Just because they made out at the end, doesn’t mean that an underlying theme of the movie is “treat girls like shit and you will be rewarded”.
Given the circumstances, this is an understandable position. There’s male behaviors, which can be modified, and the nature of male sexuality, which can’t.
Ha! Where the hell did that come from? This is a movie about high school students, the pressures of high school, and social status in high school. Claire is the attractive, popular girl, and Bender is no one. Perhaps it is better to say that he perceives that Claire thinks she’s better than him, and that that is an obstacle that he must get around.
That is, I thought Bender was an asshole, and, I was not particularly interested in Claire. Therefore I missed out on an important lesson in the movie. That if I wanted to make out with girls, I should be a huge jerk. Dodged a bullet there.
In all sincerity, I hadn’t meant to condescend, only to point out that your own emotions informed your thoughts about Ally’s character. If you hadn’t had a crush on her, you might not have cared.
If you hadn’t felt the way you did when you saw the movie as a teen, you might not be participating in this discussion.
It’s easy enough to say that, but no one really knows if that’s true. In the end it doesn’t matter- your feelings and the emotional charge exist. Obfuscating them doesn’t change that.
Thanks to @anon61221983 curiositybgot the better of me. Ugh.
Just two things. First I loved this movie then and still do today. I was 13 at the time this came out. And these characters were about 16/17. So naturally these were the kids I looked up to. To me regardless of the inner machinations of character development the unifying bond between them was the point of the story. The all had issues. And I do think it was all of them…albeit some more serious than others. But the bond was them dealing with facing adulthood. That time during development where we all begin to form our defined self and person and move past our parents influence and society’s expectations or we don’t. Sometimes young people fall to those pressures. Bender’s triumphant fist raised, ally taking Andrews wrestling letter, claire giving bender the earring, Brian’s defiant essay to mr Vernon; is all meant to show us that they have changed. That they have chosen a different path than the ones they were all walking down. Does it last? A day. A week. The rest of their lives? Who knows. Hughes only gave us that moment and no sequel or epilogue.
Second point which can be applied to this and many other movies. Sometimes. A cake is just a cake.
Looking at the entire thread, the long discussion of The Breakfast Club and lessons learned, I am reminded of what one filmmaker said about the problem of. well, discussing problems. I can’t remember who and which movie he had just directed, but he did say that the problem with making an anti-war movie is that the format automatically glorifies war despite your best efforts.
Most artists are aware of this. Most artists are also aware that they are themselves problematic people. The thing is, they try to make the world better even if they themselves remain shitty people.
Again, dude is looking at her underwear without her permission, BITES her, and then he “gets the girl” at the end. It’s kind of fucked up bull shit and I find it really disappointing that so many guys here are just brushing that off as “boys will be boys” which is a major part of the problem. It not only reinforces the objectification of women, it assumes that men have no ability to control themselves.
The point is that his harassment and abuse WORKS for him. It reinforces the old trope that women love nothing better than a good slap. Like we’re dogs or something. Fuck that noise.
It’s not. Doesn’t mean it isn’t problematic. The issue isn’t realism here, the issue is problematic depictions of relationships between teenagers, and spinning it in a way that makes it seem OKAY to act in an abusive manner. If you can’t see how the things bender does steps over the line and that Claire giving him her earring is a tacit acceptance of that behavior, I don’t know what to tell you.
Which many of us have said here already.
And logic can be used to run over nuance and the fact that we’re human beings deserving of some basic respect and dignity.
At some point, whether or not women are deserving of equal treatment shouldn’t even be a point of debate.
And yet, the pro-gay marriage argument employed emotion as much as it did legal and logical arguments, because a major part of it was the ability of human beings to make families as they see fit.
Agreed to the brushing it off part. My feelings are that some films and some parts of films fit in the “cake is just a cake” mentality…i.e. no need to over think it.
Example: Starship Troopers - plenty to go in depth but honestly I just prefer to enjoy it as a popcorn flick.
I think there are portions of The Breakfast Club as well as other John Hughes films that we probably don’t need to think too much about, just take them at face value.
Bender’s character is a shit. His behavior is shit. I would argue that’s working as intended. We aren’t meant to like him, and him “winning the girl” in the end is shite. I also don’t really like any of those characters…they are tropes and stereotypes. I do like that there is some hope they may have grown from their day long experience with one another. (me being an optimist)
edit:
I think the old trope was that “the princess falls for the bad boy” was in play there…not exclusively one or the other, just that it was a part too. at least that’s what I always took from it.
Well, not all humans. It’s just not a gender thing, I think. Everyone is different - every has different needs and desires, and that’s the problem with broad sweeping generalizations like “boys are like” or “girls are like”.
Of course, there is always that ONE asshole, racist kid who sees Triumph of the Will and thinks it looks awesome. I’m imagining that happened to Richard Spencer.
I wasn’t even going to deign to acknowledge that one; I remember being 15 with hormones that were ridiculously out of control… to the point that I was “relieving” myself pretty much everyday, several times a day. And of course I hid that fact, and told no one, because that’s what females have been socialized to do since time out of mind.
I’ve seen several comments about the realism of the relationship between Clare and Bender. Like that’s a thing that really could have happened.
But then a lot of other things also really could have happened. Bender could have been killed in a bus crash halfway through the movie. Clare could have moved to another state with her family. Bender could have been gay and the film could have culminated in him apologizing to Clare for using her as a smoke screen for that. Clare could have actually disliked being treated like shit enough to not put up with it.
I don’t see how realism is a defense of the choices that any artists makes. The result was only realistic for those characters because those are the characters the writer chose to write. You want to show realism? You still have a reason why you chose to show the realism of that particular thing. This isn’t a practice still life painting.
In my high school, the asshole racists kids were busy watching ‘Faces of Death’. Luckily, laziness, ignorance, and early alcoholism has left them safely parked back home, where they can amuse themselves by shooting rats at the local landfill.
That was just the weird or edgy kids in my school. actually, I knew very few folks who had access to this, but a few did.
The really out racist kids were pretty much either neo-nazi skins already, and were indeed into the fascist esthetic pretty hardcore or were good old boys whose folks were KKK members.
Well, the entire region where I came from was populated by refugees from the pre-WW1 Austro-Hungarian empire, when they purged all of the ‘wrong’ religions in order to re-distribute the farmland - basically, anyone who wasn’t Lutheran*. If you tried to identify as a Neo-Nazi out there, you would get such an instantaneous, unanimous beat-down that even the school secretary would jump in: “My Grandpa lost a leg on D-Day!”
*My exteneded family was spared, but we didn’t want to belong to any club that have us as members
Yeah, I think this probably was less true of the white working class dudes I grew up around in a rural north GA town. To be fair, I only knew a few guys who would have identified with the ayran nation at the time, but the KKK still had a strong presence where I grew up.
