How “The Breakfast Club” Is Easing My Death Anxiety
Don’t you forget about me.
I am approaching 50 and still love The Breakfast Club.
The film hasn’t aged well, I know. I tried watching it with a teenage neice some years ago, and very quickly found myself saying — multiple times — “We don’t do that anymore. Ooo, yeah, we don’t say things like that. Yikes, sorry, no, that’s not acceptable…” and so on.
This, despite the fact that I proudly wore black fingerless gloves as a young teen, and did everything in my power to work in Bender quotes to teachers. (Sometimes to great effect! But not often.)
So that’s a bummer it’s not the same movie it used to be. It’s also good that it’s not the same movie; it means we fucking learned.
I still love it. Most of my generation does, I think. Despite its flaws, it spoke to a lot of us who saw ourselves in the various charicatures.
(The thing about stereotypes is, there’s a reason they are stereotypes, and the charicature stereotypes in TBC perfectly matched my lived experience at the time.)
I’m a published YA author with nine trad novels at places like Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, and there is no escaping the impact John Hughes had and has on my writing today.