The Jock, the Nerd, the Dork, and the Popular Kid: Shura’s “What’s It Gonna Be,” John Hughes, and Queer Nostalgia

To the extent that Shura has “queered” Hughes’s films in the act of paying homage to them, we might wonder how this process is informed by contemporary readings of Hughes, in which the legacy of homophobia and queer erasure (among other prejudices) continue to mark his work as products of a particular, and particularly queer-unfriendly, era. In remaking The Breakfast Club in her own queer image, however, Shura reveals at least one crucial blind spot of her own, in the form of an act of class erasure that arises out of the process of making Hughes palatable for a contemporary queer-friendly audience.

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In the music video for her 2016 single “What’s It Gonna Be?” the British singer, songwriter, and producer Shura (in collaboration with the video’s director, Chloé Wallace) responds to the contemporary push toward positive depictions of queerness in entertainments aimed at young people as a starting point for telling a pair of queer-affirmative love stories set in a suburban high school. At the same time, the video tells its story while paying explicit homage to an assortment of pop culture referents of the 1980s, most notably the films of writer/director John Hughes, whose influential teen comedy The Breakfast Club (1985) has been cited by Shura as “the main inspiration” for her video.1 The result is a video that operates on two distinct textual levels, each of them defined by separate temporal registers: a relatively linear, self-contained narrative level that depends on contemporary attitudes toward queer adolescence, and an extratextual level, in which a variety of generally ’80s-centric pop culture references makes additional meaning for the viewer. The merger of the past and the present in “What’s It Gonna Be?” complicates the video’s queer-affirmative aims in several ways. In terms of target audience, the multiple levels that the video functions on would appear to suggest two separate intended viewerships. On one hand, the setting and subject matter appeals to the contemporary youth market that has generally been assumed to be the audience for pop music videos since the format was popularized in the early 1980s. On the other hand, the video’s flurry of references to the 1980s speaks, nostalgically, to older viewers who would have themselves been the initial consumers of the teen-oriented films and pop culture artifacts of the 1980s that the video references. As the video is utilizing ’80s nostalgia as the backdrop to a narrative that depends on contemporary attitudes toward queer adolescence, however, the video cannot help but call attention to the ways in which queer adolescence is made invisible, often through threats of violence or erasure, in the very 1980s texts that “What’s It Gonna Be” recalls with such reverence. Viewers with any memory of the political and cultural climate of the 1980s are likely to recall the era as the one in which AIDS began ravaging gay male communities (among others) and the resultant moral panics that suited the political visions of right-wing populists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. For viewers who were queer adolescents in the 1980s, these relics of their youth might produce a smile of recognition, but seeing them applied to a contemporary queer narrative is as likely to serve as a reminder of just how much these queer former adolescents were denied the privilege of seeing themselves reflected in the pop culture productions of the era.

In what follows, then, I examine the effects of telling a contemporary queer-affirmative story through the lens of a particular 1980s nostalgia. I begin, first, with a summary of the video’s narrative content, followed by an analysis of the ways in which the video uses particular spaces – most notably, those of the school and the suburban teenage bedroom – in order to establish a set of dynamics that allow the video’s reasonably elaborate narrative to be effectively communicated within the limited space of a four-minute pop video. From there, I move on to an examination of the presence and particular meanings of the pop culture that is being self-consciously evoked in the visual presentation of “What’s It Gonna Be?” Because certain referents are afforded greater significance than others in the video, I will then take a closer look at the influence of writer/director John Hughes on the video. As Shura has explicitly pitched “What’s It Gonna Be?” as an homage to The Breakfast Club, the video warrants an examination of the ways in which Hughes’s heteronormative (and, some claim, homophobic) text leaves space for queering, while also performing its own act of erasure in omitting certain inconvenient elements of the original text.

Collect Intel

Viewed solely as a narrative, “What’s It Gonna Be?” combines numerous recognizable conventions of high school comedies. Viewers familiar with any number of romantic comedies set in high school, in particular, will have seen some variation of the plot that this video is, at least initially, presenting the viewer with. Such a plot neatly conforms to a traditional three-act structure, in this case: (1) a nerdy outcast has a crush on a more popular kid; (2) the nerd manages to initiate a relationship with their popular crush, which sometimes (though not always) involves some degree of scheming deception; and (3) typically following some series of misunderstandings and revelations, the couple ends up together (or, in a some rare cases, does not). This broad outline forms the basis for several John Hughes productions, including Sixteen Candles (1984), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), along with many later (and arguably Hughes-inspired) high school comedies, such as Lucas (1986), Angus (1995), Ten Things I Hate About You, Drive Me Crazy (all 1999), Whatever It Takes (2000), and Get Over It (2001), as well as Can’t Buy Me Love (1987) and its remake Love Don’t Cost a Thing (2003), plus She’s All That (1999) and its remake He’s All That (2021).2 “What’s It Gonna Be?” duplicates this familiar plot by presenting two such outcast/popular kid couplings: Nick is the awkward and bumbling nerd contrasted, in the early scenes, against the conventionally attractive and obviously popular Sarah (her student government campaign posters are all over the walls of the school), while Shura, with her dyed-green hair and mornings spent rocking out in the girls’ bathroom to the music on her headphones, contrasts against the athletic and popular Brad. In presenting these characters as recognizable high school archetypes – the nerd, the “most likely to succeed” popular girl, the weirdo, and the jock – ”What’s It Gonna Be?” neatly performs a kind of narrative shorthand: the viewer, schooled (as it were) in the conventions of high school comedies, requires very little else from the narrative in order to understand who these four characters are.

