I grew up with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, Home Alone and Dennis the Menace, but for whatever reason, I never borrowed The Breakfast Club (or Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles) from the video store. I recently watched The Breakfast Club for the first time. It was an intriguing film, basically set in one space, similar to Reservoir Dogs. (I imagine that both films have been adapted this for the stage since.)
It is intriguing watch these films with hindsight, as Ringwald touched on in her 2018 essay rethinking her three films in a post-#METOO world:
John’s movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel, and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teen-agers experience. Whether that’s enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say—even criticizing them makes me feel like I’m divesting a generation of some of its fondest memories, or being ungrateful since they helped to establish my career. And yet embracing them entirely feels hypocritical. And yet, and yet. . . .
How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art—change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.
Source: What About “The Breakfast Club”? by Molly Ringwald
There is something fantastical and absurd about all these films. But on a serious note, when were smoke detectors invented and where is the duty of care with leaving the students unattended for large swathes of time?