Wild Mass Guessing for The Breakfast Club.
Both seem to enjoy pushing people over the edge. Both are outsiders. Both carry a hatred for authority figures. Bender's father beats him, and one of the Joker's stories for his scars involve an alcoholic father. The Breakfast Club is set in Sherman Illinois, which is not too far from Chicago, which is what the The Dark Knight Trilogy's Gotham is supposedly based on. Perhaps after graduation, Bender suffers some sort of traumatic accident that leaves him scarred physically and drives him to insanity.
With that in mind...
Brian grows up to be Mike Engel.
The news host of
Gotham Tonight was portrayed by the same actor. Perhaps Brian wanted a cooler name.
And while we're at it...
Allison grows up to become Catwoman.
She does enjoy stealing things.
They all become staff at the school.
This is more just fantasy, but it would be nice
It is Vernon who becomes The Joker.
Both characters say "Hit me!" repeatedly to another character.
Bender does this regularly.
Its clearly established that Bender is constantly in detention. Maybe he secretly likes bringing kids of different cliques together, if only for one day, as part of an experiment of sorts on society. Maybe he has it methodically planned out: observe them, comment about their parents, take them to his locker to get his pot, and get them high so they eventually spill their secrets and grow closer. Maybe thats where he met all the girls in his wallet.
- He gets abused at home. Understandable why he'd rather spend the weekend away from his parents.
Brian wanted to get stuck writing the letter.
When Vernon came down on them for skipping the assignment, Brian would get off scot-free. If Vernon tried to get him into trouble again, the report in his handwriting would clear him and probably put some suspicion on Vernon of his corruption; the other teachers would start watching Vernon a lot more closely. Meanwhile, the other four would think that he had been "sticking it to the man" along with them instead of doing the assignment like the sycophant they thought he was.
- Early on in the film, he's the only one seen to be taking the assignment at all seriously. Considering that he's the Brain, it's possible he was simply interested in the question on its own merits.
There were only four students; Bender was the "unrestrained" persona of Brian.
The students didn't call him on his differing stories because of the things "Bender" had already made up. Two clashing stories don't seem like much when there are three other stories he insists are true.
The charge wasn't just a flare gun in his locker, but a flare gun set up to blow up in front of anyone who tried to get into his locker without disarmng it, which happened when a teacher noticed that his elephant lamp looked suspiciously like a water hookah when the lamp mechanism was taken out. Bender's locker was an empty pair of lockers on the other side of the school that he set up to avoid 1) being caught with a bag of weed in his locker, and 2) burning it all up when the trap was triggered.
Which and how much of their backstories were true is unknown. Odds are, he ran away a few months or couple of years ago and has lived in an abandoned house ever since. Any scenes where Bender insults Brian, such as the lunchroom scene, are just him mumbling and being surly and (to anyone listening) mocking the reaction of someone who might object to his insults. At the end of the film, Claire falls for Bender and Brian, since they're the same bad boy to her. The Brian persona writes his idea of a subversive note in which the "extra" character seemed like something he threw in for contrast against the popular athlete and "cool" criminal (like how the basket case contrasted against the princess).
They all killed themselves. Well, not Claire...
Detention is purgatory, place where the kids repent for their sins. The nerdy kid DID top himself, as did the Jock because he felt so ashamed for what he'd done. Claire went to the mall with her friends, the car crashed and she died. Allison had
nothing better to do bt kill herself and Judd Nelson is Judd Nelson, so he killed himself too.
- Carl could be Jesus. He guides the kids (and Judd) through detention, and does help them improve themselves, though mostly leaves it to them.
Anything from the pot smoking on was a hallucination
It was REALLY good pot. Explains the lack of logic in the last five minutes.
We get the film from the point of view of the characters. The reason things don't make as much sense in the end is because they're still really, really high.
Alison is a virgin
Just before she blurts out that she is a nymphomaniac, they are discussing virginity. She has been watching them silently all this time, maybe she thinks that stating their virginity is some kind of 'bonding' exercise or a 'right of passage' to become friends, so she lies after seeing people teasing others about being virgins.
