What's Wrong with Pauline Kael's Original Review of "The Breakfast Club"

Everything, and it's the difference between Gen-X and "Greatest Generation" types

I’ve been drafting a series for paid readers on “How to Watch a Movie,” which is getting lengthy and delightfully out of control. You’ll see that soon.

But first, I break from that to pick on Pauline Kael, among the most revered movie critics ever.

Let’s look at her original review of John Hughes’ Gen-X classic, “The Breakfast Club” (1985). It’s got quite a few howlers, and a great number of declarations that time has shown to be ridiculous. Such is the fate of movie critics everywhere, present company included.

One intention here is to debate what ought to be said and noticed in movie criticism, amateur and professional. A great number of critical assumptions will be brought into the light and examined below. For those of you on letterboxd.com, this writeup below is an extended, elaborated version of what I posted for free there.

(My videos on this movie so far are here and here.)

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Onto Kael’s review, which begins:

"Most of THE BREAKFAST CLUB takes place in the library of a suburban Chicago high school where, for various infractions of the rules, five students are serving a 7 A.M.-4 P.M. Saturday detention. Each of the five is a different type, and together they form a cross-section of the student body. They are a champion wrestler (Emilio Estevez), a popular redhead "princess" (Molly Ringwald), a grind (Anthony Michael Hall), a glowering rebel-delinquent (Judd Nelson), who wears an earring, and a shy, skittish weirdo (Ally Sheedy). They walk in not liking each other and with their defenses in place. But they're like the homosexuals who gathered at the party in THE BOYS IN THE BAND and played the "truth game." In the course of the day, under the prodding of the rebel and the mellowing effect of the marijuana he provides, they peel off layers of self-protection, confess their problems with their parents, and, after much shedding of tears, are stripped down to their true selves. When the doors are opened, they walk out transformed. They know who they are; they know who the others are. THE BREAKFAST CLUB is A CHORUS LINE without the dancing. It's THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL as a sitcom. This is a very wet movie (and a very white movie), but it is a box-office hit, and has been widely praised for its seriousness. "It's the kind of mature teenage film I enjoy seeing" is one of the quotes used in the advertising."

It's intriguing she picked up on the "white" element this early, a charge that would've been leveled in the PC-aware early 1990s, and certainly in today’s supercharged version of the early ‘90s.

However, Director Hughes' major social-identity concerns were obviously socioeconomic class and age. These are the focii in “The Breakfast Club,” while a thousand other things are not.

For Kael to say what the movie is not is possibly to introduce an *ought* into movie-making, a tacit and prescriptive creative limitation. This says more about the critic and her preferences than about the artwork. (And, yes officer, I’m guilty as charged for such statements, too.)

I am for taking movies mostly as they are, for what they are, and not for what they are not. They create their own terms upon which criticism of the work must be built. Sometimes they doing have glaring holes that depart from real-world norms. Sometimes, not as much as the moralists think.

I also think today's movies could use a bit more socioeconomic commentary, as Ms. Kael's charge about this movie's depiction of race could be leveled against a host of today's movie's that ignore class altogether.

"The writer-director John Hughes, who made his directing debut just last year, with the uneven but light and peppy SIXTEEN CANDLES, has gone the group-therapy route this time and has also fallen back on the standard device for appealing to teen audiences, the device of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS: blaming adults for the kids' misery. Each kid in turn tells the group of the horrors of home: the wrestler's father pushes him to compete, the princess is given things but not affection, the brainy grind is pressured to be a straight-A student, the (secretly sensitive) rebel is beaten and burned by his brute of a father, the shy girl—the basket case—has parents who ignore her. It's she who puts her finger on the source of all their troubles. "It's unavoidable," she says. "When you grow up, your heart dies." 

Okay, here I've got to ask why criticism like this—and I am usually to blame here too—automatically assumes that these five kids represent everybody in the audience and their troubles.

Are they not five individuals? I thought the movie was trying to say, as in the nerd character’s essay, that the kids are seen as types, stereotyped badly, but they want to be known as individuals.

The eternal struggle for all readers and viewers of art is to figure out whether to take characters as individuals, as general types, or as individuals who are representative types. A work like “The Breakfast Club” just happens to be talking explicitly about how viewers should approach the characters themselves, as well as any real-life person assumed to be just a type.

In this case too, “The Breakfast Club” is a 97-minute movie, a short story essentially. It's easily viewed differently than Kael’s way of looking at it.

It’s not universalizing parent-child trouble necessarily; it's bringing up a common, typical problem. 

