Hacker Cinema
The Breakfast Club
1985 · Film · 98 min
Directed by John Hughes
Five high school students from different walks of life endure a Saturday detention under a power-hungry principal. The disparate group includes rebel John, princess Claire, outcast Allison, brainy Brian and Andrew, the jock. Each has a chance to tell his or her story, making the others see them a little differently -- and when the day ends, they question whether school will ever be the same.
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22 comments on Hacker News
I'm honestly pretty tired of the 80s-movie-derived cultural memeplex of nerds getting oppressed by jocks with girlfriends in a high school context. This never accurately characterized any social environment I've been in, and I'm definitely a nerd by disposition. I'm not sure this ever really existed outside the imaginations of hollywood screenwriters. The Breakfast Club is mid, Weird Science is an actively terrible movie, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off is entertaining enough but looms way too large in the American pop culture imagination.
Tim Cook was the salutatorian of his Alabama public high school, majored in industrial engineering in college, and later got an MBA. He sold IBM computers for years and joined Apple in its late 90s doldrums because he was won over by Steve Jobs' charisma within several minutes of his first interview with Jobs. He's an openly-gay fitness nut - meaning he's had a lot of opportunity to have sex in his life (and being famously private, he's not talking about it one way or the other, as is his right).
I frankly don't think Tim Cook is much of a nerd. He's a smart, driven, ambitious business guy who's done a good job at making the gigantic electronics company he's the CEO of sell more products and navigate the political environment it operates in. He's not some underdog hero, and people who actually care about technology for its own sake or who care about computational sovereignty shouldn't attach their sense of identity to anything Apple does.
I do not like this article. I do not learn how to manage better. I do not understand why managing is hard. The diffusion between individuals, organization, and science/technology never got on to the table, because it never got into the restaurant. It's a glaring omission. I do not learn what management should aim for. I am not learning what successful management was like before computers: think post WWII advances in tech+manufacturing. So how can I assess if AI --- forget making things better or worse for me or the other guy --- is even registering in the universe of measurable change?
I am not per se force fed ... whence this comment ... but there's a running unchallenged theme of brittle otherness between tech and business that, if this was a movie, is like the first 45 minutes of the Breakfast club (snark, derision, insecurity, anger, immaturity etc.) before the kids grew up and learned something. The OP never gets me to a place where I want to learn, grow, or do better. Here's an example:
"What’s particularly fascinating is how these proclamations are enthusiastically amplified by two distinct groups: middle managers who’ve never written a line of code beyond an Excel formula, and that special breed of commentator who’s long resented programmers..." The article also contains pictures which drive this point more with apes, robots.
The thrust of the article is advanced by python code which amounts to the same, sad ``pattern match" the OP decries: a linear, finite list of things with 1D real value score. Life is far more complex than that.
The article is also replete with references to ``laws" which, I have noticed over the years, HN likes. It's the tech equivalent of an American Southerner with a catchy one-liner: it seems pithy, smart, unique, and powerful all at the same time:
“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.” — Putt’s Law Yah - well - the main users of American Southerner catchy lines in media are American Congressmen. America thinks Congress sucks.
Nobody who cares about management, or people, or organizations, or science, or really anything in the adult world thinks about things the way the article does minus OP.
The article --- if we assume the OP is underneath on the same page with me here --- is graphics+English+rhetoric performance art pushed around the world by Ethernet. Otherwise it's the kind of simplistic nonsense we could do without.
Wanna do better? Read a book:
The clearest, shortest, smartest read you'll run into deftly combining organization, management, and quality which, as engineers in the software world, we could do a lot better at:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Japanese/dp/0139524339?crid=OO52LHR1CA1W&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.9TBgQPegnlhWw14sA8EYoRMG7gQsr3RKFGJ-XseaiyLyGSUFEWVgwQxq9mXpj9_ZjDFwQD_slHsMlMZmhvjFs82ZnOB9aW4mDiPCROmGHR6gt7BErjvfGIntCRdLNZ74spm9JSgC1hykMsEW1d09Rg.Ce7xCqDGyob3yZAxny2SRwWWbwiIkFz6vYDmOKk5w9w&dib_tag=se&keywords=total+quality+management+the+japanese+way&qid=1748359920&sprefix=total+quality+management+the+japanese+way%2Caps%2C63&sr=8-1
A focus on dynamics between individuals, teams, and organizations:
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Esteem-Management/dp/1555426123?crid=5TF20BHNVA7Y&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Lohn9WItcGTGKS4D7pwxv8HgwBInB9wNVAYuQkYus0w.iTM_sfOZTacF1LAMMLZZ7aairOd5AwNEFitz-7o1FnI&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+human+element+schutz&qid=1748360045&sprefix=the+human+element+schutz%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-1
As for the tech, CS, science, math parts of the equation ... HN is a wonderful resource.
Terrible.