And yet the video is using these recognizable archetypes and conventions of high school comedies as a misdirection, as the narrative reveals a queer twist at the very end. In one sense, the twist functions to subvert the viewer’s heterosexist assumptions, leading us to believe, or at least take for granted, that Shura has her eye on Brad, and Nick on Sarah, until in the last minute of the video we see Shura paired off with Sarah, and Nick with Brad. At the same time, it is possible to view the queer twist not as a subversion of the teen romance formula but rather as an illustration of its durability, as the genre’s character archetypes and plot conventions demonstrate their malleability to contemporary, queer-affirmative contexts. In her description that accompanies the video on her YouTube page, Shura appears to be using the twist to perform both functions:

“What’s It Gonna Be?” is about having a massive crush on someone, so it made sense to go back to school, where it all began. But it was important for us to explore those archetypal characters – The Jock, The Nerd, The Dork, The Popular Kid – and then flip expectations. “What’s It Gonna Be” is based on my personal experience as a kid; thinking you’re in love but then realising that’s maybe just because you feel you should be (and ending up with someone totally unexpected).3

Rather than simply using the twist as a narrative sleight-of-hand, or a trick played on the viewer, though, Shura establishes it as a point of empathetic identification between the audience and the characters on the screen. The tension she identifies in her video between “thinking you’re in love but then realizing that’s maybe just because you feel you should be” and “ending up with someone totally unexpected,” then, becomes literalized in the viewer’s experience of watching the video: if “What’s It Gonna Be?” is a narrative about the process of realizing the unexpected, the viewer experiences these moments of discovery right along with Shura and Nick. The heterosexist assumptions that the viewer brings to the high school romance narrative are the same ones that Shura and Nick, raised on a steady diet of hetero-centric high school romances, bring to their own experiences of navigating the complex world of friendship, romance, and sexuality in high school.

While the examination of “What’s It Gonna Be?” that follows will focus on the ways in which the video evokes the ghosts of pop culture past, much of the video’s novelty derives from Shura’s ability to apply well-worn narrative and character tropes to a contemporary, queer-affirmative context. “What’s It Gonna Be?” accomplishes this by relying on the viewer’s familiarity with the conventions of the high school narrative, which is mirrored in the ways in which the characters of Shura and Nick appear to internalize these very same narratives. This intertextual dynamic allows what might have otherwise been a self-consciously clever narrative twist a more significant thematic weight, as it serves as a meta-commentary on the ways in which the genre of high school romance stories has historically been a resolutely hetero-centric one. Before delving into the ways in which “What’s It Gonna Be?” queers this genre and various other pop culture touchstones, however, I would like to turn to an analysis of the ways in which the video utilizes specific, meaningful spaces in order to further establish the numerous social, romantic, and power dynamics that are being employed in the video and how these further contribute to the viewer’s understanding of these character types.

Understand Their Planets

As efficient as “What’s It Gonna Be?” is in establishing its characters via recognizable adolescent archetypes, the video is equally sophisticated in its use of mise-en-scène to further suggest the various dynamics that define the characters and their relationships to each other. Specifically, while “What’s It Gonna Be?” is clearly invested in the social and sexual dynamics of its characters, it expresses these dynamics largely through its representations of particular spaces. In this sense, the video, at times, cannot help but reveal as much about the characters’ relationships to the spaces they inhabit as it does about their relationships to the other characters in the video. The analysis that follows will demonstrate how certain spaces – notably, those of the suburban high school and the middle-class adolescent bedroom – become, for the viewer, every bit as illustrative as the video’s use of character archetypes. Additionally, it is these spaces that determine the characters’ mobility across the particular boundaries of social status and maturity that the video employs as an expression of the sexual knowledge and self-discovery that the characters gain over the course of the narrative.

