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 te

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.