Sociology in The Breakfast Club

for the last week we've been watching the breakfast club

and trying to apply concepts from the four chapters that

we've learned so far in sociology.

So the first chapter that I'm going to talk about

is the origins of sociology.

Um The main thing that I focused on while watching

the movie was viewing the vice principals and the students

relationship through the conflict perspective.

So um in one of the very first scenes we

see all of the students pile into the library and

we're and then we're introduced to the assistant principal.

Um Throughout the movie, he is seen as the authority

figure and right away he instructs his students that they

are not allowed to move or talk.

And the only thing that they're allowed to do is

right there are 1000 word word paper um that is

due at the end of their detention um in this

situation and throughout the entire movie the students are the

minority and their opinions don't matter, which is one of

the main points of the conflict perspective.

Um so there are many instances where the vice principal

comes in and he just like yells at the students

because they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing.

And then throughout the movie the students are trying to

tell him their opinions and like what they think that

how this is like wrong and how it should be

different and he doesn't listen because their opinions don't matter.

One um situation that really stuck out to me was

when Bender got in trouble for being outside of the

library, which all of the students were outside the library,

but he took the fall for them, so the assistant

principal puts him, it locks him in a storage room

and basically he's just trying to start a fight with

Bender, he's trying to get vendor in more trouble and

like Bender doesn't really have like any way to get

out of IT vendor, like he's just being made fun

of by the assistant principal and like he can't speak

his mind because again his opinions don't really matter in

the eyes of the vice principal and he could get

into more trouble if he talks back.

So that was just one instance that stuck out to

me and just I saw throughout the entire movie, the

vice principal yells at the kids and then he never

lets them speak their opinions and so their opinions are

never represented until the very end in brian's essay um

saying just stuff about their opinions on directed attention.

The next chapter that I will be talking about is

culture. So many of Robin Williams, american values that he

identified are represented in the breakfast club values such as

groups superiority, personal achievement and work.

So um there are two main groups that are sort

of represented which are the weird kids in the popular

kids. So the popular kids are claire and Andrew and

then the weird kids are Alison brian and um vendor.

So at one point in the movie when all of

the teens are like talking to each other um they're

kind of talking about how like how they would react

if they ran into each other outside of saturday detention

and like if they were all with their respected friend

groups. So Clarin Andrew kind of state that like they

would ignore them, like their friends will make fun of

them for even interacting with the weird kids and then

brian speaks up and he says well I wouldn't ignore

you guys if you came up to me and my

friends like wouldn't think that that would be weird and

then claire sort of retorts that with well that's because

your friends look up to us and like that's where

I really saw a group superiority because the popular kids

and think that they're better than the weird kids and

that they shouldn't really interact outside of saturday detention.

Um The second to that I see um personal achievement

and work, I see those through the vice principal because

Um I see personal achievement through his salary that he

um explains is $31,000 a year and the fact that

he's like higher up in the educational system, like he's

he's the vice principal which is one step down from

the top I guess as a principle.

Um He also is explaining, he while the vice principal

in the janitor or talking they're talking about work and

um the janitor kind of explained because well the vice

principal is sort of saying that like the kids have

changed their awful now, like they never used to be

this bad and the janitor kind of brings out to

him that maybe he's the one changing and the kids

aren't really changing, he's just getting older and getting um

less um like I can't think of the word, but

he's just getting older in getting more cranky about things.

Um and then he also talks about the Vice principal

also talks about how he took this job because you

would get the summer off and he thought that it

would be fun, it would be fun and then he

started doing the job and it's a lot more work

than he thought it what would be and it's not

very much fun anymore because he thinks that the kids

are changing and that they're awful.

Um So that's what I saw for all of the

american values.

Um Yeah so the next chapter that I will be

talking about is social structure.

So throughout the entire movie we see um the most

common stereotypical high school groups which are groups in society.

Um And like we see how they interact and how

they learn to interact with each other and how later

they influence each other.

Uh So starting out, we see the popular girl which

is claire, she's the stereotypical popular girl, she has makeup,

she's pretty jazz, nice clothes, her family's rather wealthy.

Um Next up we see the weird girl through Alison

and she constantly through the movie, she makes like animal

noises and they're kind of weird and like they all

look at her like what the heck?