The separate introductions of Shura and Nick, each in their bedrooms and each called by their off-screen mothers, ties both characters, at least in part, to the domestic realm and, by extension, to childhood as a temporally ordered phase in which time is productively split between domestic and educational spaces. The opening pan across Shura’s bedroom reveals a kind of geek haven: an electric guitar, a vintage record player with a stack of records by its side, figurines of characters from popular sci-fi films (E.T., Godzilla), magazine cut-outs of pop stars taped to the walls, a telescope, a home computer. Shura’s cluttered fortress of a bedroom is a space she has visibly made her own, its (and her) idiosyncrasy sharply contrasting against the cold, institutionalized sterility of the modern high school building that the viewer is introduced to seconds later. Further, the lack of stereotypical feminine adornments in Shura’s bedroom are notable not only for their absence but also for what appears in their place: the presence of guitars and sci-fi action figures do not suggest lesbianism, exactly, but the stereotypical association of rock music and geek culture with boys is just strong enough to suggest a form of a gender nonconformity that foreshadows same-sex desire. Indeed, at this early point in the video, Shura’s gender nonconformity reads rather more like tomboyism than lesbianism, but this association furthers the presentation of Shura and Nick as existing between the domesticity of childhood and the sexual and social arrangements of high school that they have not yet found their way into. As Judith Halberstam argues, tomboyism, in representing “an extended childhood period of female masculinity . . . is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl.”4 Shura’s tomboyism, here, presents her character as lingering in a childish state that ties her to the domestic, while simultaneously signaling that she is on the cusp of a young adulthood that will violate the rules of gender presentation and sexual behavior. Nick, on the other hand, is more clearly infantilized than Shura: lying on his bed, next to a teddy bear, with his headphones plugged into his Walkman while eating from a bowl of a colourful, sugary cereal, Nick might appear, in this moment, as someone several years younger than a teenager. At the same time, his suggestive pose on the bed – legs raised toward the ceiling, as if mimicking a passive anal sex position – betrays a level (and a form) of sexual knowledge and desire that, like Shura’s tomboyism, signals their impending emergence into the world of same-sex exploration.

In contrast to the viewer’s introductions to Shura and Nick, Sarah first appears to the viewer (from Nick’s perspective) descending a staircase in the school, her stature both at the school and within the frame presented as literally elevated. Brad’s initial introduction is rather fleeting, as he is glimpsed reaching across a desk in front of Shura, her gaze averted from him in this moment, to the extent that a first-time viewer might initially regard him as an extra in the scene rather than a key player. When the viewer sees Brad again, a second later, we now register Shura’s gaze as being directed at him. Following this foreshadowing cue, the viewer’s (and Shura’s) next glimpse of Brad speaks more clearly to his social status within the school: seated on the floor in gym class with two other boys who bear a notable physical resemblance to him, Brad is made legible as a jock archetype through his uniformity with his physical surroundings – a homogeneity that neither the tomboyish Shura nor the childlike Nick can match.

Brad’s uniformity and Sarah’s elevated status within the school highlights their social stature by firmly associating the two of them with the physical space of the school. Sarah and Brad are never, with one exception, seen as existing outside of the school; and, crucially, when each of them finally gets together with their respective love interests, it is in spaces located on particular school grounds that represent each character’s “home turf.” Shura and Sarah’s kiss occurs when the two girls stop by the school auditorium while hanging up campaign posters; taking a break to sit together in the empty auditorium, the two share a kiss in a space in which Sarah would frequently be placed on display in front of the whole school (giving campaign speeches, for example) but which is now transformed into a more intimate site for romantic exploration. Likewise, Nick and Brad’s kiss takes place in what appears to be the dugout of the baseball diamond at the high school – a site that (we can assume) is instrumental in Brad’s high school popularity turned into an after-hours semiprivate space where the two boys can initiate their romance. As with the character types that the video trusts the viewer to recognize and bring preexisting meanings to, these spaces both assert and disrupt the normative values associated with them, as public sites of high school ritual are rendered temporarily private in order to facilitate queer exploration. The use of these spaces for this purpose is at once pleasingly subversive, as sites of high school hegemony are queerly appropriated, while at the same time preserving the social hierarchy: Sarah and Brad effectively belong in, or perhaps even own, these spaces, which Shura and Nick are only able to inhabit once their more popular love interests have granted them access.

