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

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

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