Here’s an irony for you: the first time I ever watched The Breakfast Club, it was with my mother. I had missed the film in the theatre, thinking it to be yet another piece of flotsam and jetsam drifting along the youth-movie scene of 1985, running alongside films such as Sixteen Candles, which was made back-to-back with TBC by the same guy, and, really now . . . what sort of life-changing art could be made by such “hucksters” anyhow, right? I, myself, was in the teen-angst period of a very wild and unconventional upbringing—almost nothing like what I would soon see depicted by any of the five kids in that movie. I say ALMOST, because The Breakfast Club would soon blow my mind as one of the most important and empathic films ever made about schoolkids . . . but we’ll get there in a minute.
Picture this: in 1986, I lived a life of rock and roll excess with my father. I had a band that played in smoky nightclubs. I smoked dope and did drugs at all hours, took care of myself while his band was on the road . . . and my father even resorted that winter to hacking up the back porch for firewood when the bill money went up his nose. And high school? I was there for one year before switching to a correspondence course made famous by the Jacksons and the Osmonds. My rock and roll parents did that for me because public school was a big joke to all of us and I wasn’t learning a damn thing—plus this way I could rock out at all hours and get schoolwork done on my own fucking time. This plunged me head-first into a very adult world. Very far from teenyboppers with bubblegum lips and the pointless trudging from class to class, seeing it all and absorbing nothing. Truth be told, the three years I spent in JUNIOR high school were really my salad days as a student, during which I attended The Gregory Lincoln “Fine Arts Academy,” which was a disorganized playground for excitable early-teen “prodigies” in its first couple of years, located in one of the worst barrio neighborhoods of downtown Houston (I was the star of the drama department, apropos no?)
But this wasn’t like the “real world” so many others have gone through. Nether here, nor in my one and only year of “authentic” high school, had I experienced the cliquish us-versus-them aspect of the whole thing. I ran with the stoners and the burnouts as a “freshman,” and we were all mixed in like pigs at Lamar High with pretty much everyone else. As far as I could ascertain, the hotties who wore polo shirts also had punk hair. Not a jock to be seen. And it was all bullshit. Boring, pointless, even redundant. Nobody paid attention in class. Everyone ditched to get high on the track. We even had a poor English teacher from Haiti who could barely speak the language, and we all sat in the back and watched the spectacle like it was the Howdy Doody Show or something. One thing was certain: here, we were all cogs in a wheel. Nobody paid attention to anybody, except for the two or three “dudes” you actually bothered to make friends with. The machine was just too big, too well-greased. There were too many of us. Back in the 8th grade I had been well-liked because the place had been unorganized, loosely structured, easy to take over. So I guess, in a way, I HAD experienced the cliques. I just hadn’t known it.
Until I saw The Breakfast Club.
This was in the summer of 1986. My mother, who had divorced my father before I was old enough to remember anything, had decided to “save me from myself” and move back to ..Texas.. from ....Arkansas...., providing “much-needed maternal perspective.” Funny thing is, I had to hear about her real reasons from moving back second-hand, from other people—she never confided in me about the loneliness she had felt in ....Fayetteville.... after I had left her to live with my father. She never confided in me about her dead-end job or the horrors she felt I would be consumed by if allowed to run exclusively with my father for much longer. She was living in ..Beaumont.. with her mother, looking for a job somewhere close to ....Houston....—a town she hated and would never even drive through if there was any way she could avoid it. I always found it very telling about my mother’s uncompromising attitude that she moved back to Texas to save me from myself and yet refused to live in the same city with me—it was part of the reason I left her in the first place. Separated from my father for so many years over a thousand miles had taken its toll on our relationship. By the time I finally left her, we were hardly speaking to one another. And what was my mother’s idea of a better life?
Well . . . she was just as bad as my father, really. She just knew how to get a “real” job and was “trained” for it. (Several years later, she eventually became a piss-test technician at a hospital in Galveston, the hospital that eventually was responsible for ending her life.) But she drank a lot and smoked incredible amounts of home-grown pot—and this was Arkansas pot. Before the ridiculous term “kind bud” was coined, they just called it “skunk weed” . . . and this was the SHIT. My brain was pickled on that stuff for years after my mother’s arrival in Texas. She grew it in her chicken coops “back home.”