While Sara and Brad are closely associated with the space of the high school, Shura and Nick occupy a variety of spaces both in the domestic and public realms, including those spaces that are made semiprivate within those larger domains. As I argued above, the opening shots – in which Shura and Nick are seen, separately in their bedrooms, complete with their mothers calling to them from off-screen – associate both of them as much with the domestic space as with that of the school. The bedroom additionally establishes the video’s suburban, middle-class milieu. Examining the history of the teenage bedroom in American culture, Jason Reid finds that this space represents “a decidedly Western phenomenon in which the sleeping quarters of youth are expected to assume a prominent role in socializing teens and shaping their identities.”5 For the twentieth-century teenager, defined by their “growing economic clout,” the bedroom offered a space not unlike the shopping mall, the arcade, or the multiplex, but more intimate and personal: a space in which they might “express their consumer preferences in the comfort of their own rooms.”6 The teenage bedroom also remained, for parents, a comfortably liminal space which offered their children room for privacy and self-expression while also ensuring a degree of parental supervision in “a relatively safe place in which teens could express their consumer preferences without straying too far from the comfort and safety of home.”7 For Shura and Nick, the surveillance aspect of the teenage bedroom is downplayed in favour of its commercial and expressive potential, which are merged in a manner that resembles Reid’s observation of the “concert-poster aesthetic” that marked the teen bedroom décor of the latter half of the twentieth-century, in which such rooms “often resembled a chaotic, Warhol-inspired art experiment,” assembled out of “found items such as beer cans, cutouts from magazines and newspapers, and other detritus from the world of pop culture.”8

The teen bedroom aesthetic is on full display in the opening shots of “What’s It Gonna Be?” As noted above, the quick pan across Shura’s bedroom reveals a mixture of objects (guitar, record player, telescope, figurines from sci-fi movies) that attest to both her creativity and her tomboyishness. Likewise, while the opening shot of her bedroom affords the viewer too little time, and the shot allowing too little depth of focus, to register each of the individual photos that decorate her bedroom wall, what appears is a collage of ’80s-era fashion models, all big hair and aerobics gear, and black-and-white tabloid images of spaceships. The shot of Nick’s bedroom, which follows, is significantly clearer: on his wall, the viewer can easily identify images of Molly Ringwald, ABBA, David Bowie, Donna Summer, and the title portion of the poster for the movie Porky’s (1982). While the shot of Shura’s bedroom wall is a bit of a blur, more suggestive in its indistinct retro-images of sexy women and space-age anxieties than actually illustrative of anything, the relative clarity of the shot of Nick’s bedroom affords the viewer an opportunity to scan these images for meaning. The image of Molly Ringwald, most obviously, prefigures the narrative’s homage to John Hughes, who is popularly thought of as regarding the actress as his “muse” during the time in which he wrote and/or directed such landmark teen films as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986), all of which starred Ringwald. The rest of the identifiable pop images that grace Nick’s wall are, like Ringwald, earlier pop culture moments. The musical icons, in particular, carry a notably queer resonance: a style icon as much as a musical one, David Bowie famously played with the slipperiness of gender and identity throughout his career, but most notably in the 1970s, when he adopted what Sasha Geffen calls “a feminized alien aesthetic”9 which stylishly reflected the outsider status that queers were still largely relegated to in the late twentieth century. Notably, the specific image of Bowie that Nick displays appears to be one from the Man Who Fell to Earth era, where the artist portrayed a literal space alien in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film of the same name and in which, with his dyed-red hair and sharp dress, Bowie looks something like Ringwald’s androgynous, fun-house-mirror twin when their pictures are placed in such close proximity on Nick’s wall.

In contrast to Bowie, who identified as bisexual, ABBA and Donna Summer might register as somewhat milder gay icons, only made queer by the (not insignificant, it must be noted) association of gay men as fans of disco music, of which ABBA and Summer were among the reigning champions during the genre’s late-70s commercial peak. Unlike with Bowie – arguably the queerest major rock star of 1970s – however, the selection of these artists has the curious effect of downplaying the gay/disco association, opting for heterosexual and even potentially homophobic exemplars of the disco era over far more unabashedly queer disco artists like Sylvester or the Village People. With such effervescent and decidedly “feminine” hit singles as “Dancing Queen,” the brazenly commercial-minded ABBA nevertheless possessed the kind of queer appeal that locates, as Elizabeth Vincentelli argues, “ABBA’s crucial place at the crossroads between mainstream and underground.”10 At the same time, ABBA was still a band made up of two heterosexual couples (Benny Anderson/Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Björn Ulvaeus/Agneta Fältskog) penning and performing testaments to heterosexual romance and heartbreak. While Donna Summer remains one of the most popular and acclaimed of all disco artists, her status as a gay icon has been contentious ever since an incident at a concert performance in 1983 when the singer, having become a born-again Christian several years earlier, is alleged to have made some comments about “evil homosexuality” and AIDS as a punishment for sin. Even after denying, years later, that she ever made the comments, while offering vague apologies for any perceived offense, the possibility of Donna Summer’s homophobia has remained something that her gay fans have had to grapple with.11

