The Breakfast Club Effect: Coming of Age in Gen X Stereotypes
Forty Years Later: What the Movie Got Right, What It Missed, and Why the Lessons Still Matter
“Simple Minds’ iconic track Don’t You (Forget About Me) was written for The Breakfast Club, but on its own became an early Gen X anthem. I added it to the first mix tape I made in 1985. I’d just gotten a boombox for Christmas. Well actually, I got a clunky clock radio with a tape deck, but begged my mom to exchange it for a boombox. It was the year I stopped being a kid. The time I realized that life will never be simple—neeever.
The song came on the car radio while driving to work just after I found out my brother Patrick passed away. The lump in my throat grew as the song played, reminding me that the conversation I had with the medical examiner hours before was real. How could a lump of nothingness hurt so much? I wanted my brother back. I never wanted him forgotten. How could Gen X even be old enough to die, just like that?
Last month I added the song to my walking outside playlist. When I listen now, I still miss my brother. I still don’t want him forgotten. But I can also feel connected by our shared Gen X memories. Listening to the song made me curious about the movie.
I haven’t watched The Breakfast Club since the eighties and couldn’t remember much. Now, ever since rewatching, it’s been stuck in my head. So I knew I had to write about it—to forget about it (again). I don’t mind forgetting some things. In fact, I’m trying to get better at forgetting.
For the first time ever, the original cast of The Breakfast Club reunited for the movie’s 40th anniversary this past week. I didn’t notice the anniversary until after I started writing this post. It seriously feels like the 30th was just a few years ago.
I know John Hughes movies have been dissected endlessly, but this is my Substack, and I can write about whatever I want. Everyone can read or write whatever they want. That’s the bright side to self-publishing and I love that. (There’s a dark side too).
Nine going on sixteen
My expectations of growing up were shaped by watching iconic teen movies of older Gen X. I vividly remember watching Sixteen Candles in a theater at the age of nine, back when it carried a PG rating (PG-13 didn’t exist yet).
Fast forward 25 years, I rewatched the film with my own nine-year-old daughter. Like others revisiting the movie, there were lots of WTF moments. Every horrible -ism is pictured in every way except the truthful way, showing the problematic and destructive consequences and pain. Some were obvious when I first watched it at nine (like the racist depiction of the Chinese exchange student), others were less so (I had no memory of rape happening in the movie).
Back then, date rape wasn’t considered rape. Victim blaming was common. And the reaction by most was something like, “You should’ve been more careful.” That’s what I thought when it happened to me at 15. That’s what others I knew thought when it happened to them. So I wasn’t surprised to see it when I rewatched the movie in 2009. But still, it felt shocking to see it show up so casually in a movie about kids and for kids while remembering how no one said or thought anything about it at the time.
Although John Hughes movies and similar ones perpetuated discriminatory and predatory behaviors, they also reflected what was totally and completely normalized at the time. That context is so important to remember. The culture was cruel in many ways, and allowed (and even encouraged) people to be cruel, sometimes blatantly and sometimes unknowingly (which still counts).
Gen Xers were raised to be mean and tough, or at least pretend we were. And we were expected to withstand, or at least pretend we did. Who really benefited from learning that? And how many people were harmed by it, sometimes tragically so?
Why do we keep choosing a culture of cruel over a culture of kind? Why do we keep forgetting?
Fitting in and standing out
In 1984, the teen excitement I heard from my older brothers and other kids on my block wasn’t about Sixteen Candles. The Breakfast Club’s filming in our hometown of Des Plaines was much bigger news that spring. In case you haven’t seen the movie (or can’t remember), here’s a perplexity.ai summary:
The Breakfast Club (1985) follows five high school students from different social cliques—Andrew the athlete, Claire the princess, Brian the brain, Allison the basket case, and Bender the criminal—who are forced to spend a Saturday in detention at Shermer High School. Initially hostile and divided by stereotypes, they gradually bond through shared vulnerabilities, revealing their struggles with parental pressure, abuse, neglect, and identity. As they smoke marijuana, dance, and share personal stories, they discover unexpected similarities and form unlikely friendships. Despite fearing their newfound connections won't survive outside detention, they leave with changed perspectives. The film ends with Brian's essay summarizing their realization that they are more than their labels, as Bender triumphantly raises his fist while walking away to the iconic anthem "Don’t You (Forget About Me)."
