39 Year Later, The Breakfast Club Star Questions Her Trademark Movie’s Timeless Appeal

Summary:

• The Breakfast Club, despite being the 1980’s classic coming-of-age movie, can be criticized of its irrelevance to today’s norms of society,
• Molly Ringwald, who starred in it as Claire, has recently shared her impression after the rewatch of the movie, calling out aspects that “haven’t aged well”.

Back in 1985, John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club was not only a massive public success, which grossed $51.5 million against a budget of $1 million, but also a critically acclaimed indie drama. Telling a story of five high school teenagers of different social statuses, who are left for a detention with their authoritarian vice principal, the nostalgic coming-of-age movie has become tightly associated with the era of the 1980’s.

However, despite its wholesomeness and being definitive to the whole generation of back-then teens, nowadays some aspects of The Breakfast Club’s plotline may raise some questions. Surprisingly, the movie’s critics were joined by its leading star, the 1980’s girl-next-door actress Molly Ringwald, who played Claire the Princess.

In the actress’ recent interview with The Times of London, she said she sat down to rewatch the movie, which made her a worldwide movie celebrity, with her 21-year-old daughter, the actress Mathilda Gianopoulos. During the process of revising it, Ringwald understood the movie doesn’t pass the test of time due to the plot’s controversy.

“There is a lot that I really love about the movie but there are elements that haven’t aged well — like Judd Nelson’s character, John Bender, who essentially sexually harasses my character. I’m glad we’re able to look at that and say things are truly different now,” the actress stated.

The point here is that John the Criminal, the most repulsive Breakfast Club’s character, was laying into Ringwald’s Claire due to her being much more privileged, but then the girl out of nowhere started sympathizing with him, and the two ended up sharing a kiss.

“Yeah the whole falling for people who treat you like sh*t never worked for me,” sarcastically joins the actress’ criticism of this movie user Lebronforpresident24 in a Reddit discussion.

However, it’s obvious that the filmmakers don’t write scripts “anticipating social changes 40 years later”, as voiced by Redditor LeoMarius, and back then it was not considered as an act of harassment, but could rather be perceived as a poor screenwriting decision.

There are a lot of classic movies which for some reasons can now seem outdated, thus, The Breakfast Club doesn’t lose its significance for both cinema history and its fans.

You can revise the 1980’s classics, as it’s available on Netflix and Prime.

Source: The Times