About John Bender

I can practically recite the entire script of The Breakfast Club, a feat shared by most of my generation. Just what was it about this simple teen-angst film, a movie in which nothing happens, that makes us all want to spend our Saturday in detention with a jock, a princess, a basket case, a nerd, and a reject? And then do it over and over again?

The movie’s stars have for the most part fallen out of the radar, the theme of teen alienation has been done to death, and the only ‘car chase’ scene is a bunch of weirdly-dressed teenagers running down the hall to avoid the school principal.

Yet lines from the film make up a good portion of the vocabulary of my world. Seldom do two or three days go by without hearing or making a reference to the film. One pal was heading north with dad, and she made a crack about taking her homework along to do on the boat. She’s not in school, though, but we all knew she was referring to Brian’s home life- the world of happy homework. “Hey, son, do you want to go fishing this weekend?” “Great, dad, oh, but I have homework!” “That’s all right son, you can do it on the boat!” And not too long ago I was in a pub restroom, and two girls were giggling and trying to apply lipstick with no hands…the only ‘skill’ that Molly Ringwald’s character Claire was good for.

Indeed, one of the poems in my collection The Astronaut’s Wife relates directly to the final scene of the film.

Claire

she’s so sad in red
pressing that tiny diamond
into your worn leather palm.

John Bender, played brilliantly by Judd Nelson, tells princess Claire about how her parents use her to get back at each other. Then he says, “Wouldn’t I be outstanding in that capacity?” Smoldering stuff. Near the end of the film, embracing, she pulls one of her diamond earrings from her lobe, and presses into his gloved palm.

This simple gesture pretty much defines my entire inner erotic life.

Back when I was a teenager, we weren’t allowed to go to “worldly movies” so this one I got to see on those newfangled VCR thingies, when at pajama parties with other deprived teenage girls. The innocence of those days seems stunning and heartbreaking. And so it was that there in my sleeping bag, drying a manicure, I fell in love with John Bender. Hard, relentless, witty, and gritty, with a poet’s soul, this rebel weed-smoker would define the way I fell in love. In fact, it had already happened: my first kiss was in an old barn, pathetically chaste, as I let Steven Jordan kiss my cheek before roaring away on his dirt bike. I walked about in a daze for the whole weekend, and alas, upon returning to school, saw no sign of my love. He had been whisked away to juvenile detention after stealing groceries to feed his family one time too many. I wondered then why it was not his welfare-check-blowing mother who wasn’t held accountable. All she did was sit on the couch and drink, and the fridge was empty. The affair had started when my dad felt sorry for those poor kids, and suggested I invite them to church. Steven and his sister Jennifer both came, and so began that devastating first heartbreak.

It got much worse over the years. There was Malachia, the street kid, whom I ran away with back when I was a more tragic adventurer than I dare to be now. We lived together with a bunch of gutter punks in a burned down plantation house in New Orleans. Eventually, there had to be more to life than poetry readings and ‘spare change for booze’ placards. So I returned to Canada, leaping from the gutter directly into the higher halls of learning, beginning my university career.

But Bender’s ghost came back to haunt me when I sat across the table from a Serbian sailor. Gazing into his ocean blues, I fell into the most incredible person I will ever know, a man who spoke half a dozen languages and had traveled the world over, whose astonishing insights into the human heart made my own beat faster. But magic comes with tragic, and I watched my husband’s ship go down on methamphetamine until I buried him.

And because life is nothing but a series of scenes from a movie, the last time I fell for a prison inmate, a man I could not weigh down, I looked for a tiny gift he could cherish but not have to carry about. And so I went diamond shopping. It was the cheapest diamond I could find- who knew that you could get a low-grade cut for $35 bucks? It was the most beautiful thing, that single stud, and the smile it lit in his face. This is the man who promised me he would walk a thousand miles if I needed him, and in fact, that’s pretty much what he did the last time I saw him. He hitched from the east coast to Toronto with nothing but a small back-pack and a sunburn. Apparently he had felt my malaise and had to see me. We spent our brief visit listening to Johnny Cash records and a bit of Elvis, making pancakes, and busting a move to This Little Light of Mine at church. It was the last time I would see him before he died.

Well, for all the fifty times I’ve watched The Breakfast Club, I’d never seen in on the big screen, so last weekend when I heard it was coming to a retro cinema, I packed up my longtime BFF and headed to the Fox. The old Beaches Toronto cinema is absolutely haunted, and I felt ghosts hovering around us in the dim and dank room as the lights went down. The film quality was obligatorily poor. There were no surprises in the film, having memorized every line, but still we laughed and cried at every turn. “Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?” still earns a guffaw. “Screws fall out all the time, sir, the world’s an imperfect place!” still resonates with smart-ass wisdom.