The Breakfast Club was filmed at Maine North, a high school where my brothers, friends, and I went for open swim night, running around the empty locker rooms and having the pool mostly to ourselves. The halls sat empty, though. Maine North High School shut its doors in 1981 when there weren’t enough Gen X teens to justify keeping it open.
Gen X: Discounted from the start
Our lower-than-expected size made it easier for grownups to discount us altogether, as if we’d never be responsible enough to step into their shoes (even though we often already did, parenting ourselves and others around us).
"You think about this: when you get old, when I get old, these kids, they’re going to be running the country. Now this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night,” Principal Vernon famously fretted about Gen X in The Breakfast Club.
Forty years later, we’re still waiting for our turn as they run the country into the ground. To be fair, I also stay up late wondering WTF I could’ve done better, and should be doing now. I’ve been a grownup for 30 years.
But Gen Xers were never meant to be the main characters, I explain to my kids in defense. Even the brat-pack Gen X movies felt like a re-shuffling of cliques and stereotypes from a white male boomer perspective, with their generation’s coming-of-age transposed onto ours. We were raised to be the sidekicks in society, being who we needed to be to get by and letting others think what they wanted.
“You see us as you want to see us—in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal,“ Brian the brain narrates in a joint letter to Vice Principal Vernon, although the message is meant for society writ large.
Five ‘random’ people
Put five people in a room for a day and see what happens. I love these story plots. I love getting to know random people in real life, too. Most everyone is interesting and likeable once you spend time with them, so you knew the students would end up liking each other. And you knew the movie would follow the typical eighties storyline: Bad boy gets girl. “Pretty” girl gets guy. And nerd gets nothing.
I remember watching The Breakfast Club as a tween wondering what “type” I’d be. Which cafeteria table would I sit at? The outcome felt heavy because your high school type was talked about as if it determined your prospects in life.
I started out a brace-faced freshman in cheerleading who chose plaid skirts and button-up shirts, but I was a new girl at a new school so I thought I could become anything, but not really. I never followed groups but always found people, and then the group found me. I ended up as the type no one thought I’d be, a burnout Bender-like type, and then morphed into a Kelly Bundy type the following year.
Take the social clique group away and all you have are people who are more alike than different.
Stuck in detention, apart from their cliques, the five bonded as they shared home life confessions. “We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all,” Brian declared. The throughline was that all their parents were screwed up, which explained their specific type of bizarreness. I related. Most “rebellious” kids I knew (myself included) weren’t really rebelling. It was more like accepting the “life’s a bitch and then you die” lessons learned at home.
Though obvious, but necessary to note, all of the characters were vanilla enough with eighties-defined attractiveness to not have any obvious barriers to fitting in. Against the backdrop of accepting their limited differences is a movie littered with gay slurs and body shaming.
The homophobia and fatphobia were blatant and unapologetic but mostly normalized to the point of being wallpaper. And that matched every bit of reality I remember and hear from memories of other Gen Xers I know.
Here are two random memories that came to mind as I rewatched the movie: A gym teacher used to call a single student into his office every class for a weigh-in, offering him a dime for every pound he lost. Then there was a heartbreaking story of an older classmate who was relentlessly teased and called “Happy” (as in gay). The first boy’s mother took him out of school because the teasing got so bad. The second boy, a high schooler, died by suicide. And what followed? Nothing. No accountability, no change—just silence.
The all-white and seemingly U.S.-born cast of characters in The Breakfast Club seemed disconnected from the reality of the Chicago suburban public schools I experienced growing up in Des Plaines during the 1980s. Most of my friends didn’t speak English at home, and many weren’t white. That was my favorite part of where I grew up: How amazing to be in a place that brings people from all over the country and world to live, learn, and work together and become friends.
Even the fictitious Shermer, IL (supposedly located in Chicago’s coveted North Shore) would’ve likely been more diverse at the time. But who knows? Each oddly shaped city or school-district boundary told a different story. Chicago suburbs are weird like that. Red-lining never really ended. And Chicago’s North Shore was the least accessible, making its location both captivating and despised, on-screen and off.
Bleak, cynical, and disaffected—and they wondered why?