Imagine that you want to make a film that is an unholy amalgam of Scrooge, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Dead Poets' Society and The Breakfast Club. Imagine that your audience is oblivious to any nuance and you're not so creative, so you will need to employ the standard tropes of bratty prep school kids, mother whose son was killed before his time, bookish professor with a heart of gold and life lessons at the end for all our protagonists.
Trowel on the schmaltz like it's wet concrete and multiply the cringe by 1000. Now you have a decent description of this movie.
I learned that the password my parents used on the computer was “Neo Maxi Zoom Dwebie” by password cracking my windows XP with rainbow tables at like age 11.
I hate the breakfast club and think it’s one of the examples of movies which idolized anti-intellectualism and basically celebrates bullying nerdy types. Sadly ironic of a password choices from my “nerdy” family.
If the rainbow tables didn’t work, I’d have rootkitted/RATed the computer.
Where and when I grew up, Saturday detentions were pretty common in high schools (don't know if they still are or for other parts of the U.S.). The movie 'The Breakfast Club' is based on Saturday detention. That gave me the impression back then, that they were pretty normal.
Movies I rewatch like once a year: Trainspotting (1996), Donnie Darko (2001), La Haine (1995)
Movies I've watched quite a few times and wouldn't mind watching again right now: The Matrix (1999), Akira, Breakfast Club
My most (deliberately) rewatched movies include:
* Breakfast Club
* Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
* Penn and Teller Get Killed
* Chungking Express
* Pink Floyd PULSE
* Black People Hate Me and They Hate My Glasses
* Pulp Fiction
* Fringe (not a movie)
You can probably identity my real identity from this list alone. YOLO.
Once upon a time I used to be so good at remembering faces that the first two times I encountered someone who knew me but I didn’t recognize, it freaked me out -for days- afterward.
The first time it was someone a year or two behind me in high school who I never recalled interacted with but must have known of me through someone else in school.
The second time my first year chem lab partner said hi to me while I was at work. She had gone through a complete makeover. Lost weight, switched to contacts, clothes that actually fit and complemented her, bleached and straightened her hair. It took me half an hour to figure that one out.
I am still the guy who can point out the boyfriend in the movie was so and so who hasn’t been in a major dip for twenty years, but in last few years I’ve started to confuse actors with each other, and suspecting family connections between people that have none. Which is both bothering me and giving me some sympathy for old people saying “they all look the same”. Maybe it’s not being racist it’s just having an old brain.
I can still pick out voices accurately though. Molly Ringwald was in season 2 of The Bear. After 40 years (yes, 40 years this summer!) she looks completely different from The Breakfast Club, but her voice, while much older now, is exactly the same tempo.
The Breakfast club analogy in the first 2/3rds of the film --- there's a finite number of distinct and static social-idelogical-clubs --- analogously Republicans and Democrats in politics is silly. No penetrating and practical solutions will follow from this contextualization.
And they were exceptionally rare.
But here are 2 films from different eras with somewhat similar themes:
1985: The Breakfast Club, 1h37m 2023: The Holdovers, 2h13m
It pretty much was just like that (I was there). One of my favorite "biographical" movies that nobody's ever heard of is Explorers:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much of it was actually more functional (didn't require instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it wouldn't matter anyway.
Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering, because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record. And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I miss most.
It's a movie series set in an old timey fantasy world so it's not going to seem dated the way an 80s movie like The Breakfast Club or even Ghostbusters might seem dated.
That said I don't entirely buy your premise about freshness if by that you mean quality. I'd say Ghostbusters still holds up much better than the majority of modern hollywood movies even if it used a different style of film stock and different special effects.
This is one of the things that made The Breakfast Club such a great example for low budget filmmakers. Very small number of people on camera, low number of locations, yet it does not feel weird within the context of the script.
There have been others that are great examples of it being odd. The TV show The Good Guys was shot on empty streets in a dead part of town because of low budgets, and it comes across that way. Was the crew so small that they couldn't send a couple of the grips or PAs to walk down the side walk? Another of the low-budget examples I like is in Queen of the South's first season, they used the production's grip truck as the bad guy vehicle in an episode. Maybe it was the pilot? It was just one of those hung head in shame moments for me
To quote from High Fidelity: "How can it be bullshit to state an opinion?" :)
FWIW I agree, I thought the movie was boring when it came out. After all there were hundreds of other cooler movies around that time. Same with the breakfast club. As an adult rewatching them I enjoyed them more.
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.
> Remember that movies are HIGHLY produced works
True, but also John Hughes was notoriously fast at producing works. There are independent rumors [1] that he wrote first drafts for both Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club in a day.
That's not to say he couldn't invest in explaining his motivations to the production designers, but sometimes a personality and idea is clear enough in your head, you can spill its' dialogue out without filters.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/910399/john-hughes-took-the-brute-force-approach-to-writing-ferris-buellers-day-off/
Was born in 1973 and grew up in the Redwoods of Northern California, near what would eventually become Silicon Valley.
