Psychoanalysis of The Breakfast Club
The Breakfast Club is a movie about five high school students who are forced to serve a Saturday detention, as well as write a lengthy essay about who they think they really are. I chose to psychoanalyze this particular film due to the sheer pleasure i receive when i watch it. The Breakfast Club epitomizes high school cliques and dramatizes each of the respective student’s need to belong. All of the main characters in the movie, Brian, Claire, Bender, Andrew, and Allison, have very distinct psychological issues that they are dealing with internally. In this paper, i will attempt to breakdown and analyze the schemas of each of the teens to better understand the emotional and physical plights that they undergo on a daily basis.
Brian, the brain of the bunch, is the last person that should be in detention. He is described by Bender as “a parents wet dream” who still gets his lunches made for him by his mom. Throughout the movie, Brian is subject to verbal abuse from the others because to his great grades and his seemingly perfect home life, however, he is extremely self-conscious. Brian lacks the confidence to tell the others that he will not write their papers for them. Instead of confrontation, he writes one paper for the whole group. Peer pressure is something that he comes in contact with during the movie. When the group goes to smoke marijuana, he follows them in an attempt to be accepted and to seem “cool, sporting a pair of Ray Bans. During the main, climatic conversation that the five of them have at the end of the film, Brian revels to the group that he brought a gun to school and was going to kill himself over a bad grade in shop. The extreme competitiveness that our society places on...
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...he’s serving a Saturday detention when she does not have to. When Claire helps Allisons by changing her look at the end of the movie, all of the guys noticed and treated her differently. She was no longer looked like a crazy artist, but a beautiful woman who just needed some coaxing to break out of her shell.
It is apparent that my psychoanalytical research of The Breakfast Club reveals each character's persona in school is not who they actually are. The walls that they came into detention with that Saturday came toppling down Brian’s pencil and onto a piece of paper in the shape of a letter to Mr.Vernon explaining that they are more than the stereotypes that he sees them as. The five students entered Sherman High School as a jock, a princess, a basket case, a brain, and a criminal, but they left as friends bonded by the fact that they are not alone in this world.
In the iconic film, The Breakfast Club, five random high school students must spend their Saturday together in detention. Each teen is in detention for a different reason. The Jock (Andrew), the Princess (Claire), the Brain (Brian), the Basket Case (Allison), and the Criminal (Bender) must put aside their differences to survive their grueling eight-hour detention with their psychotic and rash principal Mr. Vernon. While in detention, they are expected to write about “who they really are” in one thousand words. Throughout the day, their actions reveal their innermost struggle involving their cliques and their home lives. As the movie progresses, we find out the reason each teen is in detention that culminates in a climactic discussion about
Allison obviously lacked the respect of others, for she had no friends whatsoever prior to her time spent in this detention. She also has nervous ticks, such chewing her nails, and played with her hair. Brian was another case of insecurity. The influence of self-concept was strong with Brian Johnson for he had no sense of self. He could not meet the standards of his desired self and was therefore unhappy with himself as a person.
The movie The Breakfast Club is a perfect example of peer relationships in the adolescent society. It shows the viewer some of the main stereotypes of students in high school you have a jock, a nerd, the weirdo, a rebel, and a prep. Over the course of a Saturday detention the different types of peers learn a lot about one another by hearing what each one has done to get into Saturday detention as well as why they chose to do it.
The film being analysed is the Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes. Trapped in Saturday detention are 5 stereotyped teens. Claire, the princess, Andrew, the jock, John, the criminal, Brian, the brain, and Allison, the basket case. At 7 am, they had nothing to say, but by 4 pm; they had uncovered everything to each other. The students bond together when faced with the their principal, and realise that they have more in common than they think, including a hatred for adult society. They begin to see each other as equal people and even though they were stereotyped they would always be The Breakfast Club. The Breakfast Club highlights a variety of pressures that are placed upon teenagers through out high school. One of the most challenging aspects of screenwriting is creating characters that an audience can identify with, relate to, and be entertained by.
