Don't You Forget About Me

(the anthem of my generation revisited with annotations)

Hey, hey, hey, hey
Ooh, woah

*I believe Jim Kerr was the first man in a music video to use the spreading arms wide open gesture shot from above (later popularised variously by boy bands and Christian rock crossovers). The spreading arms gesture symbolises that life is constraining and that in loving him might you feel your one true glimpse of freedom (with Christian rock videos the “loving him” is Christ.)

Won't you come see about me?
I'll be alone, dancing, you know it, baby

*Like a skateboarder you desire as a teen because you know there’s no room on his board for you, he’s dancing and he’s alone! ‘My So Called Life’s’ Jordan Catalano to the max, or my forever dream man, Peter Cook in Bedazzled. Except, because Jim Kerr, being Scottish, is inherently soulful, the inference is he is dancing alone only until you arrive to partner him and male him whole.

Tell me your troubles and doubts
Giving everything inside and out and
Love's strange, so real in the dark
Think of the tender things that we were working on

*It is astonishing. It is an astonishing song. “Working on tender things” when you are yourself so very tender because you are a teenager, like the time I saw a spider emerge from a box of spider shaped helium balloons. I can tell you theme songs I highly rate to movies that are bad - I’m crazy about Pure Shores by All Saints from the awful film The Beach and wild about ‘Happy’ Bobby Darin’s love song from Lady Sings The Blues.

But it’s really hard to think of a song and film combining to define a generation the way The Breakfast Club and Don’t You Forget About Me does, each uplifting and clarifying the message of the other.

Slow change may pull us apart
When the light gets into your heart, baby

*The “light” we would stereotypically take to be “goodnes”s. When she learns how to be good she will forget about him? Or is it a kind of bleaching suburban light so you can’t see him properly anymore (invoking ‘Last Time I Saw Richard’ by Joni Mitchell where he marries a figure skater and buys her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator. He can’t see Joni anymore. She has been left behind).

Don't you, forget about me
Don't, don't, don't, don't
Don't you, forget about me

*Molly Ringwald has written really movingly of how complicated her relationship was with her mentor John Hughes, with whom she also made Pretty In Pink and Sixteen Candles. The latter has major date rape issues and the former, the calamitous issue is you can’t put young James Spader in a film and not warp teenage girls who then want to spend their grown lives fucking the villain.

Will you stand above me?
Look my way, never love me
Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling
Down, down, down

*In the video for the song, Jim Kerr is walking through childish things like teddies and train tracks, his hair mussed as if you have already left behind your innocence and made love with him that day.

Will you recognize me?
Call my name or walk on by
Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling
Down, down, down, down

*It should go without saying that if a man spends the film running up and down the school corridors shouting about his childhood abuse and issues with women, the movie should not culminate with her swapping earrings with him as a sign of commitment. It should go without saying and yet.