The Porky’s reference is similarly difficult to reconcile: for scholars of ’80s teen cinema, the film represents the pinnacle of the kind of vulgar, exploitive teen sex comedies that Hughes’s more nuanced takes on the genre served to counter and, eventually, replace on multiplex screens. While the Porky’s reference might register as just another ’80s signifier, akin to the nods to ALF and Battle Beasts that appear elsewhere in the video, it is worth recalling that Porky’s, despite sharing with other films in the ’80s teen sex cycle a prurient interest in female nudity, actually features a notable amount of male flesh on screen, even displaying an unusual (for mainstream cinema of the ’80s or today) willingness to show full-frontal male nudity. At the same time that Porky’s might offer considerable visual pleasures for the gay male spectator, the film clearly articulates the debased status of queers within its universe. In a key dramatic moment, as one of the film’s teen male protagonists is confronted by his racist father’s notions of masculinity, he replies, triumphantly, “If being a man means being what you are, I’d rather be queer.” Porky’s raises the spectre of homosexuality not to affirm it as a possibility for any of the characters but only to situate it as a kind of second-worst position in the film’s meretricious screed against anti-Semitism. Tellingly, no visible queer characters exist in Porky’s or its two sequels – even the lesbian-coded gym teacher Ms. Balbricker is provided with a male love interest in the final film in the trilogy, Porky’s Revenge (1985). Thus, Porky’s presents, along with the other only-borderline queer representations on Nick’s wall (recall that even the bisexual-identified Bowie was married to a woman throughout his gender-bending ’70s heyday) a liminal space of its own as Nick, who begins the narrative crushing on Sarah before finally pairing up with Brad, begins to discover (along with Shura) the wider range of romantic and sexual possibilities that exist for them, and which are reflected, though not without conflict or contradiction, in the pop culture that constitutes both their present environment and their cultural history. That Shura and Nick must venture outside of their teenage bedrooms to fully realize the queer potential that is only hinted at by the pop artifacts that decorate their walls further attests to the bedroom’s liminality: it is a space in which certain identity markers might be tried on or used as adornments, while the ultimate fulfillment of this potential resides in the wider world outside of the semiprivacy of the bedroom.

Although these introductory scenes exist mainly to establish the bedroom as a space to be left behind, both physically and thematically, as the video swiftly moves on to the school where the romantic dramas develop and ultimately resolve, it does return to Shura and Nick’s bedrooms once each, at roughly the midpoint. As Shura and Sarah’s relationship develops, ostensibly under the guise of Shura’s wooing of Sarah on Nick’s behalf, the two girls hang out in Shura’s bedroom, watching horror movies and doing each other’s makeup. Despite the semiprivacy of the bedroom space – and the intimacy that arises when Sarah grabs onto Shura during the movie and applies lipstick to her, after which she gently brushes a strand of hair out of Shura’s face – Shura’s bedroom only serves as a site of preliminary flirtation and growing intimacy, rather than the scene of consummation (represented in the video via the kiss), which occurs later in the arguably less private space of the school auditorium. While Shura’s bedroom may have made for a more logical or convenient site of consummation, the auditorium much better emphasizes the dynamics of space and power that define the character’s relationships: Shura’s bedroom might easily be remade from a geek haven into a site of girlish activity, but for Shura and Sarah’s relationship to ascend to the more mature level of sexual and romantic experimentation, it must take place in a location less associated with the domesticity of childhood.

While Nick and Brad, in contrast, never even make it to Nick’s bedroom, the site does reappear in the video’s midsection as the space in which Nick and Shura devise “The Plan.” Notably, this scene appears as the conclusion of a series of shots in which Shura and Nick are seen hanging out together in a variety of other spaces that, much like that of the suburban teenage bedroom, might be most accurately described as semiprivate: prior to their conspiratorial meeting in Nick’s bedroom, the two of them are shown riding their bicycles in front of the school and playing around on the school lawn. Narratively speaking, then, Shura and Nick’s friendship is initiated on the periphery of the school – which is to say, on school grounds but not within those particular spaces (the classroom, the lunch room, the auditorium, the baseball diamond) that function as sites where the high school social caste system is expressed and enforced – and then certified in Nick’s bedroom, where they not only share their romantic ambitions with each other but also set about figuring out ways to help each other realize these desires. Not yet having been invited by Sarah or Brad into those public-made-private spaces that represent both social mobility and sexual maturity, Shura and Nick remain presently stuck in those liminal spaces that keep them both childlike and outcast even as they are beginning to strain against those boundaries.

