Molly Ringwald and ‘That Scene’ in The Breakfast Club

A look at Molly Ringwald’s op-ed piece in The New York Times, discussing the now infamous scene under the desk, and why I think it should remain

Trying to move undetected through the heating duct from Vernon, the teacher come warden for Saturday morning’s detention, Bender crashes through the ceiling tiles onto the library floor.

“God damn it!” comes Vernon’s voice through the office wall. He storms through the fire exit doors leading into the library, where an unlikely band of detainees look on, wide-eyed and fearful.

Bender scrambles under Claire’s desk, out of Vernon’s sight.

“What in God’s name is going on in here? What was that ruckus?” Vernon shouts.

“What ruckus?” Andrew (the jock) says, acting confused.

“I was just in my office an’ I heard a ruckus!”

“Can you describe the ruckus, sir?” Brian (the brain) says.

“Watch your tongue, young man, watch it!” Vernon says.

Now crouching under Claire’s desk, Bender peeks under her skirt. Catching a glimpse of her underwear, he moves his head towards her crotch. Claire snaps her legs tight, a crunching sound is heard as they clamp onto Bender’s head. Bender yells out in pain. The group start to cough, to mask Bender’s cry from Vernon. With Bender still hiding under the desk, Claire repeatedly kicks him.

As Vernon leaves, Bender crawls out from under the table, while Claire’s blows rain down on him.

“It was an accident,” Bender says.

“You’re an asshole!” Claire shouts.

“Sue me!” Bender says

This is a scene from the much-loved film The Breakfast Club (TBC). It’s a scene Molly Ringwald (the actress who plays Claire), in her op-ed piece in the NY Times, sees as a blight on the film and believes should be excised on grounds of decency.

But before we get to Ringwald’s argument proper, we need to understand the characters of John Bender and Claire.

Bender is a delinquent whose self-appointed raison d’être is to challenge authority. We see this played out in his ongoing battles with Vernon (the disciplinarian figure) throughout the film. He epitomises “sticking it to the man.”And this, I argue, is where he resonates with teenage boys and young men: his rebellious streak. Not his treatment of Claire.

Bender smokes weed (when it was illegal), is immature, a bully and obnoxious. You don’t have to peel the layers back far to see he’s also deeply unhappy. And in one heated scene, he acts out his abusive relationship with his father, showing Andrew (the jock) a cigar-tip scar on his forearm courtesy of Bender’s dad. A reminder he’s one of life’s ashtrays.

Claire represents everything Bender is not (and probably secretly wants to be): popular, wealthy, successful and principled(?). She gets good grades and is a member of a number of social clubs — not academic ones, as she states, because they’re for nerds. Her problems arise from the constant strain of approval and keeping up appearances. Problems in stark contrast to Bender’s. She sees in Bender that which she craves: a reckless abandon from a buttoned-up image-conscious life freighted with expectation and clique rules.

Bender plays off his attraction to Claire as the kid from the wrong side of the tracks teaching the entitled, rich kid a lesson (think of the boy pulling the pigtails of the girl he secretly fancies in kindergarten and then ratchet it up.). A trope that works well given the age and setting of the film’s characters.

With all that out of the way, we can visit Molly Ringwald's objection, where she says,

My mom also spoke up during the filming of that scene in “The Breakfast Club,” when they hired an adult woman for the shot of Claire’s underwear. They couldn’t even ask me to do it — I don’t think it was permitted by law to ask a minor — but even having another person pretend to be me was embarrassing to me and upsetting to my mother, and she said so. That scene stayed, though.

What would be lost, if anything, if the scene was removed?

Whether we had Bender hide under Andrew’s desk or somewhere else, some of the tension between Bender and Claire would be lost. Bender is the bad-boy “criminal”, after all, and Criminals behave in unpleasant ways. The scene helps cement the character’s morality with the audience and is consistent with Bender’s behaviour towards Claire throughout the film — as repellant as it is.

But I kept thinking about that scene. I thought about it again this past fall, after a number of women came forward with sexual-assault accusations against the producer Harvey Weinstein, and the #MeToo movement gathered steam.

I don’t think Ringwald understands the point of the scene. Bender’s behaviour here is not something we condone, and the TBC doesn’t ask us to see Bender favourably in this situation; he is not met with cheers and high-fives. Claire strikes him and calls him an “asshole.” However, TBC was released at a time (the 80s) when scenes like this could be considered bawdy, and attitudes and power dynamics between men and women were very different, but more on that later.

What’s more, as I can see now, Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film. When he’s not sexualizing her, he takes out his rage on her with vicious contempt, calling her “pathetic,” mocking her as “Queenie.”

The harassment of Claire by Bender throughout the film is without question. In one scene Bender tells Brian (the Brain) to shut Vernon’s office door; “we’ll get the prom queen impregnated.” It’s clear there’s no impetus behind the threat; it hangs empty and is understood as posturing. This is made clear by Bender’s attempt to involve Brian, a morally good guy he knows full well would object to the idea. But nevertheless, it’s threatening behaviour. And it’s supposed to be! He is, by design, the bad boy. What’s more important is how the rest of the group responds to his behaviour.