In that place and time, the 80's were mostly a very fun and exciting bunch of years to be a child, with the crazy hippie 60's/70's mentality of the adults crossing over into a new "cleaner" era of exploding fresh technology and intelligent comic vision.
Records became cassettes. Being able to record our own sounds and listen to music on mobile devices for the very first time was totally amazing. The first personal computers arrived, which were equally incredible, although quite mysterious and complex.
Atari 2600 and the video game revolution hit, with all of us hooking up our new joystick machines to parents big Zenith televisions, while dumping quarters into arcades.
The arrival of the VCR was a breakthrough in being able to watch movies at home, GOOD movies such as Star Wars, Breakfast Club, Blade Runner, Dark Crystal and countless other great films from the time, many of which we saw in theater.
Really cool new music was coming out regularly, from bands like Depeche Mode and Oingo Boingo. MTV arrived and was extremely bizarre and brilliant, at first.
The environment was less toxic and people were far less paranoid in general. We spent endless sunny days riding bikes, swimming in rivers, climbing trees, building forts, go-carts, and causing silly mischief, without any threat of watching cameras. We could make prank phone calls in the middle of the night without any worry about "Caller ID." ;)
We were afraid of the "nuclear war" propaganda constantly pouring out of the 3 mainstream TV channels (PBS was relaxing) and some young friends committed suicide. Yet, the Space Shuttle launches were inspiring and we felt that America was genuinely dedicated to freedom, democracy, and justice. This illusion was eventually crushed, for me.
The 80's officially died in a wave of hip-hop, rap, awful "butt rock," bad films, and a sudden appreciation for general stupidity. The inspiring momentum of what felt like a positive movement seemed to fall apart suddenly with corporate consolidation of media, commercialization of everything, and a darker, harsher, lifeless cultural attitude.
Been missing that bright 80's era, ever since.
Reminds me of the movie Breakfast Club and I haven't even seen it.
Not so much "crazy" because it was in multiple places in my suburban location at that time. The 'Claire' character of "The Breakfast Club" movie of 1985, brought sushi in (what I remember to be) a bento box with her and I only read her as spoiled, not crazy.
As one who was there, I'd argue it was a time that was fairly optimistic (there's some truth to the whole John Hughes movie archetype), but not without some shades of darkness as well. Some of that's reflected in The Breakfast Club come to think of it: wealth disparities (Claire, the rich kid), blue-collar uncertainties (Andrew), future pysch case (Allison), genius (Brian), and budding criminal (John).
The country had come out of Vietnam, the Oil Crises of the 1970s, Watergate, and a lot of distrust over the CIA, FBI, and COINTELPRO (some things never change). The Challenger explosion (January, 1986) and Chernobyl disaster (April, 1986) both suggested profound limits to technology.
There was the threat of nuclear war, the Soviets were The Enemy (or was it Eastasia?), Japan was eating everyone's lunch, and the rustbelt was really starting to show its weaknesses.
At the same time, oil (eventually) got cheap again, the economy began was was a 20 year sustained period of growth, with two minor burps (the 1989 stock market crash, and the early 1990s recession). The Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, both almost completely unimaginable even just a few years earlier.
You had your bubbly pop, but there was also the punk movement. Bands like Timbuk3 put out cynical songs like "Futures So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades":
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=gRh4-czxbT0
The uptempo performance is often mistake for optimism, the lyrics say otherwise, as Pat MacDonald clarified in an interview. From Wikipedia:
Pat somewhat clarified the meaning by stating that it was, contrary to popular belief, a "grim" outlook. While not saying so directly, he hinted at the idea that the bright future was in fact due to impending nuclear holocaust. The "job waiting" after graduation signified the demand for nuclear scientists to facilitate such events. Pat drew upon the multitude of past predictions which transcend several cultures that foreshadow the world ending in the 1980s, along with the nuclear tension at the height of the cold war to compile the song.
Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing" also reflected on the contrast between moving refrigerators vs. "See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup" (it was a different age) "got his own jet airplane". Probably moving into the Mission and ruining the neighborhood as well.
And the computer animations were state-of-the-art.
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=lAD6Obi7Cag
There was a sense of possible future problems (energy, oil, we were just starting to hear about CO2), but nothing imminent (other than nuclear annihilation). I'd say that's probably the biggest change now: the global economy has been dragging for 10-15 years now, and there's a distinct sense that the trajectory has changed.
I'm thinking this is going to be a decade-defining movie like Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off was for the 80's.
* I used to take shits in an outhouse and swim in the river where that same shit was dumped in. Though I didn't do this for long--eventually we got a toilet.
* Appear in the background in a movie scene with Judd Nelson (John Bender from the Breakfast Club).