Critics, me included, need to think more probabilistically about the particularity of movies, and not as universally about their presumed prescriptiveness. This is really the crux of where I differ with Kael here.

For example, which of these is the best critical statement about any movie like this?

• “This movie is universally stating that all parents are haters.”

• “This movie is stating that most parents are haters.”

• “This movie is stating that some, maybe many, parents are haters.”

I submit the bulk of movie criticism is too much into universalizing everything, as Kael does here.

Better would be to take a movie as making a probabilistic statement, such as “some,” “many,” “most,” “several.” I find it very rare that a movie is clearly signaling that it’s saying something about every kind of a certain category of person via one representative character. E.g., Anthony Michael Hall’s “Brian Johnson” character does not represent all nerds, just several, or most, whatever you prefer.

Again, “The Breakfast Club” is totally self-aware of this general universalizing-of-types problem. The kids in the movie are ridiculously self-aware. One of the movie's points is that they are mature enough to know that they know. And for their entire lives, including in the movie, they've been stereotyped as juvenile, emotionally backwards children who aren’t self-aware.

Nope, as we see and as they show, they are budding adults. And that means they can say lines like "What if we turn into our parents?"

So they are aware that they too are the problem!

This then is hardly pandering to a teenage audience, as Kael would have it. Although I can see why Kael sees it this way, the movie is not necessarily saying that kids=good, parents=bad. 

A lot of this movie's gentle finger-pointing is not just at 40-somethings; it's also pointing at kids in the audience themselves, who bully, stereotype, play false roles, and lie constantly to seek status. Obviously, they are really hurting each other. The onus of the necessary reform here is on the teenagers. Otherwise, the movie would signal that they are only angels and the Boomer parents are only devils. It does not.

The last point about Kael here is that she will ignore the historical context throughout the review. This may be because of her Manhattanite, literati lifestyle, which can make one out of touch with anybody else for sure.

Anyway, it's now well known that American Gen-Xers were f***ed over -- er, pardon me for feeling so strongly here -- I mean messed up by being a "latchkey" generation. Not everybody, but a lot of them.

The Ally Sheedy character, the “basketcase” character named Allison, voices that. It's depicted and described in like about 100 good 1980s movies, too.

You would think anybody in the 80s would get the message that they have a massive social problem on their hands. Let any critic talk about that, what the movie is trying to describe about real-life problems, and whether or not it does that justly.

"During the confessions, faraway synthesizer-organ sounds come toward you. And, as if the truths being uncovered in the library weren't enough, in the basement the janitor (John Kapelos) is doing a truth-telling number on the dean (Paul Gleason) who is proctoring the detention. The dean's heart is dead, all right—he hates the students. He's a bureaucrat who's in the school system strictly for the money. He tells the rebel that he's not going to let anyone endanger his thirty-one thousand a year."

It should've been obvious that this is a prison-camp movie, a much more stinging and apt criticism than Kael can detect.

And Hughes' giant point—perhaps sailing over the heads of various elites like Kael—is that school systems are akin to prisons. They are the one sure place in life where most people experience constant verbal abuse and imminent threats of violence. And that happens to kids, repeatedly, for 12 years straight.

Who isn't traumatized by their school experience?

The principal is therefore a kind of warden. If any of you have experienced this kind of person in real life, as adults, the Vernon character isn't necessarily any kind of exaggeration. His pent-up regret at sinking so low in life, combined with his status concerns, wreck him and cause his tyranny. The movie is making a comment on how, in microcosm, these mini-tyrants arise in local places. 

"Young audiences have always been suckers for this kind of flattery. They love hearing kids swap stories about how rotten their parents are, and no doubt they like to see all this viciousness loaded on the school official. The budding neuroses that made these kids antagonistic to one another are cured by their coming to see their parents and teachers as the common enemy. Watching as each kid bared his psyche, I had the hopeful thought that maybe this script was something John Hughes had written several years earlier (long before SIXTEEN CANDLES). I would like to believe that, because he has another picture coming out in a few months. He does have talent, but in THE BREAKFAST CLUB it's tucked in around the edges of his schematic plot."

Easily the most criticizable part of the movie is the "happy ending”, where the movie does stereotype itself, after criticizing stereotyping. E.g., the basketcase becomes a princess via the princess' makeup kit. And also two unlikely romances bud, after just eight hours of detention. 

Still, it's pretty obvious that Hughes is doing a Frank Capra-esque picture. Take it or leave it. Hollywood has always romanticized everything, including in most movies that Kael herself loved.

