The Breakfast Club, Generation X, The 1980s and the Eurocentric Dominated Culture and Politics of the Reagan Years!

Universal Pictures

The Breakfast Club celebrated its 40th anniversary with a major Universal Pictures rerelease on various movie screens across the nation. The 1985 blockbuster covered the lives of a group of insecure, suburban Chicago high school teenagers forced to spend detention together.

Starring Molly Ringwald (Claire the princess), Emilio Estevez (Andrew the athlete), Judd Nelson (John the rebel), Ally Sheedy (Allison the basket case), and Anthony Michael Hall (Brian the brain), the film, which showcased different teen archetypes who have more in common than what the societal pecking order dictates, resonated culturally and helped launch the ensemble cast’s careers while ushering in the so-called **Brat Pack**. Earlier this year, all five castmates reunited publicly for the first time breakfast club stars reunite since the film’s 1985 release to discuss its 40th anniversary at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo.

The Breakfast Club is one of the most definitive films of the 1980s and still powerfully connects with middle-aged and older Generation Xers like myself who were teenagers at the time. Its themes revolve around cliques, teenage angst, insecurities and competition, acceptance, and relationships. It tells the story of five high school characters, arguably stereotypes, who are stuck in Saturday detention. As the day progresses, they share their stories and discover that, despite being from varying social circles, they aren’t that different after all.

Indeed, before so-called identity politics became a term, producer John Hughes distinctly defined his characters in the most rigid terms, with the facile examples. The film captures the suburban, upper-class, specifically White turmoil and is a less intense version of the 1980 film *Ordinary People*, another film based on the occasional anxiety of upscale, affluent suburbanites in Chicago. In both movies, the theme of anxiety was rampant. This was a common theme in many films of the decade.

The Breakfast Club was producer John Hughes’s second picture. Interestingly, he intended it as his directorial debut, but Universal executives were impressed with another script he wrote, Sixteen Candles, and they chose it to be his directorial debut. Both films were smash hits, followed by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Weird Science (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), resulting in John Hughes’s becoming one of the decade’s most successful, celebrated and sought-after directors. One of the best aspects of The Breakfast Club is the soundtrack, and its opening track, “Don’t You Forget About Me” by the group Simple Minds, is instantly recognizable and still played decades later in 2025.

While the film features many memorable scenes, one that resonated with me was when principal Richard Verona, played by the late Paul Gleason (1939–2006) is deeply engaged in a tense conversation with the school custodian Carl Reed, portrayed by actor John Kapelos. When Verona laments to Reed about how the kids have changed over the years, Reed retorts pensively and confidently in a powerful, brilliant, and astute assessment, “kids haven’t changed, Richard, you have changed.” What Carl was saying is that, no matter how music, television, medicine, and the larger culture transform society, teenagers remain teenagers psychologically and emotionally.

Another provocative and captivating scene, in which the students are sitting in a circle during the afternoon conversing, exposing, and exchanging their vulnerabilities with one another, was profoundly revelatory. Anthony Michael Hall’s character, Brian, comments that, “we are talking to one another now, but will we speak to one another in the halls on Monday morning.” This was nothing short of a touchdown in its candor and underlying uncertainty, skepticism, and mild anxiety.

To be sure, The Breakfast Club was hardly the first film to employ archetypes and stereotypes such as “the nerd,” “the outcast,” “the jock,” “the princess,” and “the rebel.” Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), To Sir With Love (1967), American Graffiti (1973), and other movies did so decades earlier. Rather than have the characters represent run-of-the-mill and largely vapid characters, Hughes instilled a considerable degree of personality in the characters, revealed and exposed their vulnerabilities, and immensely humanized them, thus making them relatable to the audience.

Universal Pictures/Allstar

As with any popular culture entity, the film has garnered it share of criticism. Several critics decried the fact that the film featured only White actors, contained considerable homophobia, and was in certain instances overtly racist. Molly Ringwald, in The *New Yorker* and elsewhere, commented as follows on the perceived shortcomings in Hughes’s films:

“But I’m not thinking about the man right now but of the films that he left behind. Films that I am proud of in so many ways. Films that, like his earlier writing, though to a much lesser extent, could also be considered racist, misogynistic, and, at times, homophobic. The words “fag” and “faggot” are tossed around with abandon; the character of Long Duk Dong, in “Sixteen Candles,” is a grotesque stereotype, as other writers have detailed far more eloquently than I could.”

To be honest, given the time that it was made during the height of the Reagan years, and era fraught with racial, class, economic, regional and various other sorts of social fragmentation. It was an era where Eurocentric culture was disproportionately promoted, prepped, preferred and thus, the film was primarily a product of the era.

Surprisingly, at least to me, there was never a sequel. It was the sort of film that have could have been produced in so many variations — all athletes, all male, all females, racially diverse, socioeconomic diversity, sexual diversity, religious diversity, etc. In all probability, had a sequel occurred, an all-White, heterosexual group of students as the main cast would have been highly unlikely. It has been rumored that John Hughes owned the film rights. Maybe so, but the truth is that The Breakfast Club was generally a splendid film. For many of us Generation Xers who were teenagers during the 1980s, several of the film’s messages hit close to home on multiple levels.

Elwood Watson Ph.D. is a professor of history, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is a cultural critic, syndicated columnist, and author of the books,: *Talkin’ To You, Bro!: Liberate Yourself from the Confusing, Ambiguous Messages of Contemporary Masculinity (Lasting Impact Press, 2021) and Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race in Contemporary America. *https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/K/bo40060337.html (University of Chicago Press 2019)