10 Movies That Will Make You Re-Evaluate Your Life
6. The Breakfast Club
"You see us as you want to see us; in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions." Often mislabeled as another one of John Hughes' light 80's comedies, The Breakfast Club is really anything but. While humor is certainly prevalent in the film itself, it's used more as a plot device than just a way to make the audience laugh. At its core, The Breakfast Club is a movie about generalization, predisposition, and the idea that every individual has certain events unfolding within their own lives, regardless of whether or not we are aware. What made this film so special was that it managed to approach each character in a way that the audience could relate to; it didn't attempt to tell us anything about a character's life unless it was absolutely integral to the scene at hand. We didn't need to know their histories, much in the same way that we don't know every single detail about people we might meet in our day-to-day lives. As the audience, we were able to slowly learn about the five teenagers while they were learning about themselves and each other; the result was a film that captured the nuances of human interaction in a way that remains unique to this day. The way in which The Breakfast Club handled the reality of concepts like prejudice, peer pressure, and emotional/physical abuse is really what makes this film so incredibly relatable. Such issues are inherent in our society today, and yet we often only see what people want us to see; we assume that everyone operates under the same conditions, only rarely considering the fact that their experiences could be wildly different from ours. In this sense, The Breakfast Club should inspire us to get to know more about the people with whom we interact instead of merely taking them at face value. The real beauty of the film was that all five of the main characters were so vastly different in terms of upbringing, mindset, and values, and were able to connect with each other only after discovering the number of things they had in common. In the end, it isn't our differences that determine who we really are, but the ways in which we are similar to those around us. The Breakfast Club is a film that portrays this message like no other, and for this reason we believe that it is one of the most thought-provoking movies to grace the industry.