The Breakfast Club is a coming-of-age movie. This movie follows five high school students who all have school detention on a Saturday morning. They all come from various types of group. There is the anxious and bizarre girl, Allison; the sporty guy, Andrew; the hard-acting guy, John; the popular girl, Claire; and the nerd, Brian. They all saw each other that way too because they were “brainwashed” into accepting that. Since they are all from different types of groups, they don’t know each other, nor do they want to. At first they think they don’t have anything in common, but as time passes, that proves to be wrong. Since they were the only people in the library, they can’t help but slowly get to know each other. This movie was written and directed by the brilliant John Hughes, who in my opinion is the “King of 80’s movies.” He has directed great 80’s teen movies like 16 Candles, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink. This movie has mix of genres any individual could possible enjoy: drama, comedy, and even romance. The actors in the movie performed to be tremendous in their roles. The actors in the movie are known as “the brat pack”. The movie is starring: Emilio Estevez, known for popular movies like The Outsiders; Molly Ringwald, who starred in movies like Pretty in Pink and 16 Candles; Anthony Michael Hall, who was in the movie 16 Candles with Molly Ringwald; and Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson, they both starred in St. Elmo’s Fire. There couldn’t be anyone better to portray the characters in the movie than these actors.
Every person sees themselves differently, whether you're the jock, the brain, or even the criminal, we all have a plethora of personality quirks in common. We don't belong solely to the singular “clique” that society has placed us in. Throughout The Breakfast Club, we see ourselves in each of the characters, and so did John Hughes, while we may relate to a singular character or clique in the beginning, we come to see ourselves, our struggles in each and every character. Though John Hughes may have seen himself as the geek or the athlete in high school, that's not all he was, and it's through this classic film that he shows himself to be all of the characters in some way or another. We're all united in common beliefs, in
The 1985 film, The Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes shows how a person’s identity can be influenced by conflict he or she has experienced in life. First, John Bender is in the library telling everyone how he got a cigar burn on his arm from his dad. For example, his mother and father don’t treat with the most respect or any respect at all. They call him names and say he can’t do anything right. One day him and his dad got into a really bad argument and his dad burnt him with is cigar that he had. Because his parents treat him that way, he treats everyone he’s around very badly.
What can you learn about adolescence by watching five very different teens spend Saturday detention together? With each and everyone of them having their own issues weather it be at home, school, or within themselves. During this stage of life adolescents are seen as rude, disrespectful, and out of control. But why is this? Is it truly all the child’s fault? Teens have to face quite a few issues while growing up. Adolescence is the part of development where children begin push back against authority and try to figure out who they are or who they are going to become. Therefore, we will be looking at adolescent physical changes, their relationships, cognitive changes and the search for identity as depicted in the movie The Breakfast Club (Hughes,1985).
In this film we see many typical high school behaviors such as cliques, cattiness, and popularity (or lack there of) issues. Many scenes in this movie have an array of stereotypes. Sometimes they are clearly stated and others just seen through attitudes of the actors/actresses character. Also through out we follow the main clique “the plastics” and they have this image they have to uphold. Be perfect, skinny, the best at everything, and in sync with everything they do; or they wont uphold their status. I chose this film because I think it shows a lot of what we have learned in this course and how it is in real life. Clearly the film is exaggerated but much of
One of these is normative social influences, this is “the influence others have on us because we want them to like us (King, 2013, p. 447). Andrew shows this when he talks about how he got in detention. Andrew states he bullied a kid, so the kid would think he was cool. You see that Andrew does this disgusting action to this kid so he could be seen as cool. Another social behavior that is seen in the film is the fundamental attribution error, which is observers overestimate the importance of the internal traits and underestimate the importance of external factors when explaining others behaviors. We see the fundamental attribution error a lot in this movie. First we see it with Brian, everyone sees him as smart. But when Brian explains that he failed shop class people were surprised; they never thought this kid would ever fail, since he is so smart. Another is with Bender, they see him as disrespectful and aggressive. What they do not know is, at home, he is being verbally and physically abused by his dad and has to defend himself. This can bring us to conformity, which is a change in a person’s behavior to get more closely with group standards. We see this with all five of the students. Let’s start with Andrew, he covers up his hatred for him father so he wouldn’t be seen as abnormal. Then you have Brian who talks about contemplating suicide for failing a class. He did not want to
The film, The Breakfast Club, introduces five students, each perceived with a different stereotype which is commonly found in American high schools.