Although Gen Xers often had lives cushier than any gen in memory, that wasn’t always or fully true. Still, we were called spoiled even when the rods weren’t spared. Punching, kicking, and biting (yes biting) happened. Belts, switches, and wooden spoons were sometimes used. Whether it happened to you or you saw it happening to a sibling or parent, it stays with you forever, the dehumanizing feeling. I’ll never feel “normal” because of it, can you?
Some kids came from hitting homes, and some kids didn’t. So it made sense why Andrew didn’t believe Bender when he did an improv skit showing what his abusive home life was like. Andrew probably didn’t come from a hitting home. But Andrew shut up about it when Bender revealed a cigar burn on his forearm.
Norms on physical punishment were starting to change in the eighties, but change was slow. A girl in high school once came to school with a black eye. When my friends and I found out it was from her dad who punched her because she went out with a boy, we convinced her to tell a school counselor and went with her for support. Nothing was done. It was chalked up to “old-world parenting.”
Although Andrew might not have been hit at home, he later reveals he was raised to be a hitter, a frat-boy bully. Anything goes as long as you don’t get in trouble for it: “Guys screw around, there's nothing wrong with that. Except you got caught, Sport,” Andrew’s dad tells him when dropping him off for detention, one he earned by forcibly taping a classmate’s buttocks together, causing skin damage when the tape was later removed. And his only consequence is one detention? Meanwhile, simply saying “Eat. My. Shorts” gets Bender another Saturday.
It wasn’t as much what you did that mattered as much as who people thought you were and what that meant to them—that coming-of-age lesson was true to life. Don’t trust adults was another, unless they gave you reason to.
The ego-maniacal Vice Principal Vernon was overly dramatized as aggressively militant to the point of quickly villainizing him. But when burnout Bender calls him a “brownie hound” in the opening scene, you know by the following silence it was true. Didn’t every school have at least one scumbag teacher like that? Though at the time, the girl “half his age” would be blamed for tempting him, like in the 1980 song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”1 But also like in real life.
No one thought anything of me and my friends going out with grown men over 20 when we were 15, even 14. Some jokingly called us jail bait because nothing would happen to the grown men. They were sympathetically seen as normal, red-blooded American males. So in my head then, I didn’t think anything was wrong with it either. But even when something happened you knew then was clearly wrong, you stayed quiet because speaking up or saying something did nothing (or worse).
"What are you gonna do about it? You think anyone’s gonna believe you? You think anyone is gonna take your word over mine? I’m a man of respect around here," Vice Principal Vernon told Bender.
Hearing Vernon berate Bender reminded me of my freshman bio teacher who kicked me out of class so many times I had to repeat bio the following year.2 The last time was for laughing during a frog dissection. Instead of the giggly girl I was who was grossed out by touching frog guts (in the days when you had to use your bare hands), he assumed I was high because I wore heavy metal tees.
Why did people make stupid assumptions? I hung out in lots of different social cliques and didn’t find big differences in who had sex, got drunk, or used drugs. It all happened in every social clique and for lots of different reasons (oftentimes not the ones people thought).
I also never understood why simply wearing a suit could inherently make someone more believable. Grownups were so gullible. Sometimes that could work to a kid’s advantage. Other times, you just did your best to stay away, saying nothing and knowing that no argument—no matter how compelling—would change their mind about you or anything else.
Brats of the Me Generation
The Breakfast Club captures the transitional period between traditional and modern parenting. Growing up amid changing norms (hearing something is bad while seeing adults still allow or do it) explains a lot of Gen X cynicism.
It’s true; most parents of Gen Xers I knew (my parents included) had lives that were hands-down harder. Sometimes, you never really knew why because they never really said. But still, growing up as kids of the original "me generation" wasn’t exactly easy.
Bender: "You get along with your parents?"
Andrew: "Well, if I say yes, I'm an idiot, right?"
Bender: "You're an idiot anyway. But if you say you get along with your parents, well, you're a liar too."
The message to parents at the time was: “Do what makes you happy and your kids will be fine.” The message to kids was: “Do what makes you happy as long as it doesn’t interfere with their happiness.” Occasionally, these two roles managed to line up in a somewhat okay-ish way. But when they didn’t, guess who ended up taking the blame.