In fact, the last shot, which looks extremely triumphant, is far more complicated than a simple happy resolution. It quotes "The 400 Blows," freeze-framing Bender. As is known, that freeze-frame technique solidifies something moving towards freedom, not allowing that freedom to be gained just yet, but holding the promise that it might get it. Bender is not going to have the most pleasant months ahead, with all the detentions he got and with his harsh family life at home.

That alone should tell us this movie doesn’t necessarily have a "happy ending.” The kids, as we said, are ridiculously self-aware. They know that school on Monday will be trouble, since they are now friends with each other, and yet they will have to choose whether to show that to their cliques. It may be that Clare dumps Bender next Wednesday, for all we know. 

Ms. Kael hadn't been in high school for awhile at this point. I wonder if she knew what was going on in real high-schools. Hughes simulates something that probably ought to happen but doesn't: the aired honesty of suppressed young people. 

Speaking personally, Brian's and Andrew's pressures were real to me — the nerd’s and the jock’s. And I still have students get upset when they get an A-, or when they miss 5 points that are worth 0.005% of an overall course grade! Who in the world is telling them to get upset about such trivialities, the movie asks? As well, who is helping them get over their illusions?

I'm imagining there are so many variations on Bender and Allison, too.

Last, this movie doesn't even depict single-parent or no-parent students. Which is a kind of *a fortiori* argument on behalf of Gen-X writ large.

"Hughes' production unit is based in Chicago, and that seems to be good for his ear. When the kids are just killing time and being funny when they're not being challenged by the rebel's probing—the dialogue has an easy, buggy rhythm. (There are stray bits of oddball parody when you can't tell exactly what is being parodied.) But the scenes involving the snotty, callous dean ring false right from the start, and though Paul Gleason seems miscast, maybe anybody playing this villain would seem miscast. Judd Nelson's role as the catalyst-rebel—the working-class kid who's good with his hands (he loves shop), and is also a hipster, and fearless—is a dud, too. And Nelson doesn't seem to have a speck of spontaneity. After his early scenes, he becomes too self-pitying, and he's given to tilting up his head and pointing his nostrils at the camera."

“Ring false from the start.” Such a line always and everywhere has an implied “I think” before it. This is straight opinion offered as critical declaration of truth. I despise this, usually. I think we all should give the qualifier before such statements: “I think the depiction of the dean is false.”

That’s because it’s a bullshit statement, and so at least when it’s grounded in the subjective, it seems less bullshitty.

Contra Kael, Paul Gleason is quite good as the principal, and if you haven't experienced school discipline before, maybe you have no concept of what it's like to be harassed by superiors like him within a bureaucracy that you are forced to participate in. 

So then Kael says what probably everybody can agree is her dumbest comment in the entire review: that Judd Nelson's role as Bender is "a dud."

That was an epic fail of a statement. 38 years after the film’s release, I saw a student dressed as Bender last Halloween. I bet Judd Nelson is stopped every day in the street to get Bender quotes thrown at him.

Bender's playing the motley fool to the corrupt power-elite. He's been harassed and stereotyped worst of all, but he's full of potential. He's an intelligent guy.

Probably he grew up to be Ms. Kael's investment banker.

I also think Bender's "self-pity" is obviously part-show on his part, and it's not something we have appreciate at all. He *is* too sulky at times, but Kael is wrong to omit that he's criticized for it by characters in the film. This criticism of teenage-rebel sulk is not something that “Rebel Without a Cause” engages in. Again, the onus of the reform is on the kids themselves, who have been as false and vain as the parents they criticize. Bender’s flaw is his sulk; he needs to get over it, despite massive hardships placed on him.

The beauty of a well-done Grand-Hotel movie like “The Breakfast Club” is that none of the types get to dominate. Each plays off of each. Each checks each.

In that shot where Bender pulls a knife, he puts it in the chair. It's sad, wreckless, self-pity galore. Guess what happens? The "basketcase" reaches across, at the bottom of the frame, and grabs the knife, defusing the situation. That always gets a laugh for an audience I screen the movie in. Here, self-pity is undercut. This happens again and again throughout the film.

