“Adolescence, Anxiety, and Escape in The Breakfast Club"

Considerations of the youth or teen film have defined the genre as either focused on representing the experiences of adolescence or exploiting the youth demographic. Yet while both approaches emphasize the distinctiveness of the stage between childhood and adulthood as a distinguishing generic feature, there as yet has not been a discussion of the youth film as a distinct embodied sensation for the film’s spectator. This essay aims to fill this gap by analyzing The Breakfast Club (1985) as an example of the youth film’s affective aesthetics. Following the work of child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, I will argue for adolescence and youth as distinct feelings in which adolescence is linked to the anxiety of identity formation while youth serves as a synonym for play, a liberating sensation accessible to those any age. 

The Breakfast Club marks an interesting case study since although it is now lauded for its realistic representation of adolescent angst, the film initially received tepid reviews because it induced exactly those feelings of tedium and confinement in the spectator. Janet Maslin noted that the film’s setting during five teenagers’ Saturday detention produced “not such a spine-tingling situation” while the Bloomington Pantagraph complained that it offered “‘Rebel Without a Cause’. . . sapped of the anger, passion and intensity of adolescence.” This presentation will examine how the film’s aesthetics prompt these feelings in the spectator. In particular, in the beginning of the film, static framings of the teenagers in close shots serve to convey the feeling of anxiety as an experience of interruption and waiting. By contrast, the film reserves the power associated with camera movement for adult characters who supervise this space. However, the film ends by offering brief moments of play when the frame is transformed from a space of containment and surveillance into a space of liberation. In this focus on affect as the defining feature of the genre, I argue for a new approach to the youth film as another type of “body genre,” like melodrama, horror, or pornography, as Linda Williams has argued, in its address to the spectator’s body.