As bizarre and even horrifying as some of this might sound to a few of you, it was a very revealing and fascinating time of self-discovery for me, mostly. I was transplanted from high school into the “real” world. My band stomped ass all over town. We got in crazy adventures and I would spend weekends in Beaumont with my mom, getting high and doing math assignments. We saw a lotta movies during this time . . . and one of them was The Breakfast Club. I can’t even remember how we came to the decision to rent it. It was a very lonely period for both of us. I was a child in an adult world—forget about having a steady girlfriend, I was 15-year-old jailbait. (Imagine being an adult vampire in the body of a child and you start to get the idea.) She was cut loose and living with her mom. We hung out with each other at my Grandma’s house when I came to town. Nether of us really knew anyone in that little shithole. Beaumont is where old people go to die of cancer. It was me and mom and Mary Jane. And Grandma, of course. That was good. I got to see her a lot during that time, and it was weird because mom and I would always have to sneak around her to get high and drunk. There was a girl in the neighborhood I liked. She was my age and cute and had red hair. She would always smile really big and swoon “you’re such a nice boy” when I would walk her to the door of grandma’s house after hanging out. I never kissed her. Not sure why. She reminds me now of my last girlfriend. She reminded me then of Molly Ringwald a little.
I didn’t know the names Molly Ringwald or Anthony Michael Hall from Adam. Mom twisted up a fattie and we sat down in the west wing of grandma’s house with a rolled up towel under the door to watch TBC. Judd who? And that Emilio guy? Why did he look so much like Martin Sheen—wasn't he in Repo Man? And, hey . . . that song! It was still all over the radio that year. The band that did it—Simple something?—were constantly bitching on MTV about how they couldn’t throw off the shadow of The Breakfast Club. (Ungrateful fucks.) I would come to know later that the theme song and almost all the score for that film was produced and performed by Keith Fosley, who had been responsible for “the new sound” that shaped Billy Idol’s entire career. I loved Whiplash Smile and Rebel Yell, even as an “old school” cat trained under my 1960s father in an alterno-retro blues club scene. (I rebelled against the old school with my “misguided” love of Motley Crue, too—which still holds, too fast for love, to this day.) I was also a pretty big fan of David Bowie . . . and from the instant his quote from “Changes” appeared at the start of the film, I was captivated:
“And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultation
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through . . .”
And then the screen shattered like a mirror blasted to bits in the unforgiving blowback of a childhood tantrum . . . or maybe the end of an old life, revealing a new one . . .
The movie put me in a hammerlock and never let go. It was funny, giddy, silly, even juvenile . . . and it was also one of the best films I had ever seen. Within a deceptively-simple, skillfully-constructed puzzlebox, it contained insight into the teenage human condition in a way which no film ever had before—and here was the thing: it spoke to ME. Mister “alternate reality.” Mister sixteen-going-on-forty-one. These themes, these plights, these people . . . they were all from the same world, the same reality. And there was a little bit of me in each character. In Andy, the Jock, I saw my relationship with my mom, the expectation lain at my feet and my failure to meet them. In Claire, the prom queen, I felt the pain of being a part of something you have no control over and do not want. In Brian, the Brain, I saw Just Me, filled with talent and ambition that went far beyond anything around me, and isolated by my own “genius” to the point of obsession and even madness. In Allison, the Basket Case, I saw the intense loneliness of belonging nowhere, owing allegiance to nothing, spiraling down and down and happy in your misery, so happy you cry every day. And in Bender, the Criminal . . . well, I saw everything else in me. And in so many other people I knew. I was stunned into damn-near speechless silence. How could these people comprehend and explain the common denominators of our lives so well through such an uncertain and oft-compromised form of entertainment like this? Even Fast Times At Ridgemont High—another “deconstruction” of the “youth movie model” which bobbed to the surface of my tormented 13-year old awareness a few years earlier as an incredibly cynical and unforgiving slap in the face—had not hit the mark with such honesty. In fact, TBC worked because it was all the things that Fast Times was not. It was accessible. It was funny. But it was also real in its unreality. And it had a brilliant hook that reminded me of so many moments in my own life as a kid, and then later—when I would wake up to find myself in a roomful of strangers and allow myself to feel the kind of honesty one can only access when he has nothing to lose.
It’s called Survival Charisma. That’s what I call it anyway. You’ve been there, I bet. You’ll talk to some strangers on a bus, in a movie lobby, or even at a defensive driving or self-help seminar . . . and you may even tell them EVERYTHING . . . and why is that? Because you know you’ll probably never see any of those people ever again. You make these people your friends for just a few moments and then you move on. You survived in that moment. You were charismatic for just enough time to get it all out. And you listened to THEM, too. Or did you? I did this more times than I can count as an only child of bitterly divorced parents—because, before Junior High, I never attended the same grade school twice. Disposable friends. Hello and goodbye. You hope your stories stay with that person whose name you’ll never remember a day or a week or a year later, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe you hope they’ll forget, too.
