Could The Breakfast Club happen in 2024?

With Cellphones? The Short Answer is No.

I had just settled into my seat on a flight from Caracas, casually scrolling through the movies 10,000 feet in the air, when The Breakfast Club popped up as an option. For the first time in over 20 years I thought “ya, ok, why not?”

I must have been around sixteen or seventeen during my first and only time watching this film, and I generally enjoyed it then. But I wanted to watch it with a new set of eyes as a forty-one year old. Immediately, within five minutes of watching the main characters slowly engage with each other in Shermer High School’s library, I thought: could this movie even happen today? Could five teenagers stuck in detention for 6 hours on a Saturday navigate through similar, transformative experiences like these characters do?

My first answer would be no, and the low-hanging-fruit reason for that response would obviously be: kids now have cell phones. The second after Principle Vernon comes in and lays down the ground rules for the day (“don’t mess with the bull young man, you’ll get the horns”) each student would have jumped on their phones, navigating any corner of their virtual universe that would remove their focus from the banality which consumed them in that shared space. At that point the camera might as well pan out, freeze-frame Bender scrolling on instagram and kick on “Don’t you Forget about me” by Simple Minds.

Roll Credits.

No getting to know the pretentious, yet curious Claire Standish; no mesmerizing monologue from Bender about him and his old man ("no dad, what, about, you!”); no watching Alley Sheedy magically get through the first half of the movie telling us everything we need to know about her character without muttering a coherent word; no classic weed-smoking scene on the second floor where Andrew Clark shatters the library glass with a single, primal scream; no montage to Karla Devito’s “We Are Not Alone,” that cleverly signals the movement from each character’s closed off persona as an insecure high school student to an awakened, community of one, focused on a single enemy of conformity represented by Principle Vernon.

And that, of course, is the beauty of this movie which I completely forgot about until I watched it again–eyes wide opened and in the safe, upright position of my economy class seat now 15,000 feet above sea level, eating salted, Jet Blue pretzel sticks. The boredom of that day forces these characters to take a deep exploration into themselves and their detention center comrades (led by Bender), eventually shattering the bullshit, insecure fronts each one puts on in the hallways of Shermer High School. It’s not a complete transformation of course, things aren’t perfect, (i.e Claire admits she’ll certainly be ignoring geeky, Brian Johnson once this Saturday is over) but we do watch as these young people are pushed to reconcile with their own choices, anxieties and sense of loss as if they were in an AA meeting for angsty teenagers.

Take the forever memorable “Larry Lester’s Buns” monologue given by Emilio Estevez (aka Andrew Clark) in the confession circle midway through the movie. Andrew confesses that yes, it was he who decided to tape Larry’s butt cheeks together in the locker room. As he starts the confession, right away Brian interjects with a “wait, that was you” comment, suggesting that Larry is Brian’s friend and that he’s horrified Andrew was the guy who did this to him. Bender, of course, can only look over and chuckle.

But when Andrew notes the severity of the prank and it’s rationale (“when they pulled the tape off, most of his hair came off and some skin too, but the bizarre thing was that I did it for my old man…”) the tone gets serious. The story becomes awkward and real. We learn that Andrew taped Larry’s buns cause he thought he was weak and weakness, according to his “old man”can not be tolerated. The motivation for such a prank becomes quite bizarre, yet honest; Claire’s face contorts into horror while listening to the details, Brian buries his head in his hand, even Bender looks completely stunned. It’s one of the many moments when conventional wisdom about a character’s desires and motivations break down and we see each listener actively shift their attitudes in the moment. It’s also another example of where conversations between the characters quickly go from combative, to cordial, to revealing, a process one may attribute to, among other things, the painstaking boredom each teen is forced to reconcile with in the library. It’s as if the mundane library environment is its on agentive force, stirring conflict and resolution throughout the movie.

Of course it’s not just the listeners who show change, we also watch the layers of each character slowly peel away into something more authentic as they talk through their issues. Andrew’s monologue about Larry leads him towards the origin of the problem:

And afterwards, when I was sittin' in Vernon's office, all I could think about was Larry's father. And Larry havin' to go home and...and explain what happened to him. And the humiliation...fucking humiliation he mustuv felt. It mustuv been unreal...I mean, I mean, how do you apologize for something like that? There's no way...it's all because of me and my old man. Oh God, I fucking hate him!

We watch as Andrew reaches that dark center of authenticity about himself in relation to others through language. He learns about this deep, unexplainable desire to be accepted by his father that even he barely understands. We are reminded that language isn’t just a means for conveying important information, but a medium in which we become aware of ourselves and the things around us. We aren’t expressing ourselves through language, but language expresses itself through us, helping to reveal a sense of being in the world.

It’s not that young kids don’t have these moments today of course, I bet they do. It’s that such long conversations between people, face to face and forced into existence through sheer boredom, probably don’t happen as much. The sting of boredom or social anxiety usually doesn’t lead us to engage with the Other these days but instead hide away into our phones even more, particularly among college students. The journey towards a “Larry Lester’s Bun’s” type self-revelation within a conversation isn’t instant, one must fight through the physical/psychological/semantic noise that happens during a long conversation before probably getting there. Do we even put in that work anymore?

Depression is high, particularly among young girls, and many people think it’s because of cell phone and social media usage. In fact it’s getting pretty hard, given the circumstantial data involved, to not draw that conclusion at least to some degree. Maybe some of this could be attributed to our attempts to always fill our social needs as humans through emerging digital platforms, where so many conversations run shallow and distant. Certainly we can have meaningful interactions online, but I feel that so much emotional transfer is lost when we communicate in the virtual.

The Breakfast Club is certainly a story about dealing with the insecurities we’ve all faced as teenagers, but it’s also a story about boredom and where it can lead us; it’s about sitting with our thoughts, alone, for a long period of time until that feeling of sheer agony thanks to solitude forces us to engage with the Brain, the Athlete, the Basketcase, the Princess or the Criminal. Today, cell phones seem to be the remedy for this feeling instead, and I’m sure you’ve felt it. Rather then push through the silence at the dinner table and find a new topic to discuss, we jump on our phones; rather then chat up the lady at the convenience store you always see after work, we check Instagram as she rings you up; rather then talk to the human who was sitting two inches next to me for three hours on my Jet Blue flight to NYC, I finished watching The Breakfast Club and read an article on my phone. It’s a habit that might take away the nothingness in the short term, but could remove the long term experiences such movies like The Breakfast Club look to highlight.

As the movie ends, we revisit Brian’s initial letter to Principle Vernon:

Dear Mr. Vernon. We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did was wrong, but we think you’re crazy to make us to write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions. You see us as a Brain, an Athlete, a Basketcase, Princess, and a Criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7 o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.

The kids figure it out: efficiency is great but within reason. Even our definitions about who we think others are can become too convenient in our desire for efficiency all of the time. And isn’t that what escapism through our phones essentially is? Just another efficient way to remove ourselves from the painstaking, banality of existence? Yet it’s sometimes through the suffering of this banality when we find something meaningful, weird or interesting in life, especially within other people. As Emilio’s character admits:

“we’re all pretty bizarre, some of us are just better at hiding it that’s all.”

When I got off my flight I had the Simple Minds song firmly stuck in my head and this sinking feeling that all things new and exciting these days will soon quickly become normal and possibly boring. I mean, I just watched a forty-year old movie thousands of feet in the air in a plastic seat in the sky and somehow I’m already unimpressed with that experience. But as we layer new and exciting ways to socialize online, we shouldn’t forget the amazing things that can happen in face-to-face interactions; the subtle shifts that we might go through in those moments of conversation, shattering our “convenient definitions” of each other.