To our faces and behind our backs, adults called Gen Xers spoiled brats—for reasons that would be laughable by today’s standards.
What counted as spoiled? We slept in our own beds and often had bedrooms of our own, too (and yes, a floor mattress or corner of an unfinished basement counted). We ate junk food, watched trashy TV, and bought crap we didn’t need and left it lying around. And we had spunk thanks to self-esteem-building signs that hung in schools and homes reminding us that we were, in fact, somebodies and not some junk—“cause God don’t make no junk!!” My family had a ditto with the saying hanging in our family room above our broken (but still cool to have) pachinko machine.
We might even be called brats even when we did what we were told. Spending time studying was a sign of privilege, the new “coddling” of the American body (I don’t like the word coddling). But I couldn’t totally argue with them. My brothers didn’t face a military draft like my dad and the generations before did. My boots were fashion statements, not true “shitkickers” like my mom used to wear on the farm. And my calluses and blisters were from playing on monkey bars, not from doing child labor in factories or fields like my parents and grandparents did.
Even if you had a job, most teen/tween-type jobs weren’t considered real work—twisting ice cream cones at Mickey D’s, babysitting mini-millennials in their Disneyfied homes, or peddling scams as telemarketers (at least that’s what those extended warranties I was sucky at selling sounded like). And what about a mall job? Any time spent in a mall for any reason was totally superfluous. No matter what we did, it was considered less hard than what they did, so comparatively speaking, we’d always be slackers.
The “richies” vs. everyone else
Aside from the “richies,” any parental support past 18 was often scoffed at, and any kids getting it were called freeloaders. Still, what parents “owed” their kids was rapidly changing, inconsistent, and unclear, leading to mixed-up feelings and expectations, money anxiety, and guilt (if you got help) or resentment (if you didn’t).
"Oh God, you richies are so smart; that's exactly why I'm not heavy into activities," burnout Bender tells rich-girl Claire, playing into class resentment that started to take off in the newly yuppified eighties. With upper-income families quickly growing richer while family sizes grew smaller, some kids started getting a whole lot more money spent on them, widening disparities between kids at school.
Even by the eighties, lots of people already saw meritocratic success as code for having parents with money who chose to spend it on you.3 Parents who could pull strings to get you into college or keep you out of trouble. Parents who considered your success theirs and had the money to maybe not guarantee your success, but at least put it within reach.
I’m an eighties kid. I love competition and bettering based on learning and feedback. But I also have to hold back my Molly Ring eye roll when I hear talk that assumes there’s one “unbiased” way of defining *most qualified* or *best* or that there’s any such thing as a wholly level playing field. Measures that promote DEI and belonging will always be needed for fairness in opportunities. That’s not wokeism (whatever that means). That’s just from everything I’ve seen and heard from real-world living.
Another Saturday
I had loads of “Saturdays” during my early high school years. Do schools have them anymore? None of my kids’ high schools have. Unlike the movie, our Saturdays lasted like five hours (not nine). We sat at separate tables in the cafeteria (not the library). And ours never had a group of kids from different cliques. It was the same group of burnouts and headbangers that I spent lunch hour with, mostly in the smoking lot.
School on Saturday wasn’t actually that bad. A few quiet hours with a whole table to myself. Sometimes, I’d bring a whole stack of chemistry books with and spread them out. Other times, I came with nothing but whatever was stuffed in the many pockets of my leather zippered jacket. Sitting with nothing to do but stare can be life-changing. Small moments are often when big decisions are made.
Sometimes, the school administrator on duty would have us do office work, sorting papers or changing out bulletin boards. He’d use the time in our presence to give us advice, none of which felt helpful. (The security guard Alice was the one adult who did and seemed to genuinely care.) I mostly tuned him out, but still remember him telling me I’d better turn things around soon if I wanted to end up being “a contributing member of society”—meaning, someone who mattered.
It’s baffling how he seemed to think doing something for society would be a motivating goal for kids feeling dejected by it. But like Vice Principal Vernon, he probably thought he was “doing society a favor” just by saying anything at all.
