The Breakfast Club at 40: the teen movie blueprint for better or worse

John Hughes set the formula for many films and TV shows in his wake with his uneven 1985 high school-set comedy

It is the burden of all art wielding sufficiently vast influence that its revelatory power will be dampened by the many imitators following in its wake; if the 1971 proto-slasher A Bay of Blood now seems to be packed with cabin-in-the-woods cliches, that’s only because it coined so many of them. In the case of John Hughes’ ur-teen-flick The Breakfast Club, still bratty four decades after its zeitgeist-capturing theatrical run, its headlining truth that teenagers possess depth beyond their broad archetypes has since been re-realized ad nauseam by generations of on-screen adolescents. (Smaller, ancillary truths, such as the binding potential of cannabis to bridge inter-clique divides, are where the film really shines.) Of recent vintage, high school crowd-pleasers Booksmart and Bottoms both learned the hard way that the pretty, popular girls descended from Molly Ringwald’s princess in pink Claire face private challenges belied by their put-together exterior. Arguably, grasping that other people exist just as much as you do is the defining milestone of the puberty years, but it still behooves a present-day viewer of Hughes’ film to remind themselves that he first broke ground on what has come to seem matter-of-fact.

Hughes’ unvarnished take on youth culture, replete with joints and F-bombs, arrived in 1985 to fill a vacuum of movies about young people in which they could see lifelike facsimiles of themselves. To one side, they had the risible attempts from much-mocked after-school specials to address Big Issues, and to the other, the cartoonish raunch of Porky’s and its hairy-palmed ilk. Following through logically on the anti-nostalgic purview of Hughes’ tenure at National Lampoon, where he punctured Rockwell’s wholesome Americana to find a waking hell in the ritual of family vacation, The Breakfast Club dared to admit that everything sucks. (In this stance, it announces itself as one of the earliest gen X touchstones.) And while that sentiment’s accuracy hasn’t been diminished by time – teens have no money, they live with their parents, their sense of self is a whirling cyclone of chaos – its articulation has.

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