"The four other leading performers fare a lot better. As the straight-arrow jock, Estevez (who was the kid in REPO MAN) isn't particularly enjoyable—he's a little heavy on sincerity—but he does a creditably simple job, especially in his long monologue about his father's always telling him to ''win, win." Molly Ringwald's role isn't as fresh or festive as her birthday-girl part in SIXTEEN CANDLES, but she slips into the well-heeled Miss Popularity languor without any unnecessary fuss. And Anthony Michael Hall, whose teeth are still in the braces he wore in the gleeful role of Geek in SIXTEEN CANDLES, delivers a thoughtful, nuanced performance. He's the pale, tall, thin boy who is an ace at book learning —he excels in math and is active in the Physics Club—but is a frightened, virtuous dork away from his books. The fine-featured Hall takes this traditional namby-pamby good-boy role and fills it out with fresh emotion. (He's prodigious—he comes close to flooding a role the way Debra Winger does.)"

I really hate criticizing actors like this, especially young ones. The major problems with this are basic: actors depend on directors, lighting, makeup, casting directors, editors, the script, and on and on.

If you don't like their performances, blame everybody, not just them. 

But time has proven this picky criticism of this particular film wrong: the five actors work well as a unit.

In an ensemble, what must be criticized is not just individual performances in, but really how the actors blend together as a larger social entity.

"But the only performance that has a comic kick to it is Ally Sheedy's. She's a flip-out, a girl who hides in her clothes and thinks she's being a loner and a mysterious recluse. Bundled up in black shawls and layers of cloth, she's like a junior Madwoman of Chaillot; with her forehead hidden under her dark hair, and her chin held down, she's furtive yet bold. Her minx's face is a tiny triangle in the darkness. When she moves, she darts, and when you see her eyes they dart, too, and flash—they're the eyes of someone who's secretly grinning. Crazy sounds come out of her, and she does eccentric things—like drawing a picture of a winter scene and shaking her dandruff on it for snow. She's a marvellous comic sprite, a bag-lady Puck. And then John Hughes makes his soggiest mistake: the princess takes her in hand, scrubs all the black eye makeup off her, gets her out of her witches' wrappings, and brushes her hair back and puts a ribbon in it, and she comes forth looking broad-faced and dull. But she's supposed to be beautiful, and she captures the jock's heart."

I agree that this should not have been in the movie. It now seems extremely corny to college students who watch the film and see her transform. They have seen this cliche, and it rings hollow.

But again, we’re in a Capra-esque.

"The picture opens with an epigraph from David Bowie's "Changes": "And these children that you spit on/as they try to change their world/are immune to your consultations./They're quite aware of what they're going through." And the picture closes on the group leaving the school with all their new understanding, and the now smiling rebel flinging his fist straight up in the air, in a gesture of defiance, solidarity, triumph. But all that this encounter-session movie actually does is strip a group of high-school kids down to their most banal longings to be accepted and liked. Its real emblem is that dreary, retro ribbon."

“Encounter session” is a slam at sham group-therapy techniques that Kael likely encountered in the 1970s.

But I know of many psych professors who have used this movie in their classes. The intricate movements of the long confessional scene, from 1:06:40 to 1:26:05 or so, cannot be contained or fully described in a hundred books of psychology, it is so complexly beyond scientific reduction.

By the way, "banal longings to be accepted and liked"? This is probably the part of Kael’s review I hate most.

The movie strives really hard to undercut vain longings to be accepted and liked, particularly status concerns. The characters are slashing at each other’s petty conceits and shows. Why else is Moliere himself directly brought up?

And the movie then builds back up their genuine human needs to be accepted and liked. The kids want to be known and acknowledged for who they are. The film attempts to give them that, albeit in one brief day. 

Every single person ever, as far as I know, has that deep need. We need to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be known and loved. You cannot exist as the invisible man, a bit of wisdom from Plato’s “ring of Gyges” myth. So who will acknowledge and affirm you as you, I mean the good and great parts of you that need to flourish?

When the Sheedy character says she's ignored at home, that is a potent tell: she needs to be acknowledged and known, but no one cares. Perhaps that is why she's a "compulsive liar." Those lies get attention, a sign of a deeper need.

How the hell is such a longing "banal” then, as Kael says? I would say it's absolutely crucial to be a human being!  Because of that, it will never be banal. Even the need to be seen in terms of one’s social status—vain as that is—is a sign of the great and good need to be known.

Now, since the movie is in the context of the Gen-X latchkey generation, this longing has extra-resonance. You get kids, en masse, left at home to fend for themselves. That's a huge number of kids at this time not being "accepted and liked," I mean genuinely liked by warm fatherly/motherly/sibling/friend figures. They are ignored, dismissed, despised, put down. Every character in the film has their own particular problem here.

The movie is a fine description of this American cultural problem circa 1985, one that probably still abides today as well, given this movie's popularity and resonance.