Like her lunch was just pure sugar and like they

all thought that that was kind of weird and then

um we see Andrew as the stereotypical jock, he's buff,

he's a wrestler, just all the things, and then we

see the geek through brian, he's really smart and he

has like straight A's except for a shop class, which

is another point in the movie where he's failing.

But um so yeah, we see like the geek through

brian, he's really good at school and like school is

his life essentially.

And then we see the Burnout through Bender.

They think that Bender isn't going anywhere.

It's actually stated in the movie that if Bender were

to disappear, no one would really notice, which is kind

of sad, but it's the truth that he represents the

burnouts, the stereotypical burnout.

Um So at the beginning of the movie, they don't

really know how to react to each other or like

how to interact with each other.

Like they're constantly fighting their bickering with each other because

they don't really know like that they're actually all pretty

similar in their backgrounds and home life's.

Um So and then like as we see through the

movie they start to like interact with each other and

they start to know more about each other and like

interaction becomes easier because they know each other and then

we see sort of how they influence each other moving

forward. Like we see some romantic relationships pop pop up

and like we just see that like maybe their perspective

on life has changed from the saturday detention.

Um So yeah The 4th and final chapter that I

will be talking about is socialization and more specifically the

agents of social socialization that are represented in the Breakfast

Club. The two main ones that I saw um were

the school and the family.

So with um So the age agents of socialization are

meant to teach an individual how to um behave and

how when what the norms of society are.

So school um are so through saturday detention the school

is teaching the teens how to behave and like how

to become a young adult and um it's a consequence

for maybe something that they did that was wrong and

they're trying to correct that behavior.

Um And then the second one I want to focus

more on because I saw like more than I did

school, but school was a really big one.

Really big agents of socialization because the movie is literally

based in a school.

Um and then saturday detention.

So family.

So all of their home lives are kind of um

introduced to us in different ways.

So um starting off with um bender.

So earlier on in the movie vendor sort of reveals

that his own life isn't that great and that his

father is kind of abusive and um so like for

example, he has the cigar burn on his arm or

he explains that one year for christmas his father gave

him cigarettes and we sort of think that like that's

not how a parent should teach their kids to behave,

like that's not the stereotypical way that apparent would teach

the kid to behave.

Um because I don't know now it's seen that smoking

is like bad and that like it's abuse that um

sticking a cigar on a kid's arm.

Um and then, so then Alison also talks about her

home life and how it's dis satisfactory and how her

parents ignore her and how she wants to live on

the streets because she thinks that she's not getting very

much out of her parents.

Um, and then Andrew, so this is sort of a

confrontation between Alison and Andrew and Allison, I mean Andrew

agrees with Alison and he explains that he feels like

he can't think for himself because his dad is constantly

feeding him that he has to be a part of

the popular group and he has to be like part

of the cool kids, he has to be the best

at wrestling, he has to be the best at sports,

he has to be the best everything and he feels

like he's constantly disappointing his family and it's known that

like you shouldn't feel like you have to be the

best at everything in order to make your family be

proud. Um And then, so then we see BRian and

brian feels like he has to be the best at

school, like his family expects him to be the smartest,

his family expects him to be the most intelligent and

get the best grades.

Um And like brian explains that like when he sees

himself in the mirror, he doesn't like what he sees

and that's really sad because that's not what his family

should be teaching him.

And then lastly we see Claire and Clara feels like

her parents are using each other, I mean using her

to fight with each other and try to get back

at each other, and Claire doesn't like that.

So through all of um the students um relationship with

their families, we see that like their families aren't doing

a very good job at teaching them how to be

a part of society and how to behave as a

normal adult.

And so yeah, we see their families failing them in

order to do that and like all of the kids

sort of realize this and they all sort of um

say that they don't want to be like their parents

when they grow up.

So in a way I guess their parents are sort

of teaching them to not be like them and to

be better than them.

So. Yeah.

Mhm. So those are all of the concepts that I

applied through um sociology and I applied it to the

breakfast club.

There are many other concepts, but those were the ones

that I chose, so yeah.

Sociology in The Breakfast Club

Chapters

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