“What’s It Gonna Be?” establishes a binary between the school as a site of romantic, sexual, and personal expression and self-discovery, and the teenage bedroom as a site in which individual expression is permitted and encouraged while the space itself remains tied to the ordered world of childhood as it exists within the domestic. In order to realize their romantic and sexual desires, then, Shura and Nick must cross over from the domestic realm of childhood into that of the school; in order to properly do so, however, they must be permitted access by their more popular crushes, Sarah and Brad. Because any understanding, on the part of the characters or the narrative, of the social dynamics of high school is as much informed by popular culture, the character types (jock, nerd, etc.) that each character in the video represents depend on particular pop referents to give them meaning. I turn, then, to both a specific filmmaker (John Hughes) and one of his most notable films (The Breakfast Club) that have been both instrumental in forming these enduring archetypes and cited specifically by Shura as a direct influence on the “What’s It Gonna Be?” video.

Take the Same Classes        

In an interview shortly after the premiere of the “What’s It Gonna Be?” video, Shura was asked to name her favorite John Hughes movie, which she took as an opportunity to elaborate on the influence of Hughes on the video: “The Breakfast Club. The clothes and everything. That was the main inspiration for What’s It Gonna Be? We even set it in Shermer High School.”12 Viewers steeped in the teen cinema canon will recognize Shura’s reference to the eponymous secondary school (visible in the video’s final shot, as the four kids come running out of the building) of the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois, the suburban setting of most of Hughes’ teen-oriented films. However, Shura’s clarificationof this point may feel unnecessary, even redundant: in employing the archetypes of “The Jock, The Nerd, The Dork, The Popular Kid,” Shura is drawing on an archive that is, at this point, iconic enough that its influence reverberates throughout contemporary teen culture. Even as the genre expands, as it has during the 21st century, to include such things as queer representation, the appearance of these archetypes in “What’s It Gonna Be?” remain entirely legible – proof, perhaps, that queerness has become normalized just enough within contemporary teen culture to permit the identification of queer nerds, queer jocks, and so forth. As iconic as Hughes’s teen films remain, however, they have not entirely survived the process of being viewed through contemporary sensibilities completely unscathed: as numerous critics and fans have noted, Hughes’s films are not immune to various sexual, racial, and class-based prejudices that, for many viewers, have left an impression on a lot of popular entertainments of the past, and which have come under particular scrutiny in recent years. To the extent that Shura has “queered” Hughes’s films in the act of paying homage to them, we might wonder how this process is informed by contemporary readings of Hughes, in which the legacy of homophobia and queer erasure (among other prejudices) continue to mark his work as products of a particular, and particularly queer-unfriendly, era. In remaking The Breakfast Club in her own queer image, however, Shura reveals at least one crucial blind spot of her own, in the form of an act of class erasure that arises out of the process of making Hughes palatable for a contemporary queer-friendly audience.

The Breakfast Club famously brings together representatives of the various levels of the high school social strata, confining jock Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), brainy nerd Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall), delinquent John Bender (Judd Nelson), popular “princess” Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald) and weirdo outcast Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) to the high school library for an all-day Saturday detention. The group’s interactions in the early scenes of the film predictably conform to social expectations: Andrew and Claire sit together at the front of the row of tables in the library while the other three students are scattered about at their own tables and are friendly toward each other while being politely condescending toward Brian. Bender is hostile toward most of the group, ridiculing Andrew and Brian for their respective athletic and academic accomplishments (along with Brian’s assumed virginity), and subjecting Claire to numerous sexual and class-based insults. Everyone ignores Allison. As the day goes on, the social barriers that separate these five students begin to disintegrate, as they all begin sharing with each other their various struggles and anxieties, generally relating to peer and academic pressures, as well as parental expectations, negligence, and physical abuse. A long group-confession scene follows, culminating in the group acknowledging that, despite the relationship that has developed among them over the course of the day, they expect each of them to return to their various social cliques come Monday morning. Following, and possibly even contradicting, the film’s dramatic climax, the final scenes of the film see Allison undergoing a makeover with the help of Claire, causing Andrew to take notice of her. As Allison and Andrew pair off romantically, Claire and Bender do the same, after which Claire gifts Bender with one of her diamond earrings, which Bender had previously used as ammunition in his mocking attacks on Claire’s social privilege. As these romantic couplings are developing, Brian completes a letter, on behalf of the entire group, to the teacher supervising the Saturday detention, an alternately tyrannical and buffoonish figure who functions as the film’s stand-in for adult authority, in which he handily summarizes the film’s themes: “You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, 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, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question?”