- It makes sense considering that she is a compulsive liar.
- She actually admitted it outright once the confession was extracted from Claire.
Bender was a cartoon character.
As
Judge Doom said, "No toon, can resist the old
Shave-and-a-hair-cut!" When Bender is hiding under her table, Claire hits the first five notes on the desktop, to which Bender replies with the
two-bits! follow up hits.
They're all dead.
The characters exist in the
DC Comics universe. They have died, and the entire movie is them gradually passing over and coming to terms with their own deaths. Alternatively, they were all alive and actually in detention, up until the janitor arrived, went nuts and killed the kids (he obviously hates them). Allison is in fact Death of the Endless, acting in her role as a psychopomp.
They're all dead and being judged by the statue.
It's watching over them, deciding... deciding....
Breeding pairs?
The kids and the few adults seen are the last few humans left. This detention scenario is brainwashed into them by caring aliens so they will breed.
- Three guys and only two girls? Count me out of this re-population program.
The kids don't socialize with each other on Monday...
...at least not in school. They know that their respective cliques would tear them apart, so they pretend everything's the same to avoid conflict. But after school every day, they hang out with each other and away from their other friends.
- Or they agree to meet before school every day, explaining the film's title. Bender and Allison can escape their respective homes; Brian's parents will be glad to drop him off at school early; and the arrangement won't interfere with Claire's social life or Andy's extracurricular activities.
Rather than becoming a bum, John Bender....
.... eventually writes a successful screenplay based on the events of the Saturday, in which his own counterpart is named "John Hughes"!
Bender did punch Vernon
The second half of the film was his hallucination to cope with going to prison after punching out Vernon.
Claire slept with all the men in the group.
It is heavily implied during the scene where Bender rips up the books, that Claire may have slept with Andrew at one point. It was also heavily implied by Bender (whom also guessed correctly that Andrew hated his parents.) that he slipped her the "Hot beef injection." She ended up with Bender in the end. Plus she did convince Brian to write the essay for them all, so he must have had something out of it.
- Brian finished that essay before they all got out of detention. If he really needed a fee to write it, wouldn't that mean that he and Claire had sex right there in the library? Hard to imagine them pulling that off with kids like Bender and Allison at the ready to interrupt.
- Not really, when Bender wanted to close the door earlier, he suggested to Brian to get the Prom Queen (Claire) impregnated. It was Bender who insinuated that Brian was bragging about having sex with Clair before admitting his virginity. She gave a sly smile to him when he did admit his virginity, claiming that doesn't bother her. And on Claire's side of things it took some coaxing from Allison to make her admit her own virginity so odds are, both are encouraging it.
Allison slept with Brian and Bender.
Bender claims to have seen her before. How else would she get close to Brian and steal his wallet.
Allison killed her parents.
Makes sense, she stole Benders knife and never gave it back, unlike Brian's wallet. Her parents ignore her so they wouldn't see it coming.
Brian's parents have connections with the faculty.
How else would he get Saturday detention for bringing
a flare gun to school?
- It was the '80s. Andrew got detention for assault and battery, so Brian getting detention for a flare gun isn't too far out.
Brian's parents are pushing him to be perfect for selfish purposes.
It's appropriately cynical, and fits in with his mother's overall sleazy mien. Brian's mother and father don't see him as a human being, but as a means of earning prestige in Shermer. They grossly insert themselves into his academic process, and they surely take the credit for his successes. Furthermore, the higher the GPA, the more money you make.
Think about that for a second.
Vernon goes to jail.
Brian secretly placed recording devices into the library and storage closet. Vernon's threat to Bender has been recorded. Why else would John smirk at Bender when he asked if he was threatening him. He knew about the devices and was just confirming it. The threat is placed all over the announcements on Monday. Vernon gets fired and arrested.
- And then Ed Rooney gets his job.
- Which is almost not WMG at all, considering that the films take place in the same universe (see Trivia section).
Allison does end up running away.
She goes to New York, where she eventually changes her name to
Marla Singer.
