The Breakfast Club Essay

The Breakfast Club is a movie that was written in 1985. It was written and directed by John Hughes. In the movie five teenagers have to spend 8 hours and 54 minutes of their Saturday in detention for various reasons. The teenagers know of one another, but they are all apart of different cliques. Bender is considered the “criminal”, Claire who is the “Princess”, Brian is the “brain”, Andy is the “athlete”, and Allison is the “basket case”. The social penetration theory was shown throughout the movie The breakfast club.

Explained by Baack, Fogliasso, and Harris (2000) the social penetration theory was created by Taylor and Atlman in 1973. It is compared to an onion diagram that is describing a person’s personality structure through layers of

an onion. As the layers of the onion peel, you dig deeper into who a person is. The outer layer starts as just a conversation you learn about the way a person dresses, but you have limited disclosure. The next layer you learn about the person’s needs, feelings, and values. You begin to increase the disclosure. The middle core you have high disclosure, and you learn the person’s self-concept, and their core personality.
Most people would agree that when you first meet someone you aren’t always open with personal information about yourself as you would be with a best friend or someone we have known for a while. People aren’t always comfortable disclosing information about themselves until they have gotten to know a person and they have been around each other a couple of times. Everyone is comfortable with a certain amount of information being released about him or her before a relationship is developed (Lane, 2001). Telling someone too much about yourself can sometimes end a relationship sooner than anticipated.
The students were placed into the library for the time of the detention. The assistant principal Mr. Vernon was in charge of them and told them, that there was no talking, sleeping, or moving from their seat aloud. He assigned a 1,000-word essay to the students about whom they think they are and that is all that they were aloud to do in the time that they were there. Of course once he left the room, the instructions were not followed. Throughout the day they did various things like smoking marijuana, dancing, making fun of each other, and telling stories. Throughout the day the students developed relationships. These relationships never would have formed if it was not for them being stuck in the library together and they had their cliques around to judge them. It was most likely outside of all of their comfort zones to talk to these people who they don’t usually affiliate themselves with. They learned quickly that your perception of someone isn’t always true. The way they had been acting to feel accepted by others in the school isn’t who they really are.
The students showed all levels of “the onion”.

At the beginning of the day they had little interactions with one another. When Bender first walked in and Brian was in his spot he makes him get up and move. This is an example of the first layer the Orientation level because they kept their conversation short and no information was released. When the group begins to talk about why they received their detentions they enter the second layer of the onion the Exploratory affective stage. Bender starts to peel away the other teenager’s layers by making fun of them, laughing at them, and taunting them. Bender caused most of the reason they began to opening up because he was very mean and straightforward with all of them all. This is showing the social penetration theory because when Bender was taunting Claire about her popularity within the school she started to open up and confess about how she felt about being popular. Bender was pulling Claire’s layers and starting to get to her inner core. When Bender was pestering each person they began to open up under pressure. The things that they were doing throughout the day were not all things that they would normally do with their clique of friends. At the end of the movie when they all should have had their essay’s completed the unexpected happened and they all came together and wrote one paper. The principle never expected this because the kids are all so

different.
The social penetration theory holds true throughout this film as they slowly let out little bits of information about them selves and took in information of the others to get to know each other. At first all of the students are very cautious with what they are saying to one another and how they are acting. By the end of the 8 hours and 54 minutes their stereotypes are broken and their “onion core” starts to show. They all realized that there is a lot more in common that they all have then what they had originally thought going into it. Even though from the outside they all look like they could never have things in common they learned that they really aren’t all that different.
The five students were dreading going it detention on a Saturday morning, not knowing anyone. Opening up to people that you wouldn’t normally affiliate yourself with is hard to do especially when you’re still in high school and are worried about being judged. But as the day went on and they began to open up to one another they realized how much they had in common. The Breakfast Club demonstrated the social penetration theory and how opening yourself up to new people can go a long way in the end.