But what if those five people you were in that room with saw you the next day and talked to you? What if they had really listened to what you said and were moved by it and wanted to be your friend? What would you say? What would you do? Would you walk on by?
Who knew these secrets? What lonely, tortured, insane, talented person could possibly know?
The Man’s name was John Hughes.
Like Michael Jackson, he defined the eighties.
After The Breakfast Club, I watched every damn thing I could see with his name on it. And even the really silly stuff—such as Sixteen Candles, which John held open contempt for at the time because if its more cartoony quality compared to the reality of TBC, the film he’d really invested the lifeblood of his creative spirit in—contained a certain sensitivity and transcendent optimism that could only belong to the same man. Who could forget the music, the happiness, the dumbass jokes and the warm, familiar, everyday-on-HBO comfort of Sixteen Candles? Even the bad guys were redeemed in the end. Making these films was not easy for John. He’d struggled to push TBC through and had compromised Sixteen Candles to the point of its ultimate silliness in the trade off. Most every film he was involved in as a writer—and there were a ..LOT..—ended up taken from him and rewritten by insecure actors and overbearing directors. (I would learn this lesson the hard way myself in my professional career.) This led him from Pretty In Pink to Some Kind Of Wonderful. And to Weird Science and the other classics . . . and then his own empire with the Home Alone films.
And then out of Hollywood, with his kids in tow, so that they wouldn’t grow up in a town of such compromised ideals.
Few are so lucky in this life that they get to even think about making such choices. Few have given entire generations so many hours—in fact, lifetimes—of joy and insight into their own lives and escapism in the grandest gee-whiz tradition. Only ONE MAN was able to sum up the Condition Of Youth in THE most important pop culture teen movie of the 1980s. In fact, John Hughes may have been more important to the eighties than damn-near everyone working in that decade. He defined the age. He spoke to us. The children who were spit on as they tried to change their worlds. Who were quite aware of what they were going through.
Does it say something sad . . . something very sad . . . about the current, neo-fascist state of the world we live in that one of our great orators left the business he was in because it was evil? Because it was poisoning his children?
Umm . . . yeah. It does.
This has been a sad summer. When Michael Jackson died, I was stunned. But wasn’t his death inevitable? Hadn’t he gone down a bad road a long time ago? He was a man crying out to done with, I think—he might have even been a monster, we’ll probably never know the truth. I think we were prepared for him to go, in a way. Not that anyone would have really been ready to hear that the Peter Pan of the eighties, who re-defined generations himself in many different disguises, was gone forever. But this is also a time in which we watch heroes like Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker degenerate into lifeless caricatures, sold up the river by their own creators. We see beloved comic book heroes whose four-color stories are intelligent and complex, dumbed down and made into action movie no-brainers like X-MEN and WOLVERINE and THE INCREDIBLE HULK. And perhaps worst of all, the remakes. It’s like somebody somewhere sold the eighties to the highest bidder. And those awesome works of art that defined our lives—I mean the lives of MY GENERATION—are casually re-created without half the style, vision or spirit, as if the originals are hundred-year old fossils that no longer inspire anyone. Forget art. In fact, forget even popular art. Show me the money. We’ve speed-evolved into a sort of anti-culture that doesn’t really exist. We make new friends on virtual neighborhood websites like this one. We text message our old friends in the middle of real conversations. It’s all about the newfangled futuristic techno age, run by cynical, oh-so-cool twenty something go-getters who think it’s hipper than hell to shit on the past and on anybody who dares honor it. This may seem cynical in itself to some of you . . . but when I look around and see how few heroes are still left, and how many others have left us forever . . . I realize that there WAS a time when human interaction counted for something. A time when we talked to each other in a room. When we bore our souls, face to face, and not on Facebook. It’s never been easy to challenge the status quo in any time—the age of contention is always the most current, if you ask the guy living in it—but these days are really starting to scare me. Badly.
No, I didn’t cry when Michael Jackson died. But I’m crying now. For the oceans of time I have left behind. For the ages that are lost. For the future, which seems bought and paid for . . . and so very unhappy without things like The Breakfast Club. For John. Who understood us. Who may have understood everything.
But remember . . . The Breakfast Club never forgets its own. We will never forget. I will never forget.
Don’t you forget.
STEPHEN
Read this. It is amazing:
http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html