The Tragic Story of Teenagers with Issues in The Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club is a comedy drama directed and written by John Hughes, released in 1985. This cult movie around the life of the teen and high school environment is considered as one of the pioneers of the genre. On a Saturday, five students with very different personalities find themselves in detention together, a criminal, a princess, an athlete, a brain and a basket case. The supervising teacher, Mr. Vernon, asks each of them to write a 1000 words essay about the subject: 'Who you think you are'. Despite the differences that separate them, the five teenagers realize that they have more in common than they would have thought at first.

John Hughes is famous for his representations of the teen life and high school settings. He likes representing the students in a very stereotypical way surrounded by teenager’s issues. Initially, the movie seems like it will be a very stereotyped movie, not really going in depth on the characters and on the story, “The Breakfast Club self-consciously takes on suburban diversity, with cliques quite clearly standing in for class. On its surface, the film adheres to the Hollywood tendency to locate the solutions to social problems in the romantic couple while simultaneously seeing class-based violence in very personal terms” (Long, 2014, p102). But the movie turns out to be more engaged than it looks and raises some interesting issues. The representation of the authority figure at school with Vernon is also an important part of the movie. As often, Vernon is represented as severe and burned out.

The characters of the movie The Breakfast club are very important since the entire movie and the success of the movie is based on the interpretation of those characters. Hughes decided to represent five different types of students. John Bender, the criminal with a rebellious attitude. Andrew Clarke, the athlete who seems popular and happy but who struggle with parental pressure. Allison Reynolds, the weirdo stereotype also called “basket case”, she is ignored by her parents and struggle to gain confidence explaining her silence. Claire Standish, the popular girl of the school, “the princess” who turns out to be pretty insecure and finally Brian Johnson, the typical nerd who appears to be a very interesting character, looking insecure and shy but who lives his life freely without caring about the approval of his classmates.

At first in the movie, those five characters are victims of the danger of the single story. They are absolute stereotypes and embrace each trait of their stereotype. The principal and surely the audience categorized them very quickly and we understand how those students represent the different cliques present in all High Schools. Adichie explains that “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” (Adichie, 2009, p251). In fact, the students are not as one sided as we think and opened up throughout the movie. We understand that there is more to their personality than the first idea we can have of them.

As we have seen, the Breakfast Club's band is composed of traveling stereotypes. We can wonder if it is a choice of the director to deny any complexity in his characters. But we realize that even if Hughes flirts with caricature sometimes, it is also a reflection of the time when looks, colors and behaviors were exacerbated. John Hughes avoids clichés in two ways: first, during this detention day, the characters will open up to drop one by one the socio-cultural barriers that separated the group. Secondly, because these stereotypes are not really a reflection of the characters' deep personality, but rather a picture or idea of that locked themselves up, consciously or not.

While refusing to let their parents decide on their future, the characters understand that they must break the mold that is imposed on them. Thus, Andrew is not the son-to-dad that we could imagine when we first get to know him: he's raging inside, he wants to emancipate. This is true for every other characters, their attitude and personality being conditioned only by the environment from which they come. John Hughes reveals the cracks and frustrations that define these young people who, with the exception of John Bender, look quite normal.

Parents are at the heart of several Breakfast Club dialogues. The rebellion is latent and it is the principal who will bear the cost. The principal, representative of authority and incarnation of the paternal figure, is thinking of inflicting a memorable punishment on this club of five that ends making them federate. The parents have a very important role in the development of the teenagers. The first scene, when the parents drop their child off says a lot about their relationship. While Claire’s father is supportive, Allison’s mother is completely uninterested or Brian’s mother who pressure her son to find a way to study whereas he is not even allowed to.

The film, taking place entirely during the detention, reminds us of a prison environment. Using Stuart Hall encoding/decoding model of communication (1993), we can try to interpret the message of the director. Hughes put the students into some very specific settings throughout the movies. He is encoding a particular message by putting the students in those settings. In fact, they are like prisoners, forced to stay silent, locked in a space. Some scenes also remind the audience of a prison scenario like the escape in the corridors and the principal who abuses of his power like a prison mate would. Another encoded message would be at the very beginning of the movie in the prologue, parents seem unable to talk to their kids. Framed in front of their car, the roles are defined by the seat occupied: the driver or parent is the one who decides while the passenger or students are forced to follow. The audience is able to decode the lack of freedom of the students in both the school and the familial situations. Faced with this incommunicability, these lost teenagers seem slaughtered when they take place in the library. Their calls for help failed, only giving them an afternoon of restraint instead of the expected attention. It shows how their parental negative influence affect their behavior and the situation they are in.

