Coffee Breakfast

Today, The Breakfast Club will be released in all of its remastered glory on DVD and Blu-Ray. It will also screen in Austin next week, as well as at 430 theaters around the country on March 26 and March 31, 30 years after it first gained widescreen release. In honor of all that, I was going to write this whole thing about why The Breakfast Club is all about hope and also why it’s kind of like Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, but then I just decided to talk about “Larry Lester’s buns.” Seriously.

While re-watching The Breakfast Club (for the billionth time), I was determined to get to the bottom of what makes this movie so special. For starters, there is the fact that the movie begins with a David Bowie quote, and a Simple Minds song that delivers exactly the kind of opener and closer that brings a story about five kids in detention full circle. Then there’s the reality that it’s a movie about an athlete, a princess, a criminal, a basket case and a brain — and how they all don’t recognize their similarities until they’re forced into lock-down together, and working as a group to screw with the one authority figure who represents all other sucky authority figures (Mr. Vernon). There’s also the fact that Judd Nelson is hot, and Molly Ringwald is so very Molly Ringwald, and Anthony Michael Hall is a child prodigy and Ally Sheedy is all of us. But what really made this movie for me — the first time I saw it, and now this last time — is this line and what it represents: “I taped Larry Lester’s buns together.”

I remember being a child and not understanding what the line meant, but even then I knew that Emilio Estevez’s character, Andy, was saying something funny, while his eyes were all wet. I knew it was important. The line is the start of a monologue written comedically, and spoken with all the anguish in the world. It’s the absolute heart of why this movie works so beautifully and means so much to so many.