John Hughes captured the 80s. If you want to know what the 80s were like as a teenager, watch The Breakfast Club (1985). His best work, in my opinion. Unlike Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club is close to the reality of teenage life in the 80s.
Disclaimer: American, middle class, suburban teenagers in the 1980s.
Growing up in rural Ireland in the late 70s and 80s The Breakfast Club seemed so damn cool to us. Life for these kids seemed impossibly great and it was hard to understand why they were so jaded. At least the more privileged ones. But then I grew up and saw Ireland go from fairly poor to rich and understood that when you solve one set of more basic problems then new higher level problems emerge.
As a suburban white kid a few years younger than the characters, my first watch through the Breakfast Club saw it as a subversive film about cool, rebellious teens making space for themselves. Later, it seemed like a time capsule of the oddity of our society trapping kids in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood and punishing them for their reactions. They're all helpless, even the "bad one" who makes his escape attempt.
The light read is that we are not merely our cliques and labels.
I remember that feeling, watching John Hughes films as a teenager in northern England. Though sometimes part of his gift was that the sense of adolescent angst was so universal, I could identify with some of the characters despite the exotic setting. And in some cases (e.g. Pretty in Pink) Hughes managed to show us this world of spoilt rich kids through the eyes of someone less privileged.
Tangential, but I think part of the genius of the more recent Sex Education (Netflix) is that the setting is definitely British (accents, landscape) and contemporary (smartphones, fashions) and yet brilliantly evokes a British kid's fantasies of what a High School should be like after watching too many 80s American movies.
I wasn't a teen in the 80s (and European) but TBC still had echoes in my generation. Although I grew up many Hughes movies, I only heard about it way way later (early 2000s) and it left me speechless to feel that again.
>But Hughes made only one film I would consider true art, only one that reaches toward the ecstatic power of teendom and, at the same time, exposes the true, piercing woe of that age.
While I really appreciate the author's examination of FBDO, TBC achieves what he states here in a far more poignant way.
I had more than one friend in the 80's who loathed FBDO because he was the prototypical popular spoilt rich kid who got away with everything in High School and all the other parents loved.
Disclaimer: American, middle class, suburban teenagers in the 1980s.