Character actor Paul Gleason, who died over the weekend at the age of 67, spent much of his career playing obnoxious, arrogant jerks who are destined for a come-uppance in the final reel. There was, for example, his character in Die Hard, Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson, who swaggers onto the scene and promptly makes a bad situation much, much worse. But, as every obituary on the ‘net is noting, Gleason will be remembered for playing one specific jerk, Principal Richard Vernon in the exemplary Brat-Pack flick The Breakfast Club.

Perhaps the best of the mid-80s teen-movie cycle (“best” in terms of actually having something truthful to say about the real-life teenage experience of the day), The Breakfast Club was the first R-rated film I saw without parental accompaniment. I was fifteen or sixteen, a miserably straight-arrow kid who would never think of switching theaters or sneaking in through the fire exit to see a restricted movie, the way everybody else did. So, rather than risk doing anything so guilt-inducing as Breaking the Rules, I went with my two-years-older friend Chad Skinner. It was the best possible solution: he could technically serve as my older guardian for the purposes of evading the dreaded MPAA rating, and even if we did run into one of those busybody enforcers of “the code” — Utahns have historically treated movie ratings like legal contracts, even though there is no actual statute here to enforce any sort of compliance — Chad was smooth enough to talk our way into the theater.

I was actually hoping for a confrontation, so I could watch him unleash his enviable skills of persuasion and charm on the poor, unwitting fool at the box office. Much to my disappointment, however, there was no confrontation. The box-office drone never even batted an eye at my youthful face as I handed over my dollar; she just punched up the
requested ticket, told us in a flat monotone which auditorium to go to, and continued reading her Rolling Stone magazine.
We saw the film at the Sandy Starships, a second-run four-plex whose outer-space-themed decor had been tres cool only a few years before, when the place opened to much fanfare with The Empire Strikes Back playing in two houses. By 1985, however, the digital “countdown to launch” clocks over the auditorium doors were switched off, the artwork murals of astronauts and not-quite-Cylon fightercraft looked terribly middle-schoolish, and the remote-controlled R2-D2 clone the theater used for a mascot sat forlornly in a corner, its clear head-dome dull under a thin coating of dust. I think Chad and I were the only ones in the auditorium; as I recall, the movie was a double-feature playing with Beverly Hills Cop. Ah, good times in the mid-80s. Eddie Murphy made us laugh, The Breakfast Club made us think about our lives.

Getting back to Paul Gleason, though, his character in The Breakfast Club is an interesting variation on a pretty common stereotype, the cold-hearted school administrator. Unlike, say, Dean Wormer in Animal House, who is a bastard simply because the script requires him to be, Principal Vernon is a bastard with cause. In a revealing scene with Carl, the school’s janitor, Vernon drops his guard a little, and, through Carl’s insightful comments, we realize that Vernon is such an ass because he’s been disappointed by his life. His career didn’t take him where he thought it would, and it eats him up that the kids in his charge see him for what he is: a small little man who bullies around high schoolers because they’re the only ones he can push around. Vernon is pompous and mean, but he’s also sad, as lost as any of the five kids currently serving out their detention period in the library. Maybe even moreso. The scene doesn’t make Vernon a more sympathetic character — he begins the movie as an ass and he ends it as one — but it does make him a more human character. (I also have a theory that Vernon was the inspiration for the Principal Skinner character on The Simpsons.)

Gleason’s death saddens me on a number of levels. He’s one of those iconic faces I grew up with, and I always regret it when we lose one of those. But the truly sad thing is that there doesn’t seem to be anyone to replace him, no one coming up in Hollywood right now who can — or will — do the sorts of roles he used to do. It seems like all the younger actors either want to be liked, or play characters who are over-the-top eeeeeeeevviilll, rather than real-world petty. Maybe the problem is that the kinds of stories we’re telling have changed, but either way, the identifiable, everyday villains seem to be disappearing along with those, like Gleason, who played them.