Allison is in the same boat as Squee, in that her parents don't care about her and she clearly has a number of issues. She's also artistic, a skill demonstrated early on in the movie.
This becomes a regular thing.
All the kids find excuses to rejoin Bender every Saturday that he has detention.
Or possibly half sister. We never see Cameron or Allison's family, and Cameron's dad doesn't seem like the most loyal man, so he could've knocked another woman up, or Cameron's mom had her with another man. Both are weird and don't seem to be the most popular in school. Their home lives are both unsatisfactory, and the way Ferris describes Cameron's house (Like a museum, you can't touch anything and it's cold) was a deleted line from
The Breakfast Club describing Allison's house.
Brian is a closet homosexual.
The only guy who isn't romantically interested in girls and he whistled at Andrew when he took his shirt off.
- He spends the first act desperate to please Bender
Making a remake of this movie set in the present decade would be all but impossible.
We know the students managed to bring stuff into the library that Vernon would probably have blown a gasket if he knew. If five teenagers today were consigned to detention and left unsupervised, they'd all pull out the smartphones they'd smuggled in, soon as they were left on their own, and would spend the day calling their friends or messing around online, never saying a single word to one another.
- It could work if they were forced to surrender their phones to the Principal (Like in the Victorious parody) or the school's computers were shut down for the weekend. Some schools don't allow kids to bring their tablets or laptops to detention either.
The parents we see in the film are strawmen.
A theme of the film is how the members of the Breakfast Club recognize the hollowness of their respective familial/social circles and become determined to make good rather than succumb to the faults of their parents and peers. In the opening of the film, we briefly see Claire's father, Brian's mother, and Andrew's dad. These three characters may seem like one-dimensional
Jerkasses, but it is very likely that this was intentional, as they are meant to be jabs at the failings of some suburban parents. For instance...
- Brian's mom: An exaggerated mixture of success-obsessed Education Mamas and middle class women with grandiose delusions of importance.
- Claire's dad: An upwardly-mobile man who hides his self-absorbtion under a photogenic, cheerful facade, almost like a Sleazy Politician.
- Andrew's dad: A portly, rather unsophisticated man who clings to immature notions of masculinity and toughness.
Allison is not in detention because "she had nothing better to do".
She said herself that she's a compulsive liar, she lied about a bunch of other stuff. When she gave her reason, it seemed to be mostly a joke played for laughs.Even if she wanted to get away from her parents, it feels like literally any other place would be more fun than detention.As for what she actually would've done to get detention is completely up for debate, personally I'd guess she got caught stealing something.
- Maybe she just wanted to spend Saturday at the library, only the public library was closed that weekend. She'd have spent the whole day reading if her fellow detention-ees hadn't proven so interesting to watch and provoke.
Andy and Bender have had sex
(I don't mean with each other, fyi). Think about it! Claire outright says she never did it. Brian also mentions his virginity directly. I'm not sure if Allison was lying about her status (after she 'admits' she never did it,)That leaves on Andy and John. Neither of them outright say, but considering that Andy is a popular boy jock and Bender is a criminal bad-ass, it isn't unlikely.
- Well, Bender has a whole bunch of pictures of girls in his wallet, which he states some he considers hanging out with and some his girlfriends.
M
Brian has Asperger's Syndrome
He seems unusually nervous for someone merely in detention until you realize that he (like many on the autism spectrum) is nervous about being in a room with strangers and nobody familiar to him. He also goes off on tangents even when the other characters obviously aren't listening to him (when he rattles off the clubs he belongs to), and he's oblivious to sarcasm and other social cues (Bender: Did your mother marry Mr. Rogers? Brian: No, Mr. Johnson). All of these are common symptoms of people on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum (Asperger's, Type III hyperlexia, etc).
.Being a teenager isn't easy, and these teenagers are clearly miserable, but their lives probably aren't as bad as they appear. Sometimes, we like to think the worst about our parents, but usually they are well meaning people who have roles beyond parenting. Claire is probably very bitter about her parents divorce, and is thus imagining them doing it to spite her, Andrew and Brian are very talented people who put pressure on themselves, and only fear that their parents wouldn't love them, Allison is a lonely girl who is so detached she can't relate to her own parents, and thus imagines them neglecting her, and Bender is angry jerk who provokes everyone so he could be lying because he likes people feeling sympathy.
