“Don’t You (Forget About Me)” flourishes during the film’s climax, when all five students emerge from their Saturday school sentence renewed, different than they were when they entered. By the end, the jock is kissing the weirdo! The prom queen has fallen for the troublemaker! The nerd is . . . still a nerd, but confident! To watch The Breakfast Club is to suspend a particular type of disbelief, to buy into the idea that after years in school together, in opposite worlds, these people would cut through their resentments and their teenage insecurities to form lasting bonds with each other. The song is effective here because of the plea that rests in the chorus, the title sung with an aching and longing confidence by lead singer Jim Kerr. It urges an eternal remembering that is distinctly high-school. The way I scrawled in copies of yearbooks during my senior year, promising to stay in touch or come visit people who I perhaps genuinely wanted to see but knew that I wouldn’t.

The Breakfast Club works best if the viewer doesn’t think about what will happen on Monday. Or Sunday, even, the day in between when the teens will have time to reflect and readjust to their comforts. Sure, the inevitability that the group will drift and lose touch when the morning school bell chimes gets mentioned briefly at the center of the film, but it’s a vehicle to further the self-realization of the group. They come to see that they all hate having to live up to what people think of them, and want to find some righteous path toward liberation from their social standing. It all sounds great in the moment, but for anyone who has enjoyed or endured high school, it can read as a ruse. The song hanging over the end of the film freezes and crystallizes a moment that the viewer knows might not exist when the sun sets on the weekend.