A personal favourite of mine, The Breakfast Club is an American 1985 comedy-drama film which follows the time of five students in detention. One thing which becomes glaringly obvious from the beginning is that each student appears to represent one of the main different high school stereotypes:
“a brain…an athlete…a basket case…a princess…and a criminal”.
By drawing together these different cliques, initially, we are produced with a preferred reading that because these stereotypes are so different to each other then, as result, each individual is ‘othered’ notably in the audience’s mind but also in the minds of the other characters as well. Stuart Hall explains this as being due to the fact that ‘stereotyping tends to occur where there are inequalities of power, as subordinate or excluded groups are constructed as different or ‘other’’.
Hall discusses the idea that “representation is the production of meaning through language, with language defined in its broadest sense as a system of signs”. Each student has a construction of their codes which therefore seems to place them into a main stereotype of high school. The ‘rugged’ appearance of John Bender (“The Criminal”) alongside his wild rebellious outward attitude and his referenced uses of drugs, fire and switchblades contrast greatly to the likes of Andrew Clark (“The Jock”) who is visually athletic (especially in relation to the semantic code of his varsity jacket) and Brian Johnson (“The Brain”) who comes across as a boring, hoodie-wearing, socially-awkward over-achiever. Even the two girls contrast each other in their chosen codes which result in their representation: Allