what the film does
saturday, march 24, 1984. five students report for all day detention at shermer high school in shermer, illinois. brian johnson, the brain. andrew clark, the athlete. allison reynolds, the basket case. claire standish, the princess. john bender, the criminal. vice principal richard vernon gives them one assignment, an essay of at least a thousand words on who they think they are, and orders them not to talk or move from their seats.
bender spends the morning defying all of it. he antagonizes the others, argues with vernon, and picks up eight more saturdays of detention. when the five sneak out after lunch to grab bender’s weed from his locker, bender gets himself caught so the rest can slip back into the library. vernon locks him in a storage closet and tries to bait him into throwing a punch. bender does not swing. he climbs out through the ceiling panels instead, drops back into the library, and the others hide him.
the rest of the day is a slow confession. claire describes parents who use her against each other and the pressure of being the popular girl. bender shows the scar on his arm from his father’s cigar. andrew talks about a father who lives through him and a locker room stunt he is not proud of. brian admits he brought a flare gun to school because a failing grade felt like the end. allison is there, as she says, because she had nothing better to do. by late afternoon the labels do not hold. brian writes the essay for all of them and signs it sincerely yours, the breakfast club. bender walks across the football field at dusk and throws his fist into the air.
why this one
hughes figured out that the way to make teenagers real on screen is to lock them in a room and let them talk. the whole film is one location, a school library. the whole cast is seven people. nothing happens except that five strangers become five friends in nine hours. most teen films need a prom or a party to force their characters together. this one needs a detention slip.
the cast is the film. ringwald was hughes’s muse after sixteen candles, hall and nelson had reputations as the nerd and the punk, estevez was still martin sheen’s son, and sheedy was nineteen playing the film’s strangest part. paul gleason as vernon is the adult the movie never lets off the hook. the brat pack label stuck to them for years, invented by the press and resented by the actors, and it started here.
the timing was perfect. released in february 1985, it grossed fifty one million dollars against a one million dollar budget, gave simple minds their only american chart topper, and has not left the culture since. thirty years later the remaster toured four hundred thirty theaters. forty years on, kids still get the detention essay assignment as a joke and mean it.
what stays with me
the ending. brian reads the group essay over the freeze frame, the five of them answering vernon’s question on their own terms. you see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. that is how we saw each other this morning. then the door closes, bender crosses the football field alone and throws his fist up, and the drum fill from don’t you forget about me starts. the film does not end with a lesson. it ends with a song and a gesture, and both have outlasted everything that came before them in the picture.
on hand
the dvd is the universal release.
image: letterboxd og:image (a.ltrbxd.com/resized/sm/upload/6y/th/32/zi/breakfast-club-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg); genuine production still, all five leads sitting together on the library table with the counselor books sign behind them. source luma 96.5, pre-darkened 0.75, baked at factor 0.45, lanczos to 1200x675, on-disk luma 23.6