The Breakfast Club (1985)

directed by John Hughes

Mallory Merlo

I don’t believe you ever truly forget the things that shaped you as a child. They stick with you and advise everything else that comes after, every future decision you’ll ever make. Your life is embedded with that fundamental stuff and your identity is intertwined in it. You are one with the form, unyielding and loyal.

When you love something at 13, it really just means you’ve never seen anything else like it before. That’s what life knows about you at that age: you are not a real person yet and you need something to help you get there. What you begin to attach to as a child will be a harbinger for future consumption, taste, and affection. The universe was a galactic casino and I was a starry-eyed patron. The house always wins, even if the customer is always right. Life has a way about it that says, “We’ll guide you, but you can take the credit.” I played and played until I suddenly needed no more credit to win. My personhood was being shaped before my eyes by films, music, books, and TV shows I’d claimed as my own, when really, life was counting the cards for me.

Patterns of a personal style and disposition floated into view the older I got. I remained inside the grand games room with a sense that I needed to be defined by something because that was the only way I could develop into who I wanted to be. I needed to have favorites, go-tos, recommendations, stories. Paramours drifted in and out at will, echoing temptations of new personality traits that were really just objects to latch onto and not true, discernible features of who I was. I swayed through room after room, finally landing on something concrete. It had always been there for me, but its gravity was becoming all too clear as I made my way out of middle school and into high school.

At nine, I watched John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985) for the first time. I always begin the story that way because I find it comical in retrospect just how young I was when I was introduced to it. I believe that day a seed was planted with the intention of springing up at just the perfect time in my adolescent years. The inkling of a love, a devotion to it, had been lingering and finally bloomed when I coveted it the most.

That love at 13, when I truly began to see the film as more than just a product of the ‘80s, became the defining cornerstone of who I was. I manifested the obsession materially (I purchased phone cases or T-shirts emblazoned with the film’s poster), but also in emotional and vocational ways (I suddenly, passionately wanted to be an actor because of Molly Ringwald). I memorized the script front to back because I watched it so often. I still kick myself to this day for not purchasing a copy of it—a bootleg, I’m sure—on the sidewalk of New York City when I visited in middle school. I imagined making edits to it like a strict professor with a red pen if and when I saw any inconsistencies with the film’s actual dialogue or direction.

In more ways than one, The Breakfast Club became the prime reason I described myself as a cinephile and aspiring actor. I studied the film like a fervent student desperate for a good grade on an essay. I yearned for the opportunity to have a film part written for me where I could play a character who was Claire Standish-adjacent, or at least Ringwald-esque. It was the big door prize in that windowless casino where time never matters and winnings are only valuable if you continue trading them in for something bigger.

My self-exoneration from needing to mature beyond the film’s grasp signaled a commitment I’d imposed willingly. It was always going to be in my life, I’d tell myself, because it made me who I am, as if the film itself possessed agency and I didn’t assign it the importance I believed it to have. No part of me ever wanted to eschew it because I suspected that the moment I left the pillage at the table, my entire sense of self would crumble at my feet. I couldn’t view myself as a person independent of the movie and of its impact on me. It became clearer to me after high school that The Breakfast Club had only provided me with a false narrative and a thinly veiled promise of what my teen years would be like. I could be inspired by it creatively and I could certainly credit it for sparking a lifelong passion for acting, but its core story was that of myth. High school was not like the movies, and I didn’t need one off of which to base my expectations for life.

Elements of the film I once found scintillating emerged from behind clouded glass and inhabited their true form the more I returned to it. I called a spade a spade and realized there were many imperfections with my self-proclaimed favorite film. I never once considered defending its flaws and knew that acknowledging them while still letting it hold that lauded title made more sense than trying to ever ignore them altogether. I think the more I came to terms with how the film really made me feel—uncomfortable at times, depressed, occasionally hopeful—I realized that I was allowed to distance my personality from it. I didn’t need anyone’s permission except my own. The universe at large may have fed it to me with the intention of nurturing it to be this monumental thing, but I was beginning to admit that its work with me may have already been accomplished.

I still have the notion in my mind that I need to be characterized by one single thing. It’s been difficult for me to accept the idea that I don’t have to be defined at all, let alone by a film I watched for the first time 14 years ago. I still crave the structure of a life composed of moments, media, and experiences that can be neatly organized into a clean timeline. I watch a movie, it becomes me, I become it. We are one. But as I’ve seen more fantastic movies, branched out beyond the limited scope of childhood nostalgia, and explored more than I ever imagined, I understand that the risk of growing out of something from my youth is far less daunting than never growing at all.

I still love The Breakfast Club, but for different reasons now than when I was nine. I am proud of how far I let that film take me in my pursuit of acting experience and film admiration. I love my family for watching it with me (many times in my life, but especially during my initial introduction) and respecting my connection to it. It is more than a film to me, even if its sincere definition is still hard to place. Maybe it won’t ever be as integral to who I am in my adult life than when I was young, but I will still always give it the grace of being remembered. To forget the film is to forget the nine-year-old me who found it so life-changing, and I will never lose sight of her.

Mallory Merlo (she/her) is an actor and writer from Northern California. Her work has previously been featured in Polyester and Copy. You can find her on Letterboxd @mallorymerlo.