80sfilms

What happens when a jock, geek, wastoid, prom queen
and psycho spend a Saturday in detention? You get 1985’s The Breakfast Club, courtesy of John Hughes.

Back when I first saw this film, I most readily identified with (and still identify with) the geek, with maybe a dash of the psycho thrown in for good measure. I never was good at sports, nor will I ever be mistaken for a prom queen, and drugs never were my thing.

The beauty of The Breakfast Club was that the film acknowledged that the high school hierarchy was stronger than any friendships forged ramdomly, however deep those friendships might be.

I knew this all to well.

I was a fringe player in high school. Yes, I had a few “popular” friends, but I was not readily accepted into their group.

Pick your reason–I didn’t have money, I wasn’t pretty enough, and boys didn’t know I existed. (Not that I’m complaining, because it was during those four years of high school that I developed by wicked sense of humor–can anyone say defense mechanism?)

That’s why films like The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink and Sixteen Candles resonated so deeply with me–all three featured characters on the fringes just trying to survive high school and move on to bigger and better things.

I like to think that Brian (the geek in The Breakfast Club) became a doctor or lawyer or something like that, married a model and had lots of cute kids; Samantha (Sixteen Candles) married Jake Ryan and together they moved to New York City and lived lives full of promise, excitement and love; and Andie (Pretty in Pink) started her own line of clothing and went on to become a designer to the stars.

Of course, we now know that the geek grew up to be a hunk, the prom queen went on to Broadway, and Jake Ryan fell off the grid.

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