And Judd Nelson’s stellar performance as John Bender still has the same mesmerizing effect on me that it did when I was a teenage girl. Sweeping into the detention hall, sullen and alone, even the rich girl couldn’t help swooning. All that bare-bones male energy, the smoldering sexuality of the one who doesn’t have to be polite or shuffle ridiculous pretenses of decorum. Hot, heavy, and filled with feeling, nothing could be more intense. The chaste kiss in that barn 26 years ago still burns on my face, though a veritable jungle gym of sexual gymnastics have now of course graced and disgraced my adult life. Once, there was a simple gesture, fingertips kissed and pressed to the glass through the prison window, and I don’t think anything before or after has come close to the intensity of that small connection.

I chuckle when I feel your shock- for I’m just saying what millions know and keep to themselves. Regardless of your well-behaved brood, obedient husband, and respectable bookkeeping job, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There is nothing hotter than Bender, in his grubby overcoat, jeans, and long greasy air, leaning over and asking the prom queen just how pristine she is.

“Have you ever been felt up? Over the bra, under the blouse, shoes off…hoping to God your parents don’t walk in?” It’s really rather innocent considering no one has their clothes off. Claire is getting pissed off, and we’re getting hot and bothered as our pulses skyrocket to these teenage shenanigans. In his low drawl, with that half-smile, he goes on. “Over the panties, no bra, blouse unbuttoned, Calvins in a ball on the front seat past eleven on a school night?”

Yes, John Bender sure knows how to undress a girl. Without a show of wealth and a repertoire of fantastical tricks, the bad boy gives the basics the kind of detailed treatment they require, both in and out of bed. For the underclass, life is about the things that…well things that life is about! Eating, drinking, working, and doing it with your old lady.

See, the bad boy is not just fantasy: he represents also reality, for who can speak for humanity more than the man who lives immersed in it? Looking around, realistically, life is more about poor drunks and heavy sorrow and poverty than it is about fancy jobs or the quasi-intellectual bohemian figure. The boy from the ‘other side of the tracks’ is really just a mirror. The lost, poor, angry, sad, struggling blue-collar man is quintessentially human.

And that, after all, is the theme of the entire film, isn’t it, the meaning of the breakfast club? Five assorted social groups come together and find their essential humanity hidden among their differences.

“Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had a 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 and in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, and a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely, yours, The Breakfast Club.”

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor with Richard Jenkins

Despite my reputation for abject emotionalism, I seldom leave a cinema sobbing uncontrollably. But after Tom McCarthy’s very special film The Visitor, I could not stop crumpling my face into a dwindling roll of toilet paper. Nor could I stop myself from dropping into a pub for a few glasses of chardonnay to help numb the pain as I collected my thoughts.

The review I’d read in one of the Toronto weeklies hadn’t said much about the film. It gave it five stars, and said something like “a professor from Connecticut returns to an apartment he keeps in New York City and finds a couple living there.” Not much to go on, admittedly, but the reviewer said that telling anything else would give too much away.

I am indeed intrigued by being randomly led into films or books, and rather than head toward the surely fun new Angelina Jolie action flick, I took a gamble that this would be something special.

Walter Vale, a bored and lonely widower, is sleepwalking through a meaningless life. His only joy is the piano. His wife was a pianist, but he has no knack for the thing at all, and the film opens with him dismissing yet another piano teacher. By chance he is called to a dull economics conference to present a paper he co-authored. He protests to his superiors that he barely worked on the paper- he really just lent his name and a small contribution to a burgeoning researcher. His partner is ill, however, and he has no choice but to head to New York to make the presentation alone. He enters his seldom-used apartment, one he kept with his wife, only to find two illegal immigrants living there. They had rented it from a scam artist.

Richard Jenkins as Walter recalls all the forgotten subtleties of acting that are swept under today’s special effects and wild chemistry and big names and huge plot lines. Most of Walter’s depressed, curious, shy utterances are along the lines of ‘thank you’ and ‘I will.’ Somehow, these simple deliveries convey the wild transformation going on within him. At first, he is terrified to find the beautiful Senegalese woman in his bathtub, and her Syrian boyfriend throws him up against a wall. Soon, as the couple realizes they have been duped, and that they are indeed in Walter’s apartment, the trio is reduced to awkward pleasantries as the couple attempt to arrange lodging. Walter feels for their plight and goes out on a limb to invite them to stay for a few days.

This chance encounter with strangers from far reaches of the globe changes him forever. Forget the fast pace of New York cop shows, the glitz of big name art, commerce, or fashion: New York is made up of these diverse peoples, and their everyday struggles to land free from strife near Lady Liberty. Haaz Sleiman is Tarek, a handsome and funny Syrian who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone and play his drums. Danai Gurira is Zainab, an alien from Senegal who handcrafts jewelry and ekes out a living in the street markets. When Tarek and Walter discover their mutual love for music, Tarek insists on bringing the old professor to jazz clubs and outdoor drumming circles, and Walter surprises himself by learning how to play.

One day Tarek is arrested in the subway and taken to a detention centre, despite his protests that he is not a terrorist. He disappears into the immigration system, and Walter does everything he can to protest this injustice. He even takes Tarek’s mother to see Phantom of the Opera, a lifelong dream of hers, and she opens up about their life in and escape from Syria.