The film’s exploration of identity, and the ways in which identities determine one’s position within the social order of high school, is perhaps the aspect of The Breakfast Club (and, arguably, Hughes’s body of work as a whole) that has been the most influential on the ways in which future teen entertainments would understand and express issues of class and identity. As Timothy Shary and Frances Smith point out, the archetypes that Hughes literalizes in The Breakfast Club, to the extent that each of the characters self-identify with them, “show up throughout Hughes’ teen oeuvre and, perhaps owing to the films being released in quick succession, came to be an expression of the teen genre” as a whole.13 By the time Shura gets around to paying tribute to The Breakfast Club in “What’s It Gonna Be?” these character archetypes have had three decades to solidify into conventions of the teen genre. Rather than let these conventions function as mere conventions in the video, however – to let Nick fulfill the audience’s basic understanding of the nerd figure, for example – Shura’s choice to make the connection to The Breakfast Club explicit suggests she has located something unresolved in Hughes’s text. Indeed, the references to The Breakfast Club in “What’s It Gonna Be?” are specific enough, targeting particular moments in the film while ignoring and even erasing others, that their replication in the video gives legibility to Shura’s motivations for queering her source material. Allison’s late-film makeover at the hands of Claire in The Breakfast Club is reproduced  in the video in the moment that Sarah applies lipstick to Shura in the latter’s bedroom. While in the film, this scene functions to make the dowdy Allison suddenly attractive to popular jock Andrew, in the video it functions as nothing more than a female bonding activity. Tellingly, in the scenes that follow this moment in the video, Shura appears no different, physically, than she had earlier in the video; Sarah’s attraction to Shura is not contingent on Shura conforming to any kind of “feminine” beauty standards.

Other, more minor details also speak to the video’s understanding of what makes The Breakfast Club such a meaningfully queer-able text: the early shot of the clock in “What’s It Gonna Be?” that Nick is racing against to get to class on time mirrors the heightened sense of temporal awareness that runs throughout The Breakfast Club. In addition to the occasional, time-marking shots of the library clock that signal the characters’, and the viewer’s, relative temporal position within the narrative, the film’s only two significant adult characters periodically show up to remind the students that they are on the clock. First, supervising teacher Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) shows up at the start of the day to inform the students that “It is now 7:06. You have exactly eight hours and fifty-four minutes to think about why you’re here.” Later, at roughly the film’s midpoint, school janitor Carl (John Kapelos) stops by the library to exchange some friendly banter with Bender, which contrasts against Bender’s far more combative relationship with Vernon. Carl, set up as an adult foil/future projection of Bender, pauses to tell the group on his way out of the library, “By the way, that clock is twenty minutes fast,” after which he and Bender share a knowing smile. An adult professional reminds the adolescent protagonists of the responsibilities and demands of time, while another working-class adult points out the ways in which the work day, here grossly expanded and imposed beyond the confines of the working week, might be manipulated for deceptive purposes: the clock, being twenty minutes fast, does mean that the students might get to leave twenty minutes early, but it also deceives them into thinking that they have that much less time to complete their “labor.”

Hughes’s awareness of the ways in which time is potentially understood, enforced, and manipulated depending on one’s social (adolescent, professional, working-class) position aligns with what Christina G. Peterson describes as Hughes’s tendency to “explore adolescent liminality in temporal rather than corporeal terms.”14 As Peterson observes, in both The Breakfast Club and what is arguably Hughes’s other most iconic teen comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), “youth is a state of suspension between yesterday and tomorrow where the freedom to move is afforded to those who can envision a world not predicated on external frames of identity.”15 In both The Breakfast Club and “What’s It Gonna Be?” this freedom is expressed in a pair of romantic couplings that cross what are, in high school terms, heavily guarded, identity-based, social boundaries. Shura’s introduction of queer sexuality into this dynamic extends Hughes’s social stratifications to include queerness, while at the same time enforcing these same old boundaries: where queerness unites the characters in “What’s It Gonna Be?” it is not enough to break down the borders between the popular and the unpopular all on its own, as evidenced by the ways in which (as noted above) both Shura and Nick must be “invited” onto Sarah and Brad’s home turf (represented by the school auditorium and the baseball diamond). In their use of cross-cultural romance as the great leveller of the high school caste system, The Breakfast Club and “What’s It Gonna Be?” both allow their characters to finally experience a kind of freedom from “external frames of identity” (even if, in The Breakfast Club, the audience is led to suspect that this may not last into the upcoming school week), but “What’s It Gonna Be?” nevertheless reminds viewers that such systems continue to exist even in an allegedly post-queer world.

The ease with which Shura is able to appropriate the characters from The Breakfast Club for a contemporary queer-affirmative narrative is a testament to the durability of Hughes’s adolescent archetypes. Indeed, the “What’s It Gonna Be?” foursome are instantly recognizable from their source material: Shura is Allison (the weirdo), Nick is Brian (the nerd), Sarah is Claire (the princess), and Brad is Andrew (the jock). Missing from the contemporary version, however, is any representation of Bender (the delinquent). Despite its third-act pivot to romance, The Breakfast Club sets up a notable gender asymmetry that guarantees that one of the crew – in this case, Brian – will be left out of the film’s hetero-monogamous resolution. “What’s It Gonna Be?” contains no such asymmetry, and for all of the potential that the introduction of queerness into the video’s schema might allow, there is no room for bisexuality, polyamory, or any other such nonnormative arrangements in this particular queer narrative. Rather than suggesting the kind of limitless possibilities that would never have been acknowledged in The Breakfast Club, the erotic quadrangle that Shura establishes in “What’s It Gonna Be?” exists only to facilitate the video’s queer twist.

