AUSTIN - A children's choir took the stage before the 30th-anniversary screening of The Breakfast Club earlier this month at the South by Southwest film festival to sing "Don't You (Forget About Me)." The performance was delightful, and the audience, much of which saw the movie when it was released in 1985, howled its approval.
When the lights went down, and the thundering bass line of the original Simple Minds song kicked in over the opening sequence, they went nuts all over again. The nostalgia in the room was thicker than Judd Nelson's brown mane of hair onscreen.
For moviegoing teenagers of the mid-1980s, The Breakfast Club was a magnetic encapsulation of teen angst. By dropping five mismatched high school students into Saturday detention - a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal - writer/director John Hughes indulged our conception of the high school caste system, then artfully blew it up by banding the kids together.
You can relive the bonding Tuesday night, when various theaters in the Dallas area show the same restored version of the movie that played SXSW. The choir won't be there; neither will Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, who were on hand in Austin. Your memories, however, are sure to flood the place. (There's also a new 30th-anniversary Blu-ray in stores now.)
Why do we still care? Nostalgia aside, Ringwald said after the SXSW screening, there's something universal still lurking between those detention walls.
"The message is something that never changes," says Ringwald, who was 16 when the film was shot. "Everybody is an outsider. Everybody feels alone, no matter who you are. That's a theme that resonates with a lot of people."
It certainly resonated with me. I was 14 when The Breakfast Club came out. I played my VHS copy on a loop, memorizing the best lines (I still await my opportunity to call someone a "neo-maxi zoom dweebie"). I tried to figure out which character I most related to. I determined I was some unholy cross between Anthony Michael's Hall geek and Judd Nelson's burnout. Emilio Estevez's superjock was out of my range. Molly Ringwald's princess was hot. Ally Sheedy's basket case was even stranger than I was, which gave me comfort.
But it wasn't until my recent SXSW viewing that I realized what these kids really have in common: They all hate their parents with a fiery passion. Nelson's John Bender gets the raging soliloquy about his violent father, and shows off the cigar burns on his arm. But all five bond over their distaste for mom and dad. As Will Smith would rap just a few years later, parents just don't understand.
In this sense, The Breakfast Club falls right in line with other movies made by Hughes, the '80s muse of teen disaffection who died in 2009. The movie he made right before The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, follows a teen (Ringwald) whose parents forget her 16th birthday. Ferris Bueller's Day Off embraces the anarchic adventures of playing hooky (and duping parents). In Home Alone, which Hughes wrote but didn't direct, the parents forget the kid altogether.
For Ringwald, the actor most synonymous with Hughes' work, this was part of the filmmaker's charm: He never really grew up.
But it was also the cross he had to bear.
"It was really interesting as a teenager to meet an adult who held onto things so vividly," Ringwald said. "Most adults don't. I certainly don't. All my teen years are a blur. I remember certain things, but John remembered everything. I think that's one of the reasons those movies are so real. I think there was a personal cost for him to hold on to all of that. It gave him a very heavy heart."
You get the feeling Hughes would have enjoyed that children's choir. Here was a group of cute little tykes singing a song about lost innocence. For them, high school and its cliques still waited a few years down the line. For now they were together, as one voice.
