Social Issues In 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 1985 comedy drama movie, The Breakfast Club, included five teenagers who are in Saturday school detention for various reasons and at the end of the day must write an essay that explains how they define themselves. In Saturday school detention, each teenager learns about one another, what they have in common, and why they were assigned to be in detention. The teens all have similar problems with stereotyping of how society and especially how their parents define them. In the movie, four of the main characters: Claire, John, Andrew, and Allison experience at least one of the following theories: strain theory, social learning theory, control theory, and labeling theory.

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.

Brian Johnson, or the “Brain,” in the movie The Breakfast Club, possess thought processes evident in Piaget’s Formal Operational Period stage in his theory of cognitive development. During Piaget’s Formal Operational Period, people begin to “apply their mental operations to abstract concepts in addition to concrete objects;” their thinking is hypothetical, systematic, reflective and logical (Weiten, 448). Brian asks himself existential questions like “Who do I think I am? Who are you? Who are you?” as he brainstorms Mr. Vernon’s assignment for the students in detention; these thoughts are abstract. His thought processes are also logical since he’s extremely intelligent; being part of the math, Latin and physics club requires some advanced thinking skills. Additionally, he understands how concrete applications like engineering stem from abstract concepts like Trigonometry. He also reasoned that if he took a class like Shop that “dopes” take, he could pass that class easily to maintain his GPA; such reasoning requires complex thinking. Finally, his thinking is reflective, especially when he ponders the permanence of the Breakfast Club’s friendship and describes how he steps outside himself to analyze what he sees. Unfortunately, when he observes himself, he’s highly critical and despises his “true” self; he possess a highly negative view of himself, labeling himself a failure, eventually leading to suicidal thoughts and actions.

You know that kid in your 6th period, who sits in the back of the classroom; he makes comments under his breath, skips class, and has a vile view of the world. Yeah, him. He is considered a criminal and a social deviant because of his actions, the clothes he wears, and his attitude. By generalizing a person based on a certain characteristic and comparing it to a group of people, by definition is stereotyping. Bender, in The Breakfast Club, is the social deviant or criminal because when students see him in his ripped jeans, work boots, a thermal shirt, a plaid over-shirt and a torn flannel (UR) is associated with a tough, rebellious attitude (UR). Due to his abuse at home (US) he uses his clothes as a way to show he is not week to be given any sympathy. Students view him as a criminal by getting in trouble and smoking marijuana, the image is created (CS). His abuse he gets at home causes him to hate adults and authority of any kind. Seeing the preppy girl hanging out with the same group of people, her expensive clothes, and everyone loves her and wants to be her. The conditioned stimulus (CS) is the association and the expectation of their stereotype and when it is paired with the unconditioned stimulus (US), events making them the way they are (abuse at home, parental expectations, etc.) consistently the association becomes stronger. The conditioned response (CR) is the action towards that group, such as avoidance or hanging out with them. The unconditioned response (UR) is

1)A group role is the part a member plays in a group, as a function of your traits, personality, your expectation, expectations of others in the group. and who you are as an individual. Each member in the Breakfast Club has had an input into the story line and there are multiple characters with different roles, inputs and circumstances and all of them interacting to make this film quite interesting. Lets start off with the most deviant of them all.

The Breakfast Club is an inspiring tale of five adolescents: Brian, Andrew, Claire, John Bender, and Allison, from diverse backgrounds that unite over a course of eight grueling hours in mandatory Saturday detention. These five individuals come from different social groups and a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds are present, but in the end they discover that they are more alike than they assumed.

In the film The Breakfast Club, Deviance and Conformity to the norms are used throughout the film to help viewers understand the Labeling Theory and how it connects to the behavior of adolescents. Deviance simply put is the departing of social norms and and values in social situations while the Labeling Theory can be defined as that people generate their own self image solely based upon what others think of themselves which leads to poor self image and feelings about themselves and others around them. The Labeling Theory is applied in The Breakfast Club because it appears that all the characters feel like they already know everything about one another solely based on who they really are when they all first meet. In the film, we start to get an idea of exactly who the characters really are inside. In the first few minutes we start to understand that there is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal but by the end of the film we start to understand that the individuals are all different than what they seem. It feels like only in high school, you really care about how others perceive you, how you’re labeled and you’d do anything to just prove that you’re not some loser who spends time alone feeling bad for themselves. An example throughout the film is how defensive Claire acts when Bender is teasing her for all she has. By the end of the film, we start to understand that Claire does everything she can to get respect from her peers.

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.

Breakfast Club film contained a wide variety of behavior and stereotypes. Each person had their on personality and taste at the beginning of the film. I believe that communication played the biggest part in the movie. It shows the way that people from totally different backgrounds can communicate and even agree on issues. The various types of communication and behaviors within the film will be discussed. Key terms will be pointed out and highlighted, as well as described in relation to the examples extracted from the film. To begin with the film started out with a communication climate that was both tense and without verbal communication. This was mainly due to the variance in membership constructs of the characters involved. The

The Breakfast Club was an extraordinary film that dealt with teenagers in detention. Although it looked like a regular movie, it had deep meanings involved with it. The movie showcases a circle of teens who are completely different from each other. At first they didn’t interact with one another, but as the movie goes on they begin to become close friends. The Breakfast Club does a great job at exemplifying the dynamics of a group in society because there are so many associations of people who interact with each other even if the interests are completely different. The characters in the movie move from an out group to an in group because they all felt like outsiders towards each other, but as time was going on in detention they were starting to really like each other. They became an in group towards the end of the movie because they made their own grouping, which they referred to it as “The Breakfast Club”.

The movie The Breakfast Club takes viewers on a comedic tour of the ups and downs of adolescence. The Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes, focuses on the events that unfold between five very different high school students during a Saturday detention. Even though the movie was shot in the 1980 's the characters portrayal is still relatable in a way to a lot of people today. Director John Hughes takes us on a comedic ride with what seems like another typical "teen movie" while still portraying a few life lessons along the way and exposing some truths behind stereotyping.

The Breakfast Club is about a group of five teenagers that portray different stereotypes of the athlete, the brain, the princess, the basket case and the criminal. They are all sent to detention at their school on a Saturday morning in order to write a letter about who each of them think they are and what sent them to detention. Throughout the entire afternoon they start from being

Do you ever wonder what people are really like and not just what they show on the outside? Yes, we all do. This is because we never take the time to meet up with a person to understand more about them. We meet our five characters at the beginning of the movie and they are all different. There is Andy the athlete, Claire is a princess, Allison a basket case, Brian the brain, and John Bender the criminal. But throughout the movie they learn more and more about each other and find that they all have a lot of common problems and beliefs. In his film The Breakfast Club, John Hughes uses the Star-crossed lovers and loyal companions archetypes to reveal how we as humans fail to recognize how trustful a person can be, because we let our differences control how we act and feel towards others and their beliefs.