Coming of Age Films—The Breakfast Club

Last week we began a 3-film John Hughes extravaganza with Sixteen Candles [1984] the film about Samantha, who’s turning 16 but nobody in the family seems to remember that fact because her sister’s wedding tomorrow is the focus. Plus, she’s enveloped by this big crush… so, basically, normal teen angst and Samantha is a pretty normal teen.

Hughes followed this up with The Breakfast Club [1985] which gives us a different group of teens—not one of which is ‘normal’ by teen standards. The five teens in question are at school on a Saturday for a day-long detention. And each of them is from a different clique—so they have very little in common. There’s a prom queen, a jock, a loner, a delinquent and a geek. Are they all just stereotypes? Kind of. But it’s interesting what a good writer can bring to a stereotypical ‘type’ of character. There are nuances in each of these characters and though they all seem quite far apart at the beginning of the film what they have in common, and how they come together by the end, is what makes this film so special.

Take a look at a trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSXBvor47Zs

One of the reasons this film has maintained its following is that it lets all the characters ‘out’ of their stereotypes and shows how nuanced they are. The jock is more than ‘just’ a jock. And the prom queen—who should be full of self-confidence, shows her own insecurities, too. No one is just their stereotype. And by the end, they realize they’re more alike than different.

This points to a really important part of creating characters. To some extent, you always start with a ‘type’—the self-sacrificing single mom, her drug-addicted sister, the sister’s husband who fuels her drug habit by having blatant affairs that depress her and keep her turning to drugs. And on and on. How the kids in these two families are affected, how the single mom tries to find a partner, etc. You can start with that type—the self-sacrificing single mom—but you expand that character to include sides of her personality that, at the beginning of the film, you wouldn’t have imagined could exist.

So what’s happening here? As a writer, you continually work to surprise your audience with the nuances of each character, you have the character do and say things that—when we first meet them—we couldn’t have predicted they would do or say.

And that’s one of the big keys with character—surprise. If you just have a stereotypical teen, your audience’s interest will never morph into something more than a normal paying attention to the story. But with characters who transcend their ‘type’ that audience interest can keep them riveted to your story.

Teen films are often full of angst, and what the Breakfast Club did was to capture that angst, in all of its hilarious and moving complexity.

Next week, John Hughes continues his dominance of the teen film with the iconic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Copyright © Diane Lake

04Jul21

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