Taking Life Cues from the Brat Pack in 'The Wolfpack'

It was the 30th anniversary of The Breakfast Club this week. I’ll let that sink in a little. In honour of such an auspicious occasion, the film is being rereleased in theatres on March 31.

If you came of age at a certain time, The Breakfast Club may occupy a place in your heart. It was the film of choice at every sleepover, video party, or other teenage girl gathering in the mid-1980s. For me, the film offered some weird form of hope -- the possibility that you could break the hidebound yet unspoken rules of high school society. Or perhaps it was the idea that boys had real feelings, they were simply hiding them well. Or, even, the notion that a great makeover can solve all of life's many problems.

Re-watching the film this week was a curious experience, akin to an emotional time warp. The dialogue is a bit silly and overripe, the situation implausible -- but damn it, the old girl holds together pretty well. The film has everything: drama, love, a touch of violence, sex, drugs, music, running in the hallway -- all that great stuff of life. You have a princess (Molly Ringwald), a criminal (Judd Nelson), a basket-case (Ally Sheedy), a jock (Emilio Estevez), and a brain (Anthony Michael Hall) all crammed into the school library on a Saturday, confronting each other about perceptions of themselves. Fucked up relationships with parents and the double-edged sword of sex and popularity are tackled with surprising honesty and forthrightness. (This is not to say the cheese factor isn't cranked high because it most indubitably is).

Each actor offers a majority of his or her performance with just one body part. Nelson's flaring nostrils and Ringwald's succulent pout get starring roles, but Sheedy's mangy fringe and Esteban's eyelashes also put in a good show. Still, there is something else at work here. Call it alchemy or cinema magic -- all the clunky components come together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. Pout, nostrils and hair combine and -- hey, presto! -- you have a classic of '80s cinema.

Certain films become a place you can return to and take comfort. I remember feeling this way the first time I saw The Breakfast Club, the experience of wanting to get inside it and stay there. In movie world, you could make boys like you by just being your weird old self. There was a sweet soundtrack to all your adventures, and a nice tidy ending wrapped up all of life's dramas. It's interesting and also kind of terrible to return to this film as an adult. Like stumbling across your teenage self, and being alternately sympathetic and horrified by your own dweebiness.

I thought about The Breakfast Club while watching a new documentary called The Wolfpack. Echoes and warpy reinventions of other '80s and '90s movie classics pop up in The Wolfpack, a film that goes inside the warped apartment of six brothers shut in from the world -- a place where film is more real than reality.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this January and won the Grand Jury Prize. Director Crystal Moselle first came across the brothers entirely by accident. When the boys pushed past her on First Avenue in Manhattan, she was so taken by their appearance, she ran after them. They are, indeed, a striking bunch, with hair down to their buttocks, and often dressed in Ray-Ban sunglasses and fedoras. Moselle befriended the six young men and over a number of years discovered their surreal story.

Stranger than fiction

At the time of the film's making Bhagavan, Govinda, Narayana, Mukunda, Krisna and Jagadesh lived with their parents and sister in a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side of New York City. The family was kept under lock and key by their father Oscar, who maintained possession of the only way out of the apartment -- namely the key to the front door. Home schooled by their mother and kept apart from mainstream society by their father (a follower of Hare Krishna), the kids were allowed to go outside only a couple times each year. In one particular stretch, they didn't leave the apartment for more than 12 months. Their only means of escape was through movies: Harry Potter, Reservoir Dogs, The Dark Knight, etc. The brothers wrote out dialogue in longhand, memorized their lines, blocked out scenes and built elaborate props out of anything they could lay hands on. Old Yoga mats and cereal boxes were repurposed to create renditions of Batman's iconic suit, or were fashioned into weapons so realistic they prompted neighbours to call the police.

