By the time I saw “The Breakfast Club,” the movie was already a decade old, and I remember wrongly thinking I wouldn’t like it for just that reason.
I saw it when a person probably should, during junior year of high school, sitting on the floor of a friend’s living room.
It hit me where I lived, from the David Bowie quote that opened the movie — “And these children that you spit on, as they try to change their worlds, are immune to your consultations. They are quite aware of what they are going through” — to the fist thrust into the air in the final scene.
The movie wasn’t an attempt to reminisce about childhood. It wasn’t the work of some guy looking back through misty eyes. No, “The Breakfast Club” was a distillation of what it felt like to actually be living as a 16-year-old. It was funny and sad, awkward and uplifting, all with a killer soundtrack, and all before emo was even a thing.
Much will be made in the coming years of how the movie’s director, John Hughes, died on Thursday: Of a heart attack while walking in Manhattan at age 59. It’s the type of death that carries with it a bit of romance. It’s the way Holden Caulfield might go.
But Hughes wasn’t Holden Caulfield, nor was he the heir to J.D. Salinger, as some have implied.
Hughes was his own thing, his own particular type of genius: a Midwesterner who briefly conquered Hollywood while simultaneously shunning it, a writer who appreciated the humor in a crowbar to the face, a chronicler and consoler of teen angst and a music fan with an unerring ear.
Don’t you forget about him.
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