Scene from my year 11 common room
He is destroying that chair. Dismantling it. Tearing it limb from limb.
He begins with the legs, which, each in turn, he flexes and twists, first weakening then snapping the tubular metal. Discarding these, he moves on to the base, using strong hands to prise it apart from the goose-pimpled plastic seat. More flexing and twisting, and soon the base itself is in fragments.
Now the seat, a single piece of moulded red plastic. Using his foot as a fulcrum, he levers the plastic backwards and forwards, until a white seam appears along its concave middle. Then he sets about trying to tear along that weakened seam. A more difficult task than he had assumed, but he makes headway, slowly.
He performs the entire procedure with an air of bored focus. I watch from across the room, bemused at the senseless destruction of that innocent chair.
The gospel according to John Hughes
My first viewing of The Breakfast Club was a formative experience. It was 1997, a full year before the day I witnessed the chair-mangler at work. We watched it during a year 10 English class. A hilarious film. Moving. Quite profound. The gospel according to John Hughes. (It was his first masterpiece; his second was Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)
I don't use the word gospel lightly. Here was a secular film that extrapolated, in teenagers' language, the notion of 'love thy neighbour'. Love is understanding difference, recognising shared humanity, accepting others and treating them well. It sees through cliques and types.
A simple device for this contemporary parable: five teens of varying types — a 'jock' (Emilio Estevez), a 'prom queen' (Molly Ringwald), a 'geek' (Anthony Michael Hall), a 'freak' (Ally Sheedy) and a 'thug' (Judd Nelson) — are forced to spend a Saturday together in detention.
Each has environmental and personal reasons for being who they are. A combination of nature and nurture, compounded by the eternal adolescent quest for individualisation, and the converse but equally powerful forces of peer pressure and social and familial expectations.
They're all alike, though ostensibly so different. At the start of the film, the differences lead to tensions. As the film progresses, and following a few cathartic hi-jinks and head-ons, they learn empathy. No matter what your clique, it's never easy being 'you'.
I had problems with the film, even back then. It bothered me; this use of types, to make a point about the