Listen, I know I’m super guilty of being a too literal about deeply silly shit, but this meme keeps popping back into my Facebook feed, and it’s making me apoplectic.
The implication, I’m assuming, is that John Hughes’ iconic characters of suburban Chicago high school students can each be summed up by the rosters of bands they’ve each been assigned. Speaking as both a stupefyingly pedantic music geek and a former bona fide high school student from the very same era depicted in “The Breakfast Club,” …. I HAVE SOME ISSUES. They are as follows…
1. There is NO WAY ON EARTH John Bender, The Criminal — played by Judd Nelson — would have been a fan of Joy Division, much less Tubeway Army. Did the individual who created this meme ever see the movie? In one pivotal scene, the kids repair to Bender’s locker to fetch his “doobage” and the interior of same is decked out with invocations of The Doors and The Scorpions, suggesting Bender was a fairly devout adherent to classic rock and metal. Joy Division’s tortured ruminations of existential dread would just not have been on his menu. Moreover, Gary Numan disbanded Tubeway Army circa 1979, and really only made a solitary dent in the mass American consciousness with “Cars” that same year — which would have come out when Bender’s character was in eighth grade. I doubt he’d have cared about Numan’s chilly synthesizers, to say nothing of the likelihood of even being aware of his former band.
2. Assigning Alison the Basket Case — played by Ally Sheedy — a list of ersatz goth & indie bands is truly lazy. For a start, the Pixies didn’t even EXIST in 1985, so it’s impossible she’d have been a fan. It’s a herculean assumption that she’d dig The Cure, The Smiths and The Banshees simply because she wears black. Not sure WHERE the assertion that she’d have liked the fun-loving B-52s comes from, but DID ANYONE ACTUALLY SEE THE FILM? Alison, during their lunch hour, actually whips out a copy of the cover of Prince’s 1999 and stares longingly at it, meanwhile, Prince is nowhere on this list. Do details no longer matter?
3. There is precious little indication throughout the film of what music Brian The Brain — played by Anthony Michael Hall — might have listened to, apart from the pot-smoking dance sequence. To blithely assume he’d have been into conventional mainstream pop like Hall & Oates strikes me as a dismissive move. Conversely, to assume a suburban Chicago high schooler would have even been aware of seminal-albeit-comparatively-obscsure New York punk stalwarts Television seems like something of a heroic leap.
DON’T BUY THIS REVISIONISM!!!!
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