Changes in John Hughes Film The Breakfast Club Essay

     John Hughes’ 1985 film, The Breakfast Club, gives countless examples of the principles of interpersonal communication. Five high school students: Allison, a weirdo, Brian, a nerd, John, a criminal, Claire, a prom queen, and Andrew, a jock, are forced to spend the day in Saturday detention. By the end of the day, they find that they have more in common than they ever realized.

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire other,” says Virginia Woolf, an English writer. Growing up is preordained. Everyone grows up. When do we grow up? Perhaps, after we graduate school, maybe after our first love, or maybe after our marriage or maybe after the birth of our first kid. It primarily depends on how one looks at it, but irrespective of what we consider the right time or the right situation to be “grown-ups”, we cannot help but admit that it is that moment in time where innocence vanishes. As children, we dream of growing up, getting a job, getting married, living happily but on the contrary it is quite different, we find that reality is completely opposite. More often than we wish, we were still children,

The Breakfast Club is a movie about five students from Shermer High School who gather on a Saturday to sit through eight hours of detention. These five students; Andrew Clark, Claire Standish, John Bender, Allison Reynolds and Brian Johnson, have nothing in common. The Breakfast Club zooms in on the high school social groups and cliques that are often seen in the development of peer groups during adolescents. The peer groups that are portrayed in The Breakfast Club include, John “the criminal”, Claire “the Princess”, Allison “the Basket case”, Brian “the Brain”, and Andrew “the athlete”. The movie centers around an essay that Principle Vernon wants each student to write regarding who they think they are. In the beginning of the film, the

Five teens, five different cliques, one eight-hour Saturday detention. These is the basics of The Breakfast Club. Through spending the day with one another Allison, Andrew, Brian, Claire and John realize there isn’t much difference between them, and the differences that are between them aren’t too important. Watching The Breakfast Club is a great way to learn about adolescents. You have five, very different -yet very similar- adolescents to observe along with what they do together. In observing them you can understand how they’re beginning to cognitively develop from children to adults

The movie The Breakfast Club was released in 1985, and is based on a group of five high school students from stereotypical cliques; the popular, jock, nerd and the outcasts, who all wind up stuck together for Saturday detention. Throughout the movie many themes present themselves such as teenage rebellion, peer pressure and family issues as the students get to know each other. The most prominent theme throughout the movie is the student’s placement in the social structure of the school. From the very different reasons why they are in detention to the way that they are all treated differently by the principle, their social placement is evident.

In the movie The Breakfast Club, five seemingly different adolescents are assigned Saturday detention where they learn that although they each fit a particular stereotype, they all have the same characteristics, but they are expressed differently because they have different experiences, strengths and weaknesses that makes them who they are. In the movie, Bender is the “criminal”, Brian is the “brain” and Allison is the “psychopath.” Each of their situations, strengths and weakness are similar to students that are in our classrooms currently or we may have in our classrooms in the future. For each student it is important to understand their learning differences and as a teacher, how I can use their strengths to help them become

The line between being an acceptable and unacceptable parent is often blurry and is seen on different perspectives when it comes to class, culture, and generation differences. Based on the two stories of Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds” and Tillie Olsen’s, “I Stand here Ironing” we see these two perspectives that derive from different maternal upbringings of the children in the stories. What is found between them is the conflict of being too little or heavily involved in a child’s life has had more negative outcomes during their childhood than positive.

Released in 1985, The Breakfast Club depicts five high school students from Illinois as they spend a Saturday together in detention. Prior to their arrival, John Bender, Claire Standish, Andy Clark, Brian Johnson, and Allison Reynolds had not met, nor would they have associated with one another on a typical day in high school. After spending nine hours together, however, the group of vastly different adolescents break down emotional barriers, manage to build a sense of intimacy, and some establish dating relationships by the day’s end (Hughes et al., 1985). The film illustrated a rather realistic portrait of adolescence in several topical domains.

When each of the students came into detention, they each had their own identities and their own underlying issues that no one knew about. When they started to open up and grow closer with each other, their identities changed all together. They were beginning to show their real personalities within each other and at the end of the film they all embraced who they really were on the inside and who everyone else was.

Anyone who has ever been a high school student can probably find some way to relate to the characters in the film. The movie revolves around 5 students who for various reasons have been sent to Saturday detention by principle Vernon. The principle asks each of the students to write a one-page paper on who they think they are. As the day progresses, we see the teens begin to bond with each other and find out about each other and themselves.

In school there are many groups that can be identified within the film. It is interesting to see how five students who are all in different social groups came together at the end despite these differences. In the film, the students all get dropped off at the school to attend a Saturday detention all for various reasons. The characters in the detention were Allison Reynolds, John Bender, Claire Standish, Brian Johnson, and Andrew

John Hughes's The Breakfast Club is one of film history’s most iconic and renowned movies and is a cornerstone of 1980’s pop-culture. The Breakfast Club showcases five unique high school students who all unfortunately find themselves imprisoned in an all-day Saturday detention. The students go as following: Claire (a pretty girl), Brian (the nerd), John (the bad boy), Andrew (an athlete), and Allison (the strange, goth girl). These students come from very different backgrounds and social settings which proves to spark many conflicts between them as well as with their supervisor Mr. Vernon. But through this conflict they find similarities between themselves, and after spending nine hours locked up together, they find resolution within themselves and with their new friends. Psychology can explain why this happened as well as what caused other events to occur. This paper will examine four different psychological phenomena: stereotypes, conformity/normative social influence, ingroup versus outgroup/superordinate goals, and the various causes of attraction.

The Breakfast Club was a movie delineating the interactions of five high school students from differing backgrounds encountering the obstacle of a Saturday detention. These five students were composed of a princess, a brain, an outcast, a jock, and most pertinent to this paper, the rebel, John Bender. John Bender is depicted within this movie as a careless and hostile character with some authority issues. An impulsive and uncooperative individual, Bender, in the detention for pulling the fire alarm, serves as a sharp juxtaposition to the other characters, often challenging the others on their perspectives. This contrast could perhaps be attributed to his home life, which is different from his four detention counterparts.

     The first student I will talk about is the first one to be seen in the movie. This is Claire Standish. Claire is one of the popular girls in the school.

In life there are a number of challenges that everyone will go through. This is a part of discovering who they are and what they want to do with themselves. To help explain these differences, Erikson introduced his development theory. This helps to address some of the challenges and needs that person will go through at particular stages in their lives. To fully understand these phases there will be a focus on two characters from the film The Breakfast Club and contrasting them with Erikson's theory. Together, these different elements will provide specific insights that will highlight the transformations and challenges that everyone will go through during the course of their lives.