Essay Nonverbal Communication of the Breakfast Club

     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.

The film The Breakfast Club is a movie about how five high schools of all different stereotypes have to meet on a Saturday detention. It’s a very well made movie and is easily relatable in multiple senses. In the end though they eventually pour their hearts out to each other and find out that they have more in common than they thought. Multiple sociological concepts or principles can be applied to this movie also.

On September 12, 2008, I observed two people; Person A and Person B. The observation took place at Applebee’s, a local restaurant, beginning at 7:21 p.m. and ending observation at 8:06 p.m. I was serving their table for the evening, enabling myself to observe them closely. The restaurant had died down from the dinner rush, leaving them one of three tables in the smoking section, normally filled with eight. Along with the outside light fading, the lighting indoors was dim, making the dining experience feel more quiet and intimate. The background noise was filled with a light roar of other group’s conversations, and a jazz station played quietly from the speakers overhead.

The Breakfast Club is a movie that was directed by John Hughes, and was released in the spring of 1985. It is about five teenagers from different worlds, who all come together on a Saturday for detention. The movie is filled with a multitude of scenes that may apply to many of the course concepts found in Interpersonal Communication.

The iconic coming-of-age movie The Breakfast Club, focuses on the development of five, seemingly very different high school students. In the movie we are presented with the five main characters all with stereotypes that they identify with. Claire is the princess or the beauty queen, John, often referred to by his last name “Bender,” is the criminal, Brian is the brain or the nerd, Andrew, is the athlete, a wrestler , and finally Allison is the basket case or the weirdo. The story is set in saturday detention where they are forced to spend eight hours with people from other cliques that they would normally never interact with. The day progresses and the characters interact with one another, smoke, dance, break rules, and reveal very personal parts of themselves with the others. The story ends with some of the characters making an attempt to change their identity with the realization that even with the boxes they have been put into they are not that different from one another.

The first thing I noticed was the nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication provides us with a metamessage, I began noticing this whenever Dan was sent out by his mother and he went to the book store. When, he got to the book store he got out of his car and walked over to the edge of the fence and just stood there with a blank look on his face. He used his gestures to portray

Two of the characters in particular display the themes of alienation and acceptance in The Breakfast Club: Brian,

The television show Everybody Loves Raymond is about the comical and typical everyday life of Ray Romano. Ray is a successful sports writer with interests of an average American male in sports, golf, and work and has a beautiful family with his loving wife, Debra. However, the twist is that Ray’s overprotective mother Marie and demanding father Frank along with his older brother Robert who is envious of Ray all live across the street. As a result, Ray’s seemingly normal life is always full of drama and liveliness. In the episode “Baggage,” because Ray and Debra are returning from a short vacation exhausted, they decide to leave their suitcase unpacked at the bottom of the stairs (Everybody Loves Raymond). After a couple of days, Ray notices

The Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes, is a movie that has become a classic for many generations. It is about five high school students, all from different cliques, that come together during detention and discover that they all share common problems they would have never imagined. Each student did something completely different yet they all broke the rules and ended up meeting. Those few hours in that room opened not only their eyes, but also the viewers’ eyes on how wrong we can be during those years of our lives. This movie has impacted so many generations because it is true to what the high school experience really is and how judgmental teens can be without really knowing each other.

Furthermore how would we be able to transfer all of our knowledge to the next person, better yet, how would we improve our capacity of knowledge as a whole. We

Any communication interaction involves two major components in terms of how people are perceived: verbal, or what words are spoken and nonverbal, the cues such as facial expressions, posture, verbal intonations, and other body gestures. Many people believe it is their words that convey the primary messages but it is really their nonverbal cues. The hypothesis for this research paper was: facial expressions directly impact how a person is perceived. A brief literature search confirmed this hypothesis.

In a romantic relationship, it is easy to have miscommunication between a man and a woman. “Most researchers agree that 70% or more of the meaning of any message is communicated through nonverbal channels like eye contact, facial expressions, posture, hand gestures, etc.” (Stinnett, 2015). Verbal and nonverbal messages are like a relationship, they work well together that way the message is sent and delivered appropriately and that there is no miscommunication. Women have their way of expressing themselves to their boyfriend, fiancé, and or husband and vice versa for men. This paper will focus on the varying behavior of gender in expressing the different type of emotions using nonverbal communication in a romantic relationship. Following

The film The Breakfast Club was directed and written by John Hughes and was released in the year 1985 (IMDB, 2016). The film’s running time is 95 minutes and can be categorized under the genre of comedy and drama. It follows five teenagers, who all vary in personality and stereotype, get stuck in detention on a Saturday morning. They are all different types of people in nature but when stripped down and seen through without a stereotypical lens, they all have something to share and have something in common amongst themselves despite being so different from each other. In the movie, they are stereotyped as, a basket case, a brain, an athlete, a princess, and a criminal (IMDB, 2016). The setting takes place in a library and whilst they are in detention, they go through varying phases. They start off with solitude, then proceed to share a few words, and later into the film they start to disclose information about themselves that normally would be very difficult to disclose. While they are in the library they start off as complete strangers and barely talk to each other. As the movie progresses, they start doing a lot of things that a normal group of friends would do such as dancing, playing music, sneaking out together, and even smoking a joint together.

Few realize how loud their expressions really are. Be kind with what you wordlessly say.” A quote from a popularly known author, Richelle E. Goodrich. We speak not only from our words but from our expressions. Many time, these expressions are unknown and are just caught upon from our surroundings. Our brain takes in this information and we do not really know how these expressions developed. In our day to day verbal activities, we follow up with so many non-verbal ques like the sounds we make following our words, or the way we pronounce these words. The use of pitch and pace of our voice and words to make interesting conversations. The clothing we wear based on the social norms we follow or just based on our culture or traditions. The use of our distance to known and unknown people. The use of eye contact to express the level of intensifications, the actual emphasis of the emotion running in the brain at the time. The uses of pauses in our speech and the judging of the expressions on other peoples faces. Misjudging of emotions carried along with another emotion because of the lack of understanding of mixed emotions, to give which emotion the priority during that situation. This media analysis focuses on the nonverbal communication and its different aspects in the movie “Inside Out”. Inside out is a movie about a girl and the five major emotions that control her life based on daily situations she faces. This movie is enriched with nonverbal communication as the emotions are

“Systematic research on the role of nonverbal behavior in social interaction has been common only in the past 20 to 25 years.”(Edinger and Patterson, 1983, p. 30).because that statement was published in 1983, it is apparent that the study of nonverbal behavior has been around for roughly 50 to 55 years. However, that is still a relatively recent amount of time compared to research in other science fields such as chemistry or biology. Despite the fact that this field is relatively recent there are many theories about our interaction with others. This paper will discuss the nonverbal expectancy theory along with two other theories, and describe how these theories can work together.