At the same time, Shura’s decision to omit Bender, specifically, from the video’s romantic equation represents a degree of queer revisionism that extends beyond the convenience of symmetry. In an era that has seen heightened scrutiny of past entertainments alleged to express (and thus, it would seem, to endorse) certain homophobic, racist, and misogynistic attitudes, a character like Bender becomes something of a flashpoint for such analysis. It is Bender, after all, who spends much of The Breakfast Club sexually harassing Claire, only to be rewarded with her as a romantic trophy at the film’s conclusion. It is also Bender who throws around the word “fag” as a casual insult with such ease and regularity – although there is little in the film to suggest that the other four members of the group disapprove of Bender’s homophobic language. While the film’s use of homophobic slurs, for example, are no more severe (and in many cases, significantly less so) than many other popular films from the 1980s, for many viewers, such perceived offenses have become something they must reconcile with their affection for Hughes’s work. For many queer viewers, the pejorative uses of words like “fag” or “queer” that litter popular culture may continue to represent what Judith Butler refers to as a “constitutive history of injury,”16 their offhand use in films like The Breakfast Club signalling to queers that they are not welcome in the world of these popular entertainments.

Finally, and ironically, Shura’s decision to omit a Bender figure from “What’s It Gonna Be?” has the effect of papering over one of the few areas where, for many viewers, Hughes was, arguably, socially progressive. While Claire, with her diamond earrings (bought for her by her father) and her designation of “princess,” is clearly presented as a representative of upper-class entitlement – she even attempts to negotiate her way out of the detention at the beginning of the film, perhaps suggesting a legal background in her family – the reasonably posh Shermer High School registers as decidedly more middle class than inner city. We might read Andrew and Brian’s ambitions (athletics and academics, respectively) as similarly representative of middle-class privilege, and while Allison is more ambiguous, her all-black “goth” presentation registers more as a fashion statement than as any kind of class marker. With Bender, though, Hughes introduces a disruptive exemplar of the lower classes. While his ragged clothing signals a “rock and roll stoner” look that we might read as being as much of a careful identity marker as Allison’s all-black clothes and hair, Bender offers up enough personal detail to the group to suggest that he comes from a different social milieu than the other four. In a disquieting early scene, he shows the rest of the group a cigar burn on his arm, explaining “this is what you get in my house when you spill paint in the garage,” before acting out a profanity-laced argument between him and his father. That Hughes appears to equate child abuse with a lower-class social setting is perhaps one more item to add to the list of the director’s casual offences, but as many critics have noted,17 Hughes’s attention to matters of class is one of the things that distinguished his work, for the better, from the frequently materialistic, aspirational, and class-blind popular entertainments of the Reaganite ’80s; at the very least, it is revealing that Bender is the only one of the five students to arrive at (and depart from) Saturday detention on foot, rather than being dropped off in a car by a parent. If being a survivor of abuse threatens to swing the audience’s empathy in favour of Bender in such a way that might forgive his various offenses, it’s a credit to Hughes’s writing (and Judd Nelson’s performance) that Bender remains an ambiguous figure – a bully, yes (his treatment of Claire, coupled with her and the narrative’s forgiveness of it, is arguably the least defensible element of the film), but a bully with a plausibly tragic origin story.

In erasing Bender from “What’s It Gonna Be?” we might speculate that Shura wished to remove the most uncomfortable elements of The Breakfast Club, the better to retrofit the film for an uncomplicatedly queer-positive presentation. In doing so, however, she also rids her narrative of another inconvenient truth: the ongoing reality of class-based social inequity even in the face of heightened potential for queer expression. Where the drama in “What’s It Gonna Be?” hinges on the ability of the characters to subvert assumptions about sexuality and popularity in high school, nowhere in this revision of The Breakfast Club is there a suggestion of the other borders that may separate certain high school students from others. In this sense, “What’s It Gonna Be?” registers as notably less progressive than a lot of Hughes’s teen oeuvre that, despite its much-documented deficiencies, paid imperfect but nonetheless unusual and insightful attention to matters of social class, as these tensions play out both inside and outside of high school. While “What’s It Gonna Be?” admirably and cleverly pushes the queer narrative forward, it does so at the expense of the underclass. As John Bender would say, “The world is an imperfect place.”

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All images are screenshots from the films.