However, the day will allow them to find unexpected support from their fellow classmates or prisoners, even if all of them apart from Brian knows that their friendship will not continue in the school in the future due to their important difference and belongings in various cliques. The detention will continue to bring them together as a clan until the end of Saturday. The film concludes on this sort of sad note, the magic of the Breakfast Club seemingly doomed to not last. The reality of the social classes, the peer pressure, the fear of the look of others will tear each other apart once again.

The school in the movie is not represented as place where students learn and develop, but rather as a factory producing individuals according to predefined standards. The movie underlines the issue faced in High School in term of social integration. The fact that John Hughes draws this picture that no one seems to escape the inevitable fate at the end of the movie is pretty sad. The only two adult actors in the film, Principal Vernon and the concierge, also show some cynicism on the part of the director. Despite their short time of presence in the movie, the two characters are perceived as unappreciable. First, Carl, the concierge does not really show any sympathy for the students. And even if he does not occupy a management position, he has spent enough time and saw enough young people pass in his walls to know that they will soon be higher than him in the social ranking. Marginal and frustrated, he is the silent observer of the passage of these teenagers. Carl, he is very lucid, he knows what will happen to them.

Principal Vernon tries to impose it and act as a very strict figure especially towards Bender. He is a clear victim of the single story and think he knows everything about his students. However, in the privacy of his office, we discover a man lacking confidence and ashamed of what he has become. During a conversation with Carl where the two men will exchange confidences, the latter will ask him questions about his life. He asked if Vernon once he was a teenager really dreamed of living the life he is currently living. To which Vernon replies that he dreamed of being John Lennon. We can see here a complete opposition of what he actually became. The artist, free in his mind versus the principal forcing the authority on his school. After that scene, Vernon appears as a failure, to the extent that he either failed to realize his childhood dreams, abandoning them in favor of a socially respectable career. Vernon is a classic representation of the teachers or authority figure at the school. He is opposing the student and not trying to understand or communicate with them, they are like enemies and none of them is able to gain the respect of the others, “Teaching is a war or a battle: we are in the trenches. It’s a calling or a mission: we are missionaries. Students are wild animals or, in a more disturbing turn, uncivilized tribes of people” (Applegate, 2016, p138). Once again, the janitor Carl is very wise and able to understand and reveal the deeper thoughts of people.

Carl is a very interesting character, omniscient as a kind of wise man that has seen so much of the people that he understood their way of thinking. Due to the fact that his position excludes him, he is almost invisible to the eyes of the others members of the school, he alone can reflect and laugh at the situation the students and their principal are getting involved in. He has a wise and exterior eye on the situation.

The ending of the movie is interesting, the students realized that they had more in common that they expected. They also confessed a lot of their personal stories to each other. Nevertheless, it seems like once the detention is over, they will all go back to their old lives and ignore each other, like Bender predicted it during the movie, “At film’s end, the Breakfast Club members re-enter the ‘real world’, where zoning appears to reassert the very boundaries that separated them when the film began.” (Long, 2014, p103).

To conclude we can say that this movie gives an interesting representation of the students in high school. Through the use of cliques, it determines the different social status and characters and portray them as stereotypes. The stereotypes are communicating and creating a dialogue based on the traits of each character, “A social structure and personality perspective (grounded in symbolic interactionism) emphasizes that social interactions among individuals within a society are organized and patterned by social positions” (Falci, 2011). The characters opened up and we realize that the single story we have been told about them is not completely true. They turned out to be very complex characters, dealing with internal problems and issues at home with their families that influenced their own behavior in the classroom, “An adolescent’s perception of decline in either type of parent–adolescent relationship quality will have important implications for growth in self-esteem” (Falci, 2011). The Breakfast Club is a great representation of a teen movie that succeed in showing the complexity of the adolescent mind and the social structure in High School.