Breakfast Club and Lessons from my Stepdaughter

It was my stepdaughter's birthday the other day. We had a big party at the same restaurant my wife and I had our wedding reception at. Lots of my stepdaughter's friends and family came, and it was strange and fun to see her interacting with friends from school. These friends rarely come to our house, so it was a window into her daytime, schoolday life.

My wife commented that to look at my stepdaughter with her boyfriend and her school friends, one would easily think we were at a party in 1986 or so. From the emo kids, to the punks, to the heavy metal rocker guy, all of them had long hair cut intentionally ugly, with shaved patches here and there. There was a profusion of leather and tight jeans. It looked like a Culture Club fan video!

This reminded me of the movie The Breakfast Club, which I recently bought on Amazon and shared with my wife. For a long time I'd been wanting her to see it, because that movie was so important to my young life. Seeing it again took me back to quiet, lonely days in my childhood cocoon of an immense old Victorian house, learning about the outside world through movie. It was odd to share that space with my wife, because my childhood was like a time before time, when the real world seemed like an outside force that would never touch me. Later on, in my adolescence, I gradually entered that real world, but was always frustrated because life wasn't like the movies had told me it should be. When my high school of working-class immigrants didn't mirror either the John Hughes depictions of wealthy suburbs, nor the action-packed, dramatic life of movies about the ghetto, I implicitly concluded that it was my life that was somehow lacking, and not that the movies themselves were unrealistic!

Anyway, seeing Breakfast Club made me nostalgic for my youth, frustrations and distorted media visions and insulated cocoon and all. Which of course made me think how ironic it was that now I have a real life, a wife, a house, but I was longing for that closed, Gothic, frustrating fantasy world of my childhood. It occurs to me that that must be one of the little graces of life--we can't fully appreciate the magic of youth while we're in it, but then as adults when we long for that magic, we can have children and live it again, this time more conscious of everything.

All this said, seeing the movie after all this time also left me with some questions that had never occurred to me before. I've often complained to my wife about having grown up in a highly mediatic society. A child in the modern US grows up seeing so many images which, due to the general mediocrity of TV and movies these days, are often full of cliches and cynicism. The child begins to shape his or her reality through those lenses, those stereotypes. Especially an only child like me, growing up with older parents that were no longer very interested in this garbage pop culture, in a postindustrial neighborhood without many people from my own race or culture and without much social fabric. I had no contact with suburban kids, or siblings, or teenagers, so I took all the movies I saw at face value, with no reality to confront them against. I've told my wife that it was especially tough for me to have images of a society I didn't know, then enter that society and have violent confrontations with it, as I did when I got to college. But I guess my situation was better than that of others who actually lived in the midst of suburban consumerist nonsense, at the same time as they consumed garbage images telling them how they should act and be. I'm thinking of some friends I made in college, who even now can't seem to come to terms with real life.

Along these lines, I noticed some ugly things about The Breakfast Club this time around. It's very anti-parent--we only hear from the kids, who have an abnormal (though I thought it was normal when I saw the movie as a little kid) hatred for their folks. Also, thought the idea of the movie is to dispel the rigid stereotypes and social divisions of a suburban high school, if you see it as I did without knowing that those stereotypes exist, it makes you think they're normal. So to avoid screwing up my kids' heads, I might not show them that flick until they're older, or perhaps when they're younger but with accompanying explanations of certain things in the film.

Having thought about what I consider the dangerous effects of the constant media bombardment modern kids undergo, I asked myself what the larger solution would be. I clearly think most TV shows are pure garbage, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. But where do I draw the line between avoiding or prohibiting bad TV shows, and appreciating books. I pointed out in a past blog on electronic overload that as early as Don Quijote we were being warned about living too vicariously through fiction. What kind of media is bad, and what kind is good?

I wonder if in past eras, when most spoken or written stories were about distant times and mythical figures, maybe kids didn't have the situation I experienced of confusing fiction and reality. If the story doesn't look like your world, maybe you mark recognize it more clearly as fiction. I think this is what happens here in Colombia. My stepdaughter and my nephew here have grown up with probably as much TV as I did, but they have no confusions between the junk on TV and their real life. Most of the programs here, at least on cable, are US imports, so they have very little resemblance to normal life in Colombia. Viewers can see them as an entertaining oddity, but by no means a depiction of what their lives should look like. For all my stepdaughter's punk clothes and mohawks and manufactured adolescent image, I feel like she's living in a much more vital, real world than I did at her age.

The night of my stepdaughter's birthday, her dad continued the party at his house just outside of our town. The male relatives drank beer in front of the fireplace, the female relatives talked around the kitchen table, and the kids savored a bit of beer and freedom on the house's porch, under the star-dotted rural sky. When I was a teenager I loved these moments of semi-independence, at parties with or without adults. Again I was impressed by my stepdaughter's balancing of lots of kids from different social cliques, her making them all feel welcome and happy.

My wife and I left that party around 9pm, about 12 hours before the last of the partiers went home or to sleep. We passed by a fast food joint to sate my wife's late-night hunger. The burger place we went to is in a small strip mall with various restaurants, shops, and fast food places. It is sort of a hang-out spot for teens and young adults in our town, though that particular night there were only three or four small groups of friends hanging out there. I thought it was sad that there were so few kids around, but I quickly realized that that was once again my movie-molded mind chiming in, convincing me that every teen hangout had to be bright and busy and slick like the mall in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But then I remembered that when I was a teenager, when I'd finally left the media fantasy world of my early childhood and had made contact with a tight circle of friends, the thrill of being out with buddies was not how many unknown people were in a place, but who you were there with. Obviously we always liked searching for girls at our established hang-out spots, but the main pleasure was just shooting the breeze with your friends. And in that respect the town I live in now is perhaps even better for teen hangouts and capers than was the Chicago of my adolescence. Our town is mid-sized and walkable, so a group of buddies can cruise the streets on foot and be sure to run into other teenagers doing the same thing. In Chicago, on the other hand, everything is so big and spread out that it's hard to meet up with friends, and even once you're with your friends it's not so likely you'll run into other people to meet and hang out with.

To close, I'm linking to this video of the awesome theme song from Breakfast Club. This song also figured in the prom scene from American Pie, which for all its ridiculous gags is one of the few movies that really captures adolescence with all its frustrated romance, infrequent but much-discussed parties, and boring down time hanging out with buddies.