… and probably others we’re forgetting. Out of the 35,000 or so bully characters in 1985 movies, the only sympathetic one was John Bender from The Breakfast Club, but only because the entire point of that movie was that none of the characters were what they seemed. Back in 1985, saying that a bully had feelings was as much of a novelty as doing a movie where Freddy Krueger opens up about his fear of intimacy.
Today, pretty much every bully character gets the John Bender treatment sooner or later. It’s not exactly that the writing in general has gotten less two-dimensional than before (Stranger Things still has bad guys whose motivation is that they’re bad); maybe the key to this change lies not in the bullies themselves but in their opposites. You know, the dweebs.
In a world where playing video games can be a legitimate career and movies about comic book characters rule the box office, nerds are more and more perceived as having the upper hand. That turns the good ol’ fashioned bully into the underdog, in a way, because whenever we see them in a movie, we know chances are they’ll amount to nothing. Johnny Lawrence had a rich stepdad, and he still ended up living in what appears to be an unfurnished motel room.
The dweebs have inherited the Earth, which automatically puts their former tormentors lower on the social scale and thus in a perfect place for the start of a growth/redemption arc. That, or people just like assholes, who knows.
Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok‘s heroic effort to read and comment on every ’90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.
Thumbnail: WarnerMedia Direct, Sony Pictures Television