The social commentary behind the humor of The Breakfast Club

The character development in The Breakfast Club is of the utmost importance when examining how the movie affects its audience. However, Hughes develops the five five characters in an innovative way. Instead of making the characters seem like “real” people, he takes the characteristics that place them in their respective social classes and expands them to fill out the character. What that presents are caricatures of different socia

By creating characters that so neatly fit into the main stereotypes that people place each other under, Hughes helps to reinforce and reaffirm them so that when he destroys them it has a much greater influence on the audience. The destruction of these caricatures also serves to help destroy the stereotypes that the audience possesses; and as the characters learn to like each other the audience learns to approach people with open minds.

The emotional breakdown, and eventual reconstruction, of the characters is necessary for Hughes to complete his message to the audience. Using the characters to break each other down makes a bold statement about the effect of the harmful things that people do to each other. As they attack each other the characters tear away layers of each other personalities. When all is said and done, they truly see each other for the first time, without their stereotypes and posturing, as who they are at their cores: simply people like themselves. This epiphany begins the final part of Hughes’ message i

Some topics in this essay:
John Hughes, Breakfast Club, Brian Johnson, Andrew Clark, Claire Standish, Shermer Illinois, John Bender, Allison Reynolds, , social classes, hughes’ message, earned detention, john hughes,