The Breakfast Club takeaways
Horrific things happen in the world. We know this. But what stands out from my coming-of-age memories was the everyday horribleness by everyone. You were told to only dish out what you can take, but you were expected to take almost anything. No pain, no gain. Don’t be the p-word. Never whine about words: “Names will never hurt me.” (Anecdotally, we may have been the in-your-face meanest cohort of kids, along with Xennials.) And because no one talked openly and there were fewer ways to find people having similar experiences, it was easy to feel like you were the only one going through whatever it was.
The Breakfast Club reflected reality, and that itself had some value, like how it showed Bender’s abusive home life as something that happened and was clearly wrong. Also good was recognizing the emotional pain the others were feeling at home—from being ignored, pressured to be perfect, pushed to be a bully, or put in the middle of fighting parents.
However, the storyline about Brian’s suicidal ideation was woefully lacking in how it was presented. The premise itself was horrible: Brian tries to harm himself and gets a detention instead of help. And then the whole thing is laughed off when the kids find out he was only found having a flare gun—like that meant he wasn’t still at risk of self-harm? The storyline, though, does point to how serious personal or family concerns were mostly hidden, unfairly blamed, and not taken seriously.4
Spot on was the mixed-messaging girls got (and still get) over sex. I felt burned no matter which way I went. But like every girl, a lot of what was said about me or happened to me had nothing to do with what I chose, did, or wanted.
Claire: "It's kind of a double-edged sword, isn't it? If you say you haven't, you're a prude. If you say you have, you're a slut. It's a trap."
Andrew: "Oh, you're a tease and you know it. All girls are teases."
Bender: "She's only a tease if what she does gets you hot.
The Breakfast Club showed and reinforced every toxic male message that dominated everyday life and was driven by pervasive homophobia. It sucked for everyone (except maybe a tiny group of alpha males and their direct beneficiaries). It pressured guys to prove their straightness by dehumanizing women. And the movie unabashedly validated the behavior.
Being a violating and harassing asshole worked—it got Bender the girl (or at least a kiss and a diamond earring). And for Brian, who didn’t have the “coolness” to pull that off, boys learned to lie about it without any remorse on how the rumors would affect the girl. Or if you were someone who might feel guilty about it, just make sure the girl isn’t sitting a few feet away while you make up shit about her.
The movie gave no hints that being an asshole sets you up for a life of loneliness, missing out on meaningful relationships that boys and men also crave. I’ve never noticed them wanting to be in a relationship any less than girls and women. And I know a lot of Gen X guys who have midlife regrets over never having been able to show their true feelings. How many close relationships were lost or never formed because of it?
“Boys will be boys,” the current White House Press Secretary reminded everyone during a recent press conference. Why on earth would we want to go back to the “bad boy” eighties and nineties? Then I remember, she’s around my daughter’s age. She doesn’t remember then. I feel responsible for what’s happened, for how much has been forgotten.5 But not all Gen Xers would agree with my assessment.
Gen Xers voted for Trump in larger percentages than any other age group. But like other gens, not for one “typical” reason. Plus, people reason in many different ways. So I don’t like making assumptions about people I don’t know, period. And I don’t like disliking or discounting anyone. I will actively choose not to do that as best I can.
When I can’t understand something, I pray. Then, I observe and document what I see and hear in my real-world life. Some people I do know—who are old enough to remember the eighties—are pleased with the cultural shift back (and also think it hasn’t shifted back far enough in certain ways). And some would even agree with this sentiment 53-year-old conservative talk show host Megyn Kelly6 recently expressed in a NYT interview: “I shudder to think of what the country would be right now if Kamala Harris had won.”
I feel as disconnected from some social groups as I did in high school. Except it’s worse now in new ways. Social cliques are also algo-derived and reinforced. And teen culture is never-ending. At the same time, I feel more connected, interested, and concerned about people than ever before, even totally random people.
“What’s going to happen on Monday? Are we still friends, you know, if we’re walking down the hallways? Are we going to acknowledge each other?” Claire asked the other four at the end of detention.
The group reluctantly admitted they’d probably slip back into their old cliques, doing whatever it took to fit in and get by. Not much different from what many of us may have mostly done since, but I can only speak for myself. I know I’ve done way too much of that as an adult, and I’m waaay past being of an age when I can blame how I was raised on what I’m doing (or not doing) now.
