It’s hard to believe “The Breakfast Club,” the beloved film featuring a group of insecure, suburban Chicago high school teenagers forced to spend detention together, is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

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 showcased different teen archetypes who had more in common than what their societal pecking order dictated.

“The Breakfast Club” 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 stuck in Saturday detention, and as the day progresses, they discover they aren’t that different after all.

Before so-called identity politics became a term, producer John Hughes distinctly defined his characters in the most rigid terms. 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’ 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 Hughes’s becoming one of the decade’s most successful, celebrated and sought-after directors.

While the film features many memorable scenes, one that resonated with me was when principal Richard Verona, played by the late Paul Gleason, 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 is when the students are sitting in a circle during the afternoon, conversing, exposing, and exchanging their vulnerabilities with one another. 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.

As with any popular culture entity, the film has garnered its share of criticism. Some decried the fact that the film featured only white actors, contained considerable homophobia, and was, in certain instance,s overtly racist. Molly Ringwald, writing in the New Yorker in 2018 in the wake of the MeToo movement, revisited 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.”

To be honest, the film was primarily a product of the era. It was made during the height of the Reagan years, an era fraught with racial, class, economic, regional and various other sorts of social fragmentation. It was also an era where Eurocentric culture was disproportionately promoted, prepped, and preferred in movies and on television.

Surprisingly, at least to me, there was never a sequel. It was the sort of film that could have been produced in so many variations — all athletes, all male, all female, racially diverse, socioeconomic diversity, sexual diversity, religious diversity, etc.

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.

Copyright 2025 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.