Don't You (Forget About School)

Having just seen The Breakfast Club again for the umpteenth time and with the fall school semester in full swing, I've been thinking a lot lately about my teen years. To borrow a line from Patty Griffin, I hated every day of high school. Really. It was just a miserable experience. I wasn't pretty, I wasn't athletic, and I wasn't rich. I didn't do drugs and I didn't get laid. I was smart, but not "nerd-smart." Add all those things together, and you get what is called the hallway ghost. I don't know if that's what "they" call someone like me, but that will be my term. I was like Ally Sheedy's character, without all the dandruff and with a slightly better wardrobe.

I was always nice to everyone in school (at least I hope I was) but I never really had many chances to be nice. It's kind of hard to be nice to people when they don't even talk to you, or ignore you when you talk to them. I didn't have many friends and wasn't involved in any activities. Thinking back, I can't really figure out if I wasn't more active because I didn't have friends or I didn't have friends because I wasn't active. I think it was probably a combination of both. Believe me, I tried on several occasions to be more outgoing and make new friends, but that generally didn't work. I was always hoping to be accepted into the "in crowd," but actually hung out with the “burnouts” in junior high because they were, I felt, the most genuine people in school. Eventually I fell out of that crowd as I got older because at that age, I wasn't up for smoking doobies and letting boys feel me up. The burnouts were the final frontier, the last group I could cling to. After them, there was nothing. I just became invisible. I basically became what is commonly known as a truant. I just thought of myself as beyond high school. I couldn’t wait to get to college. I was longing for the day when I would be recognized as an individual with a unique set of personality traits rather than someone to be filed under a simple high-school category.

We're all familiar with the different categories of high schoolers. If you were blessed enough to have been home-schooled, you've probably still seen The Breakfast Club at least once. That movie is quite possibly the best movie ever made about high school. It's not the best because of its realism. There is much about TBC that is pretty far-fetched. The reason it's so effective is because it really illustrates how ridiculous high school is. Nowhere else on earth, with the possible exception of Studio 54 in its heyday, will you find such a self-made, elitist society. All teenagers feel the intense pressure to "belong" somewhere. Anywhere. Most often it's the pressure to be popular. No one realizes until they graduate that all the time spent on building up a popular presence was completely wasted. It just doesn't carry over into the real world. And those people who do still judge people by who they were in high school are the biggest jokes around. It's actually sad to think of anyone who looks like a full-grown, mature adult on the outside, but whose head is still back in high school. As Randall “Pink” Floyd said in one of my other favorite high school movies, Dazed and Confused, "If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself." High school is not the golden era of our lives, regardless of how good it may have been for some.

The thing that I wonder about now is this - if the goal was to be popular, why didn't everyone just try to have as many friends as possible? Why not just be open to everyone? Why were we all adhering to some definition of popularity that was made up by God knows who? We could use the excuse that we were just young and foolish, but I don't buy that. And you know why? Because of The Breakfast Club, that's why.

Everyone I knew in high school loved that movie. When it came out in 1985, I was actually only in 7th grade. My life then was much better. I had more friends. I had more fun. It wasn't until 8th grade that things went downhill. To make a long story short, my best friend got mad at me for reasons still unbeknownst to me and started hanging out with a new group, became a cheerleader at one point and then slowly turned into one of the “bad girls.” Whatever. That's not really vital to what I'm talking about right now.

Even in the 7th grade, there were cliques. The junior high wasn't nearly as bad as the senior high, but it was shades of things to come. At any rate, The Breakfast Club was universally beloved. It only seemed to gain popularity as the years went on as we all had opportunities to watch it and re-watch it over and over. I can't tell you how many people listed that movie as their favorite in the yearbook. I can't tell you how many people quoted lines from it on a daily basis. It was, in the parlance of the times, totally rad. I never quite got how ironic that was until after I was out of teen prison and in college. If everyone loved that movie so much, why did they never get it?? For as many times as my fellow students saw that movie, the message never sunk in. Why, when they were all gushing about how great it was, did they never stop to say, "Hey...this movie has a point. Why are we all so mean to each other? Does this popularity contest really matter?"

Now we have a new set of problems because that same struggle for popularity exists, but kids seem to be so much nastier now and they want to grow up too fast. Now the movies that depict high school life are about kids lashing out with violence, as in the Columbine-inspired Elephant, or spiraling out of control, like Thirteen. If The Breakfast Club were filmed today, Bender would probably attack Claire, Alison would jump off the roof out of despair and the kid who had his buns taped together by Andrew would come back and shoot everyone. This might not be the case if all those Brat Pack fans really took the message of their favorite movie to heart. Does it really take having a gun put to their heads for kids to figure out that high school shouldn't have a caste system?