The fears, the hopes, the anguish, the built relationships, and the uncertainties that make up the life of people who are desperate not to fall through the cracks- here’s a film that effectively shows another side of the North American dream story. As I watched the film with my BFF who struggled to gain Canadian citizenship after leaving Peru, we both recalled the emotional hell of immigration, from two different perspectives.

I’m Canadian born, and grateful. We both thought of our Lebanese friend Sal who was heading to New York City to sign some official documents the morning of September 11. Needless to say his trip was cancelled that day, and his family waited many more years. Of course, the whole time, I was waiting with anxious terror for my husband to receive citizenship. He was a sailor from Serbia, one of the most war torn and volatile political situations in the world. I lived in constant terror that he would be deported and that I would never see him again. What happened instead was even worse, and that the contributing stresses led to addictions from which he was unable to escape. He died before his papers were processed. Now, like Walter, I’m alone.

And hence the reason for my teary-eyed exit from the cinema. Now there have been many films about the horrors of world politics, the dream of North American freedom, the epics of the immigration waves, the building of the Irish or Italian boroughs or the plight of refugees, the struggles and the victories and the defeats. But this quiet little film by Tom McCarthy, with its understated humour and its unflinching realism, is the one you will remember.

And what was the moral of this story without a happy ending? That you never, ever know who will touch you or how, you never know what you will lose, and like Walter with his new bongo, you never know what you will be given.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Bayona’s Orphanage

My penchant for bizarre tension and images of the unknown dark frequently leads me into the cinematic horrors of the horror genre. Given the budgets and the messy imaginations of cinema thrill-makers, my expectations are low and I’m seldom hoping for high art when I watch these guilty pleasure flicks. Still, I wonder how hard it can be to make something with appropriately arty and eerie visuals? Could we possibly consider giving some attention to crafting the film? With an imagery pool like ghosts, stigmata, the ocean, creepy old houses, and deformed children and scarecrows, I wonder why there are so few truly arresting horror films.

I’m no expert on the genre: I’m not even a diehard fan like my good friend Donnarama, who still has a trillion old video boxes lining her walls. I’m just an occasional thrill seeker who likes psychological torture and mind games, and I also enjoy a bit of voodoo and a ghost here and there. I don’t usually go in for the hardcore gore. While I appreciated rare treats like the excellent cinematography and crafting of Hostel, I do not like blood-and-gut violence. I like things like stony old mansions, hidden family secrets, a spectre in a well or china cabinet, and psychopathic eccentrics. The desolate winter tree scenes and the intricate lore of the past in The Ring was near perfect, and though I like to peer into the mind of a serial killer, something like Saw is too bloody for me.

The Orphanage seemed like a promising terror experience. It’s a gothic feature debut for Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona, produced by his mentor, Guillermo del Toro. The film is spare and elegant like classic ghost fables- think Henry James, Shirley Jackson, The Changeling- not Nightmare on Elm Street! The gloomy lighting, formidable sea, and dusty antiques create a suitably creepy setting, but the real surprise here is in the acting. The leading lady, Belen Rueda, shines with passion, guilt and terror, and thankfully, her son, who hears voices in the walls of the old orphanage, is not only cute but gives a half decent performance. Too many movies, spanning all genres, are ruined by poor planning- only give a child enough screen time as he or she can shine in. While these two are stellar, Fernando Cayo as the husband is a bit wooden, but I suspect it’s not his talent that’s lacking. It’s almost mandatory to weave in one non-believer who thinks all the ghostly evidences are just the emotions and insanities of the gullible women and children. Geraldine Chaplin’s small role as medium elevated the ghost-busting scenario to masterpiece theatre, and Montserrat Carulla as the homely social worker is a standout.

You’ll read plenty of reviews lambasting The Orphanage: whatever. It’s far from perfect, admittedly. Weaknesses are the usual suspects: what woman hears horrible intruder noises and ventures into the garage/shed/attic/cave alone? All of them, apparently- it’s standard in this genre. Then, perhaps for some the explanation of the haunting here is too convoluted, but I’m seldom expecting a film about a haunted orphanage to make scientific sense. The ending did ruin it for me a bit. I won’t ruin it for you: suffice it to say we had got the point, and we’d felt the emotional impact, and then it still went on, seriously testing our patience. But a great many films are not certain how to end, so they overcompensate. Simplicity would have been best, but so what? I’m not expecting Oscar-worthy production from a thriller.

“It seems that only someone with the flimsiest knowledge of horror’s rich cinematic history could praise the director’s shallow, plagiaristic pastiche,” moaned Ed Gonzalez earlier this summer in Slant Magazine. While I appreciate his vast knowledge and his way with words, I have to say that people who use words like ‘pastiche’ in their reviews are people who seldom appreciate the simple pleasures in life. You may not recall The Orphanage as a film that changes your life irrevocably, but I bet you jump awake tonight when you hear trees creaking at your window. And that, to me, is what it’s all about.