard Vernon. P.S.: I've shown the footage to our principal, Edward R. Rooney. For some reason, he doesn't seem to care. He sees to be fixated on some other kid here at Shermer High.

*

Top 5 Reasons The Breakfast Club Is a Horrible Movie

5. The Ginker Gets the Girl. I was at East Brunswick High School in Central Jersey from September 1984 to June 1987. "Ginkers" were what we called the barely verbal metalhead thugs who smoked anything that would stay lit long enough, like Bender. Ginkers were scum.

I hated Bender from the beginning of the movie to the end, and I had no sympathy for his home life. If he hated his father that much, the best revenge should have been to be a better man. He chose not to be one. Think about it: The first thing he says to any of the others is a rape threat to Claire.

And instead of ending up expelled, and possibly also in the County Jail (or, at least, in Juvenile Hall), he walks away having kissed Claire and received the gift of a diamond earring from her. What the flying fuck?

4. The Corruption of Allison Reynolds. She was the misfit, the one nobody understood. I have no problem with Claire going out of her way to understand her, and make her glamorous, possibly for the first time in her life. But she ends up with... Andrew? She should have ended up with the guy who needed more understanding, Brian. Giving her to Andrew was a major league copout.

3. The Kids Deserved Detention. In fact, with the hindsight of a third of a century, we can see that a common theme of John Hughes' movies is that the protagonists were rarely heroic, and the antagonists were usually just people doing their jobs.

What did they do to get there? Okay, Allison said she'd done nothing, and that she just wanted something to do on a Saturday. Fine, she gets a pass (not a hall pass). The others? In ascending order of offense:

* Claire cut a day of school.
* Andrew taped a kid's butt-cheeks together.
* Bender pulled a fire alarm when there was no fire. This, all by itself, should have gotten his ginker ass arrested.
* And Brian brought a gun to school. This was before Heathers, let alone the Columbine High School Massacre.

Did the punishment fit the crime? At my alma mater, we didn't have all-Saturday detention. Most likely, here's what would have happened:

* Claire would have gotten 1 day's detention.
* Andrew would have gotten away with it completely, aside from, maybe, a stern talking-to, but he would have deserved at least 3 days' detention.
* Bender would have gotten a week's detention, which still would have been fewer hours than all day Saturday.
* And Brian would have gotten some serious counseling. They would have all deserved that.

And none of the four of them was particularly repentant for what they did.

Sometimes, a Hughes protagonist will learn something, as did Neal Page in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Usually, he won't: Cameron Frye may have learned something in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but Ferris himself is the same jackass he was at the beginning of the film.

Which leads us to...

2. The Kids Learned Nothing. Nothing useful, anyway:

* Bender and Andrew both learned you can treat your peers like shit, and still get the girl.
* Brian learned that bringing a flare gun to school, and wrecking your own science project as a result, was more punishable than all the things the bastard kids at that school had done to drive him to bring a gun.
* Maybe, Claire learned to be a little nicer to people, maybe.
* Allison learned that if you sell out, a BMOC (Big Man On Campus) will notice you, so she sold out.

These kids didn't start out as heroes, and none of them ended up that way. And, as I said, none of them was sorry for what they'd done.

Indeed, their bad behavior is actually rewarded. The "bad boys" aren't rebels, they're just bad. They're not redeemed: They're still bad. And yet, they get the girls, and the closest thing the film has to a "good guy" walks away alone, with no hope. The true rebel sells out, and gets rewarded for it. And, of course, the use of drugs helps drive the plot.

The is the most 1980s movie there is. The only thing missing is an explosion.

In fact, there is only one way that this becomes a good movie. And I mean "good" in the sense of "moral," not in the sense of "entertaining." And, even then, it's not a completely good thing, because it would still be a ripoff. And that's if you accept that...

1.  The Breakfast Club is a rip-off of The Divine Comedy. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri published The Divine Comedy in 1320. (At the time, and even into William Shakespeare's time 300 years later, a "comedy" was a story with a happy ending, not necessarily a funny story.) He divided it into 3 parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Heaven).

In The Breakfast Club, Detention starts out as Hell. Vernon is the Devil. The parts of detention when they are having fun are Purgatory. When they're released, that's Heaven.

And the only way it makes sense that the nerd doesn't get one of the girls is if the nerd, the character who appears to be the least powerful, is God. Think about it: Brian was prepared to shoot people with a gun. He was prepared to punish them all for their sins. But he didn't. And he showed the other four the error of their ways, and they walked out as better people. (If, that is, you do believe that they walked out as better people.)

Only it's such a well-disguised message that it took me 34 years to figure it out, and I don't think anybody else has figured it out, either. Certainly, it's no sillier than the long-established idea that the castaways on Gilligan's Island represented the Seven Deadly Sins, and that Gilligan himself is the Devil.

Of course, this theory of mine, that The Breakfast Club is a modern reworking of The Divine Comedy, works out a whole lot better if Claire, an admitted virgin, hadn't kissed Bender, or anyone else, and walked away discovering that she's pregnant.