How Does The Breakfast Club Relate To Sociology

Belen Castillejos
Anthony Blacksher.
Sociology 101
3 November, 2014

The Breakfast Club is a film detailing a Saturday intention involving five very different students who are forced into each other’s company and somehow to share their stories. In the movie, The Breakfast Club we can see sociological issues such as high school cliques, stereotypes, and different forms of social interaction such as social sanctions, peer pressure. Throughout the film we can see the different characters are in conflict with each other, mostly because they come from different social and economic groups (rich, middle class and poor). The first principle seen in the film is a stigma, which is disapproval, attached to disobeying the expected norms so that a person

is discredited as less than normal (Ballantine 199), meaning it’s just labels that are used to characterize an individual. In the movie each of the characters is associated with a stigma at the start. For example, Allison is known as a basket case, liar and weird, while Andy is seen as a jock, “the Athlete” and bully, John is known as a criminal and failure, Brian is known as a geek and people pleaser, and Claire is seen as a spoiled little brat and a princess.

Also we can see how each character illustrates the term deviant and through this we can understand some of their behaviors. Each character is deviant in their own ways. When referring to deviance, deviance refers to the violation of society’s norms (Ballantine 173). Each character is seen as deviant by either their actions that brought them into detention or some of the acts we see them do during the detention. For example, during one scene we see Allison as a thief because she steals Brian’s wallet during the detention and also because she comes to detention without even being in trouble, just to be deviant. Also we see Claire as deviant in the way she skips school to go shopping, and puts make up on during detention and how she cares about her appearance, also she enters in a relationship with John during the detention. Andy is deviant when he smokes marijuana because he is a varsity athlete and that is what athletes are supposed to do. John is constantly deviant in so many ways such as he is not involved in school activities, challenges Principal Vernon; he destroys school

property, and doesn’t care about school, basically your typical trouble maker.
Another sociological concept seen in the film is social sanctions, or rewards or punishments that promote comfort to social norms. We can see this when the students cover John when he snuck back into the library and no one said anything and they just went along with it, so they wouldn’t get in trouble too. Also we can see this through rational choice theory according to our book, the explanation for this theory is that humans are fundamentally concerned with self-interest, making rational choices based on weighting cost and rewards of certain outcome (Ballantine 53.They weight it the outcome of either telling that John snuck out or just staying quiet and not risk it to get more hours in detention. We can also interpret it, the addition of more Saturday detentions to control the students’ actions, as social sanctions, like I said to control the behavior of the students. Similar to this is peer pressure; in the movie peer pressure is used to encourage positive and negative deviance. An example of this negative deviance encouraged through peer pressure is when John convinces everyone else to smoke pot with him in the library using different methods to get each of them to agree to do it. An example of positive deviance would be in the way Brian tries so hard to please people and to get along with everyone, especially his parents.
In this movie we see a variety of stereotypical high school roles that we expect to see in a normal high school.

The famous the note that was left by the teens in detention at the end of the movie shows the social connection between each of their roles in society and how those are tie to society. The teens use the stereotypical names to tell Mr. Vernon who they think they are; the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal, they use the names that society has given them because of their reputations, hobbies and looks. They each realize throughout the movie that there is something that connects them to one another which makes them all realize that no matter the stereotypical separation between them, they all have some things in common and can work together for a common goal.
We can relate these social roles to social identity. These students acted as though they needed to hold these social roles that in the beginning of the movie, they identified themselves with (the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal) but like I said by the end of the movie each one broke that stereotypical relation by doing things that were abnormal or not common for that type of stereotype(the princess talking to the basket case and helping her out or the athlete connecting with the

criminal).
To be honest the first time I saw this movie I never thought about all this. I simply thought it was a good movie and that’s all. I never really thought about these sociological terms and acts that were portray throughout the movie. I’m pretty sure there is more sociological terms in this movie but these were the ones that I felt confident about and that I can actually explain and understand. Hands down the best movie I ever saw.