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.
You can tell when his mom drops him off at school for detention that academics are important to her, she tells Brian to find a way to study during detention even though they aren’t supposed to. And the license plate on her vehicle is also “EMC2”, which is probably a nod to Albert Einstein’s famous formula ‘E=mc^2’. Brian appears to be eager to please the principal, immediately voicing that he doesn’t want to return to detention and tries to intervene when Andrew and John start to argue, telling them they should just write their papers. When Brian talks about the clubs that he is involved with, he doesn’t think the clubs that he is a part of are different from the clubs that Andrew and Claire are a part of. Claire somewhat condescendingly, says that his clubs are academic clubs, not social clubs. As the movie continues, you see there is more to Brian than meets the eye. In the scene where the five students sneak out of detention to go to John Bender’s locker, Brian is initially apprehensive to go, but follows the group in order to fit in. Brian further conforms when they are back in the library and John and Claire go into an adjacent room to smoke marijuana and he follows. Brian allows social influence to influence what he would normally do; he conforms to what John and Claire are doing
In the film The Breakfast Club there are various social psychological theories and concepts that describe the inner selves of the characters. The characters in the film are initially perceived in a certain manner by each other because of knowing the way they behave in school and the type of people and environment they surround themselves with in school. However one detention on a Saturday brings these characters together and throughout the film their true personalities and behaviors start to reveal themselves by means of social psychological theories and concepts. The characters individually and as a group display their personalities through theories and concepts of social psychology. At the very start of the film, one of the concepts displayed is the acceptance type of conformity. The principal assigns the characters (students) to complete a task and because he is a figure of authority, the characters accept having to complete the task by the end of the day without any attempts to alter that. One of the students, Claire Standish, is revealed to display the concept of narcissism, which is unfortunately a dark side of herself. This is evident as Claire claims that she is popular and loved by her fellow schoolmates and seems to care and showcase her rich and beauty too much. She is, as her detention-mates discover, full of herself. In addition this also shows signs of the spotlight effect theory which can relate to Claire in that she believes that her schoolmates look at her and pay so much attention to her appearance add rich, spoiled-like behavior. Another character to show a theory of social psychology is Allison Reynolds. In the film, Allison is a character with an introvert personality, although she also displays strange and...
Before Miles went to his new school his father said, “No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.” (Green 10 pdf) Miles’ father warned him very heavily about not doing drugs, however, he did drugs in high school before. When Miles goes to high school, he gets lost in the world of peer pressure and he end up doing drugs, drinking alcohol and smoking. In the real world, many high school students tend to fall into the traps of peer pressure and they end up drinking and doing drugs illegally. This story captures the real life perspective of high school with peer pressure, stress and troubles, instead of the fake, “all smiles” perspective of high school that some movies, such as High School Musical, portrays. Additionally, the main character, Alaska, relates to the world because she is a girl that lives a hard life and is depressed on the inside, yet she still manages to have a smile on her face. Many people in the world are going through very hard times, however, they still manage to be happy or they try to give the appearance that they’re happy. Personally, I can relate to Alaska Young’s situation, after losing my grandma and uncle to illness a couple of months ago, I am faced with tremendous amounts of depression and deep sadness. However, on the outside, I tend to have a smile on my face and I don’t show others how I truly feel deep down on the inside. Alaska does this for a while and she slowly