Bender drifts into the space of the anti-hero in his scenes with Vernon, but for the most part, he’s unlikeable and pitiable. His behaviour towards Claire is condemned throughout the film by the rest of the group, with Andrew coming to Claire’s defense on more than one occasion.

If I sound overly critical, it’s only with hindsight. Back then, I was only vaguely aware of how inappropriate much of John’s writing was, given my limited experience and what was considered normal at the time.

We are able to use the current cultural milieu along with today’s moral framework, when watching yesteryear’s films, to judge the inappropriateness of Bender’s behaviour. He doesn’t represent all teenage boys, as seen by his foil Andrew and studious Brian. He represents a particular type, the bad boy. And it’s in keeping with Bender’s character to behave in this way. His harassment of Claire makes us feel uncomfortable, which it should. And where Molly Ringwald would rather the scene was excised from the film, I see it as important to the character. Moreover, it’s indicative of the matrix films were made in Hollywood at that time.

Ringwald goes on to say,

Claire acts dismissively toward him [Bender], and, in a pivotal scene near the end, she predicts that at school on Monday morning, even though the group has bonded, things will return, socially, to the status quo. “Just bury your head in the sand and wait for your fuckin’ prom!” Bender yells. He never apologizes for any of it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end.

Ringwald glosses over Claire’s part in this scene.

BRIAN
               Um, I was just thinking, I mean.  I
               know it's kind of a weird time, but
               I was just wondering, um, what is
               gonna happen to us on Monday?  When
               we're all together again?  I mean I
               consider you guys my friends, I'm
               not wrong, am I?

                            ANDREW
               No...

                            BRIAN
               So, so on Monday...what happens?

                            CLAIRE
               Are we still friends, you mean?
               If we're friends now, that is?

                            BRIAN
               Yeah...

                            CLAIRE
               Do you want the truth?

                            BRIAN
               Yeah, I want the truth...

                            CLAIRE
               I don't think so...

                           ALLISON
               Well, do you mean all of us or just
               John?

                            CLAIRE
               With all of you...

We see Brian vulnerable and reaching out in this scene. We learn later on he brought a flare gun to school with the intention of shooting himself because of the shame and disappointment he felt in failing Shop Class. And Allison (the basket case), who walks the school corridors alone, longing for friends, is desperate for the bonds she’s made with the group to remain. Given this, Claire’s “honesty” can be interpreted as callous. This then gives a better understanding of Bender’s outburst. It’s probably one of his more reasoned acts when compared to other examples of his behaviour towards Claire throughout the film.

Although not their first kiss the end scene, where Bender and Claire embrace, is seen by some as validating Bender’s harassment and lewd behaviour towards Claire: he gets the girl, despite how he treats her. There is another school of thought, however: the kissing of Claire and accepting her earring is the moment Bender comes of age. Claire places her earring in his hand. He then gently moves in to kiss her, Claire meeting him halfway.

As Claire is driven away, Bender’s eyes follow her as the car disappears into the distance. He then places her earring in his ear. By inserting the earring into his ear, it reinforces the idea of his acceptance of Claire and how he has come to value her: the earring is now part of him for everyone to see. It’s the only tender moment we see of Bender in the film. And can be seen as a turning point for a character who had previously said: “…what’s gonna happen when you and I walk down the hallways at school, you can forget it! ’Cause it’s never gonna happen!”.

Perhaps it’s too subtle and not the satisfying apology some of us had hoped for. But you have to ask yourself, would it ring true for Bender’s character to have a mea culpa, apologising and asking for Claire’s forgiveness? I don’t think so. Should he? Absolutely! But what he should do and what his character would do are two very different things. Perhaps our moral response to this and the film’s prescribed response are misaligned, and it does count as an aesthetic flaw in value, but that’s beyond the scope of this essay.

When Molly Ringwald says:

If attitudes toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes.

This doesn’t seem entirely correct. Culture is represented in art; it’s how we make sense of it, from Hogarth’s Gin Lane, and Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities to t.v. drama The Wire. They each portray a slice of culture at a particular time and place. And The Breakfast Club is no different.

We sit more uneasy today when Bender motions under Claire’s skirt than we did in 1985. Therefore, the film rings true to when it was made. For better or worse (okay, worse) the dynamic of power between men and women in the 80s was different from today. And when part of a film sets out to explore relationships between the sexes — warts and all — it has a responsibility to reflect the dynamic of the time.

To bleach people like Bender out of existence in art is to deny they exist and disingenuous to the audience. It doesn’t help anyone and bears little resemblance to reality.

Ringwald acknowledges as much in her struggle to reconcile her love for the films she made with current moral attitudes.

How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art — change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go

Let’s leave art and historical events preserved in their globules of amber, in the understanding we are able to view them in the broader context of the time they occurred. Let’s have faith in our audience to recognise that which was acceptable four decades ago would fail to pass the morality test of today. We don’t need to play revisionist and make art and historical events align with our current beliefs and judgments; for if history is the record of change over time, when we remove that change, history ceases to exist. And our mistakes repeated.

This is an accompanying essay to the first part I wrote on what The Breakfast Club teaches us and why we love it.