Vernon wanted to get fired
It would explain why Bender is even still at the school to begin with as he's a repeat detention offender and his constant insults towards Vernon is both suspension and expulsion worthy. That and how he probably let the kids get away with causing untold amounts of property damage.
Claire is really Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles
The fact is, Both characters are played by Molly Ringwald and both films are set in the same universe, according to the late John Hughes. So think about it, after the end of Sixteen Candles, Jake Ryan probably said to himself, "Why would I bother to date Samantha knowing I will be graduating in a few months and most likely will be attending college when she still has two years of high school?" Soon after, Jake abruptly broke up with Samantha and got back together with Caroline. Samantha, devastated and enraged, didn't want to be reminded of Jake or the breakup anymore and ran away from home and, along the way, met Mr. and Mrs. Standish, who surprisingly decided to take the distraught young lady in and accepted her as their daughter. After being welcomed into the Standish family, Samantha chose to block out all memories of her real family and Jake Ryan and took on the persona of prissy rich girl, Claire Standish, got enrolled at Shermer High School in Shermer, Illinois, started to skip classes in favor of going shopping, got put in detention on a Saturday with four other students and the rest is history.
- Does she not notice that Carl the Janitor is a dead ringer for her brother in law Rudy? (Both played by John Kapelos). And that Brian is identical to Farmer Ted?
- That could be explained by her just being in deep denial over it, or possibly by her simply not caring about such a strong coincidence anymore.
Bender dies a year or two after the film ends for unknown reasons.
However, he is given a second chance, and is reborn as
Rodimus Prime. (Which version of Rodimus he becomes is a matter of personal preference, however.)
The ending of the movie is about the teenagers gaining the strength to call out their parents for their mistreatment of them.
Firstly, we know that Bender already calls out his parents, and that since by the end of the movie he doesn't seem so isolated anymore what with having friends who actually understand him, this should further embolden him. Let's go through each of the teenagers.
Claire: This actually gets spelt out by Bender near the end of the movie when he and Claire are in the closet together, when he asks her "You know how you said before how your parents use you to get back at each other? Wouldn't I be outstanding in that capacity?" Cut to the very last scene, and Bender and Claire passionately kiss each other right in front of Claire's dad's car before she leaves. It seems that Bender may well have ended up helping Claire achieve exactly that.
Allison: This is actually the next easiest character to figure out. Her complaint is about how her parents ignore her. By the end of the movie, she's had a makeover, and ends up kissing a popular school sports star before she leaves, which is almost certainly going to be near impossible for her parents to ignore.
Brian: Has contemplated suicide due to bad grades, and at the beginning of the movie we're shown that his parents seem to display no sympathy for his plight and continue to pressure him to study. By the end of the movie, he has the balls to pen a letter on behalf of the group to the school principal calling him out on his condescension towards the teenagers in detention. This should set him up nicely for calling out his parents for their pressure and uncaring attitude towards his suicidal feelings.
Andy: Hates having become the Jerk Jock because of his father's expectations of him. Opening himself up to the others gives him more confidence as does kissing Allison at the end, and when he gets in his dad's car, his face clearly demonstrates he's not going to take his dad's crap anymore.
The group meet up once a year, always on a Saturday, after the events of the film, and continue to do so after they all graduate.
The Saturday the met each other had such an impact on them that they decided to get together once a year, always on a Saturday, to hang out. After they graduated, they continued to do so, no matter if they moved away from the town or stayed. But they continue to meet for years for one day, to catch up and chat various topics. Eventually, Facebook gets released and they friend each other, even setting up a Facebook group called The Breakfast Club.
The day in the library is the last day of the world, as nuclear armageddon occurs while they're safely in the stone library.
This is the plot of the sequel parody musical, The Last Breakfast Club.
