The Breakfast Club: Symbolic Convergence Theory

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

who they really are, which ironically answers the essay none of them were going to write (except Brian). In the end, Brian is manipulated into writing a group essay for everyone in which he gives each person their defining nickname. While each student represents a different clique, together they form The Breakfast Club.
Interpersonal communication is the exchange that takes place between 2 or more people that takes place between people who are in some way who are in some way “connected.” Within it, there is message sending and message receiving. I am examining the five teenagers in The Breakfast Club, and will see how their relationships begin, grow and continue to develop during the course of the movie. The two theories within interpersonal communication that I will be looking at are the Social Penetration Theory and the Revelation/Concealment Dialectic of Expression.
The Social Penetration theory states that as relationships grow and people share more with each other, communication changes from a shallow level to a more intimate, deep and personal level. At the beginning of this movie, there are five very different people that are grudgingly brought together on a Saturday morning in the same room to fulfill their detention. These five people all have preconceived judgments towards each other and none know each other on a level deeper than the surface, or based on appearances and actions. There is very little breadth, depth, and frequency. Because they are forced to be in the same room together and because their personalities are so different, there is automatically a lot of tension and disagreements. The characters slowly start to learn more and more about each other, even though the way the information is drawn out is not the most pleasant. Bender is the initiator of conversation – you can see that his initial goal is to irritate the other teens who are easily provoked, so he continues to ask everyone questions although they are mostly rude, disrespectful and inappropriate. Regardless of the context, his strategy works and eventually the home lives and horrible parent and life stories about each and every person are revealed. As time goes on, there is an increase in trust along with the characters’ vulnerability as the secrets being revealed become more personal. This creates room for empathy and understanding as the five realize that they are all so much more alike than they would have ever thought. In order to get to this point of trust and friendship, they needed to go through the Revelation-Concealment Dialect of Expression.
As an external dialectic tension, the theory of the Revelation-Concealment Dialect of Expression states that communication allows people to share information with their social network while also keeping some information private. People must decide what kinds of information to share to the people in their larger social networks. In this case, the five students need to decide exactly what they want the other people to know about them. In this process they are looking at what could be used against them in the future (or currently) and what all they can say without disrupting the image that they hold in the school. Each one of these kids has a deep desire to be accepted by their classmates even though their appearance and how they act might suggest differently. In the movie, they are asking each other questions and accusing each other of acting a certain way and doing certain things because of a pre-conceived stereotype. When one person revealed something, it made it easier for the rest to follow suit and reveal the same amount of personal information. The teenagers make the decision of what to share about themselves and what to keep to themselves. In allowing the other kids to see the more personal sides of them it is ultimately destroying their original stereotypes and allowing them to see each other as equal individuals.
From the Organizational Theories of Communication, I chose the Symbolic Convergence theory.

This theory offers an explanation for the appearance of a group's cohesiveness, consisting of shared emotions, motives, and meanings. Within it, sharing group fantasies creates symbolic convergence. In The Breakfast Club, the goal set for the group by the teacher in charge of the detention is to write the 1000 word essay describing who they think they are as a person. They are told to sit there without talking or moving and think and write only about themselves. Of course, the whole movie consists of their procrastination as they bicker about their lives and scheme against their teacher and they start to see a different side of everyone as they find out more about each other. There are predictions of the others’ lives acted out, sharing of stories and even lying and making up things in order to get each others attention or get each other away from finding out the real truth about them. These are the dramatizing messages. A fantasy chain starts to pick up once they begin revealing the problems they have outside of school (parents/home life) and grow closer as they tell each other the reason they got into detention in the first place and how it connects to their home life. The five realize that even though their problems are significantly different, they all are equal in the fact that they are all human and one of their problems is not any less important than the others. In short, the

majority of the movie basically is the Symbolic Convergence Theory. Through the procrastination and boredom of the five students, they find out the identity of each person and bond over their problems. By the end of the film, the group hands off the assignment to Brian because he is the smartest and no one else wants to write it, but what he writes is the perfect example of how they transitioned from an I, me, and mine way of thinking to thinking about we, us, and ours.
“Brian Johnson: Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did WAS wrong, but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is ... a brain...
Andrew Clark: ...and an athlete...
Allison Reynolds: ...and a basket case...
Claire Standish: ...a princess...
John Bender: ...and a criminal...
Brian Johnson: Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.”

By the end of this film, the five teens have gone through this symbolic overlap and experienced symbolic convergence.

They even memorialize their group consciousness with a name and recorded history that recalls moments when fantasies chained out.

I. Sources

a. Bleach, A. C. (2010). Postfeminist cliques? Class, postfeminism, and the Molly Ringwald-John Hughes films. Cinema Journal, 49, 24-44.

i. Ideas from first source

1. Emphasizes importance of individual solutions to class differences (Bleach, 2010)

2. The representation of cliques in this movie were defined partly on the basis of socioeconomic status (Bleach, 2010)

ii. Quotes from first source

1. “cliques that come together seems like stating the obvious” (Bleach, 2010, p. 25)

2. “…struggles within or against the class constraints erected within their narratives” (Bleach, 2010, p. 25)

b. Macy, M. W., & Skvoretz, J. (1998, October). The evolution of trust and cooperation between strangers: A Computational Model. American Sociological Review, 63, 638-660.

i. Ideas from second source

1. Social exchanges sometimes involve an unavoidable time lag between promise and delivery (Macy & Skvoretz, 1998)

2. Not all strangers are dishonest, nor are all cultures reluctant to do business with “outsiders” (Macy & Skvoretz, 1998)

ii. Quotes from second

source
1. “Social and economic changes often occur between strangers who cannot rely on past behavior or the prospect of future interactions to establish mutual trust” (Macy & Skvoretz, 1998, p. 638)
2. “an effective detection strategy requires the evolution of two traits: the ability to signal trustworthiness in a way that cannot be easily faked, and the ability to correctly read each others’ signals” (Macy & Skvoretz, 1998, p. 640)