December 19th, 2014 at 12:41pm
Secondly, when I first began reading this review, my initial thoughts were that it was just going to be taking an in depth look at the characters of the five kids. Which, in a way, it was, but I was more pleasantly surprised to see an actual original take on the movie based on Principal Vernon, which is something I've never seen before.
I found it an interesting read because I've never seen those theories discussed before and hadn't really thought about them myself - especially the one about how each of the five character traits could be found in Vernon himself. Or even (though it might seem a bit far fetched) the theory that the kids aren't actually there and Vernon just accesses these traits of himself to keep him company on the weekend. I also liked the theory about him having possibly lost his job and that's the reason he's going through the files - to dig up some dirt and use it against the school administration. That was a good one because it seems entirely plausible.
Thirdly, I genuinely found this to be an entertaining read. I just had two minor pieces of constructive criticism - one, the only spelling error I noted, where you wrote "Vernon bloats" instead of "Vernon boasts" and two, that the title of the article could be a little more creative to attract more readers. It could possibly be called something like The Breakfast Club: An In-depth Character Review just to make it stand out from other articles about the movie. You could definitely contact one of the Mibba staff to make those little edits if you wanted to.
But overall, your points about the characters were presented well by being backed up by the quotes and the topic was most interesting. Next time I watch the movie, I'll probably be watching a little more closely at Vernon's characters to see these theories played out on screen.
(Side note: I couldn't believe no one else had commented on this before! I'm definitely recc'ing it.
Also, I'm particularly interested in what prompted you to write this article in the first place?)
I've been looking around for where I got the idea. I was near certain that I'd originally gotten it from TV Tropes, and more specifically from this page here, however it seems that the bare bones of what I described in this article wasn't there. So I guess I must have gotten it originally from somewhere else or I pulled it out of my ass and ran with it, and it's probably the latter because I'm an idiot.
I think the only real leap I made was with the premise that the kids and Carl were all part of Vernon's imagination, but I don't think that's much of a leap. I've never been to a school where Saturday detentions are a thing, which I suspect is mainly because it's purely an American thing, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone would be supervising Saturday detentions for two months or more like Vernon implied he would be during one of his confrontations with Bender; especially not when they're the vice principal like Vernon is.
The reason I doubt this is because my understanding of how Saturday detentions work in the United States is that when you supervise them, you're paid a little extra for doing them (and if anyone who reads this later on has more specific knowledge about this, feel free to jump right in here because I'm probably wrong). Teachers in the United States aren't paid that much, and it was probably the same kind of story in the mid-80s, plus even if they were, how many people are there that wouldn't happily sit around for eight hours and do very little of any pressing urgency if they knew they were going to get paid extra for it?
So the conclusion I've come to is that Vernon was either fired from his job and he was imagining the characters, he was trying to bluff Bender knowing he'd probably get into trouble for something in the next week and have to come the next Saturday anyway, or it was a fairly strict school and there were generally high turn-ups to a Saturday detention. I'm leaning towards the first option though because I personally think it's the most interesting option, plus I have a hard time believing that the other two options are a little shaky in my opinion, because I don't think anyone gets in trouble so much that anyone can guarantee that they're going to be in Saturday detention each week for over two months, and even if they did get in trouble that much eventually they'd stop going, and I'm inclined to believe that most of the stricter schools in the US are either mandated uniform schools or private schools (again, if someone with more accurate information is reading this, please come and correct me).
All of this being said; this is still a fairly abstract take on the movie and I have a hard time believing that John Hughes intended for The Breakfast Club to be anything more than just another teen movie that anyone could relate to. I very much doubt that he intended for someone in their late teens/early twenties to sit there and say, "Well, you know, if you twist a few things around and look at it like this, it kinda starts to look like Vernon's imagining everyone else he encounters."
Most of this is stuff I should have brought up in the article itself, so I'll stop raving with this bullshit now because I'm sure you've already made these links when you were reading the article in question.
But anyway, thanks for your feedback. My grammar is something I should have picked up on while writing, but whatever, I guess I'm not as smart as I'd like to pretend to be.