ABSTRACT
The Breakfast Club is considered a quintessential teen film. The film’s five main characters discover who they are, learn others are more than just stereotypes, and figure out their place in the larger social groupings of high school. They do so while braving conflicts with adults, taking time to celebrate youth, and realizing how important the decisions they make and the actions they take in the present are to their future. More than just embodying these elements of the teen film as genre, filmmaker John Hughes helped introduce, blend, and spread multiple generic features that would come to be expected with the teen film formula. The content of the film, combined with its context of production in the middle of a boom in teen filmmaking and the marketing, which focused on contemporary music, peer group dynamics, and generational conflict, merged with an enthusiastic reception by youth audiences. That the film is still relevant today is a testament to its enduring power and lasting significance. Multiple factors coalesced to solidify the status of The Breakfast Club as one of the most emblematic films of the 1980s and one of the most definitive teen films of the genre.
