The Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club is a movie about five totally different students in high school who are forced to spend a Saturday in detention in their school library. The students come from completely different social classes which make it very difficult for any of them to get along. They learn more about each other and their problems that each of them have at home and at school. This movie plays their different personality types against each other. In this essay I will go into detail about each of the students and the principal individually.

The first student I will talk about is the first one to be seen in the movie. This is Claire Standish. Claire is one of the popular girls in the school. Through her social learning she seems to feel that she is socially above everybody who is not in her group of friends, who I envision as being like the snobbish rich kids who went to my school. Claire comes from a nuclear family. Her parents are clearly the epitome of indulgent parenting. Her father pretty much tells her that it wasn't that wrong of her to skip school to go shopping and that he will make it up to her. Throughout the movie, Claire seems to have an attitude that shows that she holds herself above the other kids who are serving detention with her. She even goes as far as to ask them "Do you know how popular I am? Everybody loves me so much!" She clearly shows that there are no types of risk taking in her life other than skipping school one time to go shopping. He has never had sex, she shows that she never has drunk alcohol or smoked, and she had never smoked pot. You could tell by her choking when she inhaled the smoke. She follows the leader in her little group she hangs out with at school and tries to constantly fit in. I can imagine that her parents support her in everything that she does and this fits her personality just fine because she strives so hard for people to like her.

The second person that we see in the film is Brian Johnson. He is one of the very intelligent students in the school whom is virtually invisible. He has really good grades and he is excellent in everything that he does, but at the same time he is very hard on himself. At one point he talks about how he feels that he "doesn't like what he sees" when he looks at himself. He was in woodshop and got an "F" on his project. Because of this "F" he would be getting a "B" in woodshop and because of this he sees himself as a total failure. He admits that the reason that he was in detention was because he was going to commit suicide and he brought the gun to school. He said that he attempted to kill himself but he couldn't pull the trigger. His (flair) gun went off in his locker. He has suicidal ideation. He thought that suicide was the logical thing to do and he went one step beyond thinking about it and attempted. He just couldn't pull the trigger. He has the ultimate when it comes to parental monitoring. His parents are probably really intelligent and this is why the push him so hard academically. The reason I think this is because his mother's license plate was "EMC2" and she made sure that he knew that this (detention) was a one time thing and he should use his time wisely to study. Much like Claire, I feel that Brian is not much of a risk taker. He is a very jumpy kid and is easily told what to do by just about everybody in the movie.

The third student in the movie is Andrew Clark. He is a jock. His father drives p in a blazer to drop him off for detention and he gets out with a letterman jacket on (with several letters on it). You can see from the very beginning that his father only cares about one thing and that is, how successful his son is in wrestling and other sports. His father says "Hey, I screwed around...guys screw around, there is nothing wrong with that, except you got caught, Sport." Brian's father seems to live through him and even though there is a generation gap, he wants his son to be like him, or better than he was in school. I think that Brian would rather do and become everything that other people want him to be than to disappoint them. He likes the attention. You can tell that he is always ready to fight with anybody who gets in his way by the comments he makes throughout the movie. "If I lose my temper, your totaled man." and "you ask me one more question and I'm beating the shit out of you man." I think that sports and him being tough is Brian's right of passage in his father's eyes. Brian suffers from identity versus role confusion. He feels that it is easy to do what others tell him to do. This way he can't make the wrong decisions. He knows that he doesn't like sports and yet he stays in them to please his father. Brian in turn sometimes wishes that his knee would give out so that he could quit without disappointing his father by simply quitting for no reason at all.

The fourth student that we meet is John Bender. He is an obnoxious high school student who is full of punch lines, sarcastic remarks and a low self esteem. He is the low life of the school. The one you could buy pot from and always was in trouble. John has a lot of home issues that haunt his day