Sometimes high school can be a puzzle, tricky and complicated. John Hughes, the director of the iconic 80’s film The Breakfast Club, kept it simple by taking the stereotypes of cliques and clumping them in a Saturday lunch detention.

Stuck in a room together was a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse. Different as they were in the social ladder, their situation wasn’t ill-fated, but seemed so in the beginning of the movie. The characters come to realize they are more alike than they thought.

At first, they saw each other as their school personas, but as they started talking the social barriers fell and started to get to know one another. They shared how they got into detention. Bender, the rebel, pulled a fire alarm. Claire, the princess, ditched school to go shopping.  Andrew, the jock, taped a hairy nerd’s butt cheeks together, which injured him when it was removed. Brian, the brain, brought a flare gun to school and it went off in his locker. Allison, the basket case, had nothing better to do. Talking even more led to them sharing the deeper truth of what brought them together. The source of what led to their misbehaviors were family problems.

The truths laid on the table that Saturday morning made high school’s tricky and complicated puzzle seem easy to solve. They fit together perfectly even with their differences and faults.

And this is how they responded to Mr. Vernon’s writing prompt, beginning their note; “Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal.”

“You see us how you want to see us” can be applied to VHS or any high school. The key to the lasting popularity of that film is its message, because we all know in our hearts that people put up fronts and hide their true selves but simply talking to a person and not judging them is key.