Given that the genre of teenpics has weathered the decades and the concerns of all teenagers everywhere at every moment are in fundamental ways the same, what is new in The Breakfast Club to make it capture our attention? How does it fulfill or alter the conventions of the genre? How does it speak to its era?

The Breakfast Club is a movie about teens and for teens, but it also seems to be a message to parents. The film is rated "R," after all, so most of the "target audience" technically could not view it without a parent to purchase the ticket. Perhaps they would even sit through the show. Richard Corliss notes that Hughes, "has learned [teens'] dialect and decoded it for sympathetic adults" (90). Himself a Boomer, Hughes witnessed the struggles of the Breakfast Clubbers and tried not just to entertain but to issue an alert of sorts to their parents. In the 1970s and 80s, parents, though, were individuals first-highly likely to be divorced, and highly likely to be committed to careers. They were guided by books like Ourselves and Our Children (1978), which insisted that they consider themselves: "'Benefiting our children' they staunchly asserted, was 'not necessarily our first motivation'" (Howe 55). They were reassured that they should not shelter their children, they need not have all the answers. So they would have let their kids see "R" rated movies without asking why it was rated "R," had their kids bothered to ask permission. Latchkey kids and their friends knew very well that you could buy a ticket for a Disney flic and no one would pay attention to which of the fourteen theatres you sat down in. So as much as the message may have been needed, society was lacking in "sympathetic adults," and it was largely missed.

Most adults who did see The Breakfast Club were less flattering than Corliss. While he noted "a minimum of genre pandering," the dominant reading placed the movie squarely within the tradition of the teenpic. At least it was deemed reviewable, which says something for its ambition to rise above the typical teen movie. Highly regarded New Yorker critic Pauline Kael chided Hughes for having "gone the group-therapy route . . .and [having] also fallen back on the standard device for appealing to teen audiences . . . : blaming adults for kids' misery" (124). Scot Haller charges that "the movie vaporizes into an I've-got-a-secret roundelay that is part group therapy, part soldiers-under-siege movie cliché" (12). David Denby calls it pretentious, theatrical, "cheesy psychodrama," (95). They may not have thought it quite measured up, but somehow a mere teenpic warranted comparisons both to existential drama (Brode 144; see also Haller, Denby) and The Big Chill.

Ron Rosenbaum, describing the premise, wrote, "If this sounds like the structure of The Big Chill, it's probably a deliberate parallel on Hughes's part" (96). Whether or not this is true, however, The Breakfast Club earned the nickname "the little chill." The Big Chill is a Baby Boomer look back at the 1960s which rejects nostalgia-"the film basically affirms yuppie values and rejects the notion of clinging to the ideals of the past" (Quart 152). The Breakfast Club "raises the same questions about idealism and disillusionment, but disillusionment has come much earlier to these kids-before they even had the illusions the 60s generation lost" (Rosenbaum 96, emphasis original). While Haller complained that "Hughes doesn't just understand today's teenagers; he enshrines them, suggesting that their problems are more important than nuclear war or anything else in the world," Rosenbaum recognized that the key is not in the quantitative measure of their problems but in the qualitative difference in their perspective (12).

"The peculiarly '80s character of this movie can be found in the acquiescent tone of [the characters'] responses. They see no alternative. Unlike the rebellious youth of the Easy Rider '60s, they don't believe in an alternative vision of society. They've seen those visions fail or become exhausted. Unlike the characters in certain '70s youth movies such as Saturday Night Fever, they don't feel any pleasurable anticipation about the prospect of making it in the grown-up world. All they have is one another and the mutual pleasure they take in their sarcasm, which gives them a little distance from the fate-growing up-they're going to embrace. And they don't even know if they'll have one another once their confinement in detention hall is over. They wonder if they'll even speak to one another next week when they're back inside their insulated cliques and roles" (Rosenbaum 96).

This characterization of Breakfast Clubbers-cynical, pragmatic, perceptive and sensitive youth resigned to their fate-is close to the mark. We're not all that resigned, nor that cynical. There are shards of hope and optimism-hidden amongst the debris, but present. It's easier to see the debris, though, especially when it catalogues so nicely: consumerism, sex, violence, drugs, race, gender, suicide, therapy, crime, education, poverty, divorce, politics, the works. I've never been able to polish off "the works," though, so let's start with five: consumerism, education, violence, drugs, and sex.