Guest Blogger: Alexa 1

From the entire multitude of movies depicting the coming of age of teens in the 80’s, The Breakfast Club is one of the best. It starts with 5 teenagers from the same high school all receiving Saturday detention for various school violations. The jock, the prom queen, the geek, the medicated neurotic, and the arrogant tough guy, all forced to be in the library together from 8:00-4:00, begin to share about themselves and eventually realize that the stigmas they each had attached to the others were very incorrect. This movie has an all-star cast (at least as young actors in the 80’s) including Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall. They play the parts with excellent precision and a layer of truth that can be hard to achieve. Judd Nelson, acting as John Bender in the film, is the arrogant soon-to-be dropout who acts as though nothing will phase him. Through the movie we see him open up, and learn about some of the adversity he has dealt with in his life, including an abusive father. His desire to mask his frailty by seeming uninterested in even his own life becomes very prevalent. By the end, we understand that he is much more than what he seems. An obvious theme the audience sees throughout the story is that people are more than what they appear. Many times, what we perceive is not the entire picture, if a true estimation at all. Before you allow stigmas and stereotypes to blind you, you must get to know the people around you (and you don’t need a day of detention to do so). Critics agree, The Breakfast Club, however typical and predictable it may be, has a great message and is wonderfully executed. It may be a little old for some viewers taste, but I believe that it is a movie that everyone should see before they get too old to truly appreciate it.