Teen Movie; Coming-of-Age Movie; Comedy-Drama

The Ur-Teen Movie

The Breakfast Club is the teen movie. Arguably (or maybe inarguably?) it defines the whole genre. It's why Molly Ringwald has a prominent cameo in the teen movie parody Not Another Teen Movie: She's the definitive teen movie actress who starred in all the famous John Hughes teen movies.

Really, the concept of a teen movie is pretty self-explanatory: It's a movie directed at a teenage audience and starring a teenage cast (or a bunch of older twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers). So, frequently, the subject matter involves high school and relationship issues, with forays into sex and drug use. It can be light, frothy, and wholly amusing like Clueless or Sixteen Candles, or it can have a serious edge like The Breakfast Club, Juno, or (the original teen movie) Rebel Without a Cause.

Growing Pains

The teen movie is pretty closely allied to the coming-of-age movie. In order to "come of age" you kind of need to be young. Were an older person to attempt to "come of age" all over again, it would end up being a mid-life-crisis, like with Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. But there's sort of a distinction—teen movies are usually more high school-oriented, whereas a coming-of-age movie could have a collegiate or post-grad setting (like with Good Will Hunting, for example). And it specifically relates to dealing with the trials of growing up and attaining some kind of maturity (or failing to attain it).

That's basically what happens in The Breakfast Club: The students go from an immature understanding of each other, as defined by their respective stereotypes and cliques, to perceiving one another's shared humanity. Of course, the students all view adults as people whose hearts have died—so it's unclear if they're actually attaining maturity, or some other, more enlightened state.

Giggles and Tears

Also, The Breakfast Club is a comedy-drama for obvious reasons: It's part comedy and part drama. You have Bender pretending to pee under his desk and you have Bender showing us the scar where his dad burned him with a cigar: the amusing and the serious mixed together.

A good amount of the comedy in The Breakfast Club actually relies on really old formulas: Back in Shakespeare's time, the Elizabethan Era, playwrights frequently used the four different humors (bodily fluids that were supposed to determine someone's basic attitude and personality) to guide their creation of character.

The five Breakfast Club members function in a similar way, since they represent broad ideas about cliques and certain characteristics associated with them: Claire's snobby, Bender's rebellious and funny, Brian's quirky and neurotic, etc. But, of course, the movie actually subverts all this, since the characters transcend their stereotypes by the film's end.