If things go back and stay the way things were—when bullies ruled and cliques siloed and silenced—it’ll be because we allowed it. And in the end, we’ll be remembered not for what we changed but for what we chose to forget.
Will you walk away? Will you walk on by?
Gen X Heart
Rewatching this exchange, now in midlife, really stood out:
Andrew: "My God, are we gonna be like our parents?"
Claire: "[teary] Not me...ever."
Allison: "It's unavoidable. It just happens."
Claire: "What happens?"
Allison: "When you grow up, your heart dies."
Bender: "Who cares?"
Allison: "I care."
I care, too. I might not have become just like my parents, but their stories and dreams live in me, including ideals that were never mine (and maybe weren’t even theirs). That’s meant sacrificing my heart at times, the same way they did theirs. But I’m still alive and know I can still find and follow my Gen X heart any chance I get. We all can. It’s not too late.
I love teachers. Most are amazing, doing one of the hardest and most important jobs ever. When I repeated bio sophomore year, I had a kind and caring teacher. Instead of judging me by my clothes or inconsistent participation, she helped me see my own potential in science.
Not all parents with money choose to spend money on their kids or help them in any way that’s not mandated by law. It’s obvious but often overlooked. And it’s a reminder not to make assumptions of how “easy” some kids have it.
I cringe whenever I hear definitive comparisons between the time older generations grew up and now. Who really knows? Most abuse, harassment, self-harm, substance use, and mental health issues were never reported, never talked about, and never known outside of a person, family, or small group. People didn’t classify or call things the same way they do today, and the thresholds for anything to be considered a problem were much higher. And when reporting occurred, it was often done in ways that perpetuated racial or social discrimination. I filled out surveys in high school designed to assess risk behavior and overall wellbeing. I answer none of it truthfully. There was such a stigma to acknowledge having any problem. Hiding them was the norm. The shame and fear of retaliation or backlash were so high that people often encouraged others to stay quiet for their own good, no matter how important. Self-censoring is contagious, even when risks are low (except for a small few who seem to never feel a need to self-censor anything—regardless of how mean or dangerous it might be for others. Why is that?).
When bad things are “remembered,” the dramafied ways they’re shown in entertainment media often make the bad things not seem so bad. To fresh eyes, I can see how the Mad Men sixties or “bad boy” nineties might be appealing. That’s understandable. Seeing stuff in real life is always different. I clearly remember how some glamorized stories about eating disorders on TV and in magazines drew me closer to developing my own. Eating disorders looked a lot different when, at 16, I was sitting next to a 30-something mom of three in an intensive care unit of a psychiatric hospital who was so thin she needed a walker to get around. But how many people would watch a story about her daily life?
Why am I mentioning Megyn Kelly, besides her being Gen X? Because Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, recently named Kelly as a most likely example of someone who could be the first female president. Last summer, I wrote about Why Gen X Needs to Lead Now, Before Time Runs Out—maybe I’m A-OK if our gen is just skipped over.
We’re all safer when everyone feels safe, and everyone matters. Caring for everyone is both selfless and selfish. Those are the Gen X lessons learned long ago I hope are remembered after we’re gone.
RECS to read
BOOK: Ignorance and Bliss: On wanting to know by Mark Lilla
ESSAY: Black Americans Are Not Surprised by Dr. Christina Greer
ARTICLE: Don’t you forget about Carl: An homage to the janitor in "The Breakfast Club" by Megan Volpert
RETRO: Read Tom Wolfe’s article, “The Me Decade,” as it originally appeared in a 1976 issue of New York Magazine.
SUBSTACK: What the New York Times Got Wrong About Gen X by
I’m a millennial with a GenX older sibling. We watched this movie to death and I really enjoy this thoughtful reflection on it and the past 40 or so years. It is clear that you did not pump this out with ChatGPT but really spent a lot of time on it.
Thank you.
I love the John Hughes movies, but yes...they didn't exactly age well, but I suppose it was a mirror of the times we grew up in. This is a great deep dive into The Breakfast Club. I haven't watched it in years, but mostly because I feel like I know the movie SO well? But maybe it's time for a rewatch, not because I want to sink myself into the nostalgia, but to see how life has changed, teenagers have changed, how we talk about issues have changed. Great observation about Brian's suicide attempt. But maybe somewhat accurate to how it would have been received back then?