Generation Z Meets ‘The Breakfast Club’
‘I can’t believe they went without social media in the 1980s,’ one of my high-school freshman students said.
She was referring to “The Breakfast Club,” which I had just watched with my high-school freshmen. We had recently read “The Odyssey” and I thought it might be fun to see a movie that also deals with identity and belonging. I hoped my students would see connections between “The Breakfast Club” and “The Odyssey” about the distance one gets and doesn’t get from home. I was their age in 1985, the year the film came out.
“The Breakfast Club” is about five high-school students who bond during Saturday detention. Each represents an archetype—nerd, princess, jock, basket case and burnout—which makes their connection more poignant.
The movie had a big effect on me. I envied the intimacy among the detention-shackled teens. My students were envious for different reasons. They were shocked that the characters went a whole day without social media or parents, and that they spoke candidly about sex and self-loathing—conversations unlikely to happen in school today.
“We’re never unplugged,” one student said. “Group texts, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok 24/7.”
When I was in high school, my friends and I had space from our families during the school day, and from each other at home. Social media has blurred these lines, and it is costing our students. They’re struggling more than ever with anxiety, depression and short attention spans. My students know their lives aren’t like the movies, but they’re living every moment on-screen.
In 1985 I loved “The Breakfast Club” so much that I skipped gym class to get a Saturday detention. I thought it would be like in the movie—deep conversations with characters played by Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and other stars. It wasn’t. No one opened up about teenage angst. Someone shot a spitball. I hoped my father would drop me off and pick me up like the teens in the film, but he said no. I walked to and from school that day wondering if my life would ever be like the movies.
After school the day we watched the film, my students rushed out with the other 4,000 teenagers. Some walked, took the bus, got a ride, rode their bikes or skateboards. I headed to the faculty parking lot overlooking our sports field. For a moment, it resembled the field that John Bender (Judd Nelson) crosses in the film. The grass was plush, the bleachers empty. I pictured him walking and raising his fist in that final scene to the Simple Minds song, “Don’t You (Forget About Me).”
Yet as I sat in school traffic, I stared again. It didn’t look like the field in the movie at all. The parking lot was too close, the bleachers a different scale; the grass needed watering.
Some of my students whizzed past me. Real life might not be like the movies, but for a moment—wind in their hair, backpacks slung over shoulders, alongside friends—they looked like teens from any era. Perhaps the commute itself could provide space from the adult world, for while they were riding, they existed in a neutral space of aliveness—offline, untethered, neither in school nor home, neither bored nor plugged in. As I drove out of the parking lot, I was envious of their youth, and grateful for the distance.
Ms. Shulman is a high-school teacher in Evanston, Ill.
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