The result of the brothers' concentrated efforts is a startling reinterpretation of some of the most iconic films of recent years. It is also a curious window into how cinema shapes and colours our sense of the world. As the boys talk candidly to the camera, their inflections, manner of speaking and understanding of their world all seem drawn from films. It's as if there were a tiny little version of Quentin Tarantino, typing out dialogue from inside each of their heads. The effect is often profoundly strange. Stranger still is the idea that the story is still going on and becoming an even more twisty fable. After the film's premiere, the brothers became something of mini-celebrities, popping up in photos from New York Fashion Week, nattily dressed, like they were in an extended edition of Reservoir Dogs; the director's cut, you might say.

The Wolfpack has stayed with me for a variety of reasons, partly because of the strangeness of the story, but also, more fundamentally, because it illustrates how film can bleed into life and vice versa. Going back and forth between fiction and reality can occasionally feel like a traffic jam inside your brain. (Already this year, I've seen the real life versions of American Sniper and Fifty Shades of Grey that put their fictive counterparts to shame.) I wonder about the eventual outcome of the story for the six boys. Almost everyone has had the experience of watching a film in theatre, stumbling out afterwards, so affected that it's difficult to remember who or what you are. Imagine that experience spread over the course of a lifetime -- especially in your formative years. In an interview with the filmmaker in the New York Times, Ms. Moselle alludes to this by stating: ''It's fascinating what the human spirit does when it's confined... The downside to all the movies -- and they have seen, like, 5,000 -- is that there are certain formulas to them. Real life is different. In real life, the girl doesn't always break your heart. The boys are still struggling to understand that.''

Certainly, we humans are fantasists by our very nature, drawn to story -- nay, obsessed with it -- almost to the exclusion of all else. It's most clearly demonstrated in a film like The Wolfpack where reality and fiction combine to bizarre effect. But sometimes I think the movies, despite their power, haven't done us a whole lot of good when it comes to the process of growing up and accepting reality for the ongoing, non-narrative thing that it is. Real life has a way of stubbornly resisting our desire to structure it into a nice three-part act. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, and happily ever after -- not so much. In an interview about her film in the Guardian, Ms. Moselle talks about the experience of bringing the brothers to the Sundance Film Festival. ''They were able to go to all these movies and had people recognizing them on the street -- it’s a very surreal experience,'' Moselle says. ''We're there, making their movie dreams come true,'' she says. ''It's a beautiful thing.''

But is it really? The immersion into cinema as the only way to remain sane inside an insane situation is understandable, but the continuation of movie rules in the real world seems a more dubious undertaking.

Revisiting, revisited

It's interesting that we return again to the classic narratives, fairytales and fables, reworking the same stories over and over again. The newest version of Cinderella is perhaps one of the more curious examples of this phenomenon. Kenneth Branagh's interpretation doesn't draw so much on the original source materials (i.e., Charles Perrault's 300-year-old version) as it does the 1950s Disney animated feature that cleaned away all the messy bits (bloody bits of people's feet, for example). I remember distinctly feeling that the Disney Cinderella, with her tweedy vibrato singing voice and her dumb hair bun, was not anyone I could relate to. But here she is again, inspiring another generation of girls who have had princess pretty much shoved down their throats from infancy. (If you would like an extended and fascinating read on the use and abuse of fairytales over the years, see Marina Warner's recent piece in the Guardian.)

Movies are certainly the most seductive form of propaganda there is, endlessly repurposed to suit the demands of the time and prop up the established order of things. And, in the case of fairytales, it is curious perhaps that after much post-modern reinvention (Ever After, Ella Enchanted), we have returned to the most staid, classic and, yes, conservative version. Somewhere in his cryogenic tube, Uncle Walt is probably grinning like a madman.

I suppose this is why something as fluffy as The Breakfast Club, a film that aimed to take apart the stereotypical roles offered to teenagers (princess, jock, criminal), should seem almost radical. We are all princesses now, or in the case of boys, maybe Reservoir Dogs. That's the thing about living inside a fantasy: the longer you stay, the harder it is to escape.