I remember watching The Breakfast Club a lot on TV when I was a kid. Yeah, it was heavily edited, and a bit of it went over my head, but I'll always remember how it made me feel. Growing up is sad and scary. Writer/director John Hughes had a gift for giving a voice to young people, and giving a face to that teenage anxiety so many of us have felt. From afar these characters look like stereotypes ("a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal"), but when they open up to each other, they find they have more in common than they ever imagined. They're all afraid. They're unsure of themselves. They have no idea what they're doing. And these feelings were so familiar to me as a teenager and even still as an adult. Allison (Ally Sheedy) says in the film, "When you grow up, your heart dies." I think we could all use a reminder of how it feels to be young, wild, and scared. We don't have to be numb adults with dead hearts. The raw performances in this film, the silliness and the sadness, and that defiant fist-pump into the sky wake us up as adults, remind us that we are alive, and make this film definitely worth revisiting.
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