Page 117 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 4

one another, bullied by a frustrated, corrupt, and dangerous school of-
ficial. The film poses the question: What would happen if, unlike Jim and
Judy in Rebel, these kids were given an articulate voice to speak to one
another about their condition? What if they possessed self-understanding
of the sort that comes from having no illusions about the world and one’s
place in it? They would, first of all, speak in the language and style of
therapy, for that is the moral vocabulary of the 1980s. They would see
through the limitations of their roles as jock, princess, brain, delinquent,
and weirdo. They would, like the adolescents of the 1960s counterculture,
find meaning and release in their solidarity. But to what end?
The Saturday detention serves as a metaphor for adolescence—a pe-
riod of benign incarceration. Adolescence has always involved “doing
time”; a protected period in which young people could explore adult
roles and values without sacrificing the rough intimacies and equalities
of childhood. Andy Hardy’s quest for adulthood meant hurdling the bar-
riers set up by adult expectations, as well as by his own immaturity. In
contrast, the young people in The Breakfast Club devote their energies
to frantically constructing barriers, so that they will not have to face the
realities of adulthood. Where once adolescence meant a time of depar-
ture, transition, and exploration of limits, it has now come to stand for
vacancy, accommodation, corruption, and brutalization. Coming of age
in the 1980s entails the realization that after adolescence, there is neither
resolution nor departure, because there is no place to go. “Adolescent”
preoccupations are permanent, incessant, without hope of resolution.
At the beginning of the film, it is apparent that the students have been
sentenced to Saturday detention against their will. However, as the film
progresses, it becomes evident that to some degree their imprisonment
is also self-imposed. The Breakfast Club is a respite from the alienating
roles imposed on them by their parents, the school, and those constraints
they impose on one another through the adolescent subculture, itself a
replica of the hypocritical and brutal adult world. Only in the Breakfast
Club can members of the conflicting classes of adolescent society treat
one another as equals who share common feelings and problems. Bender,
the delinquent, initiates a series of confrontations with each member of the
group. He manipulates the others into painful disclosures that reveal the
degree to which they have been disabled by their parents. By responding
to his attacks, the group pulls itself together around a common fear: “My
God,” asks the weirdo, “are we going to be our parents?”
The tragic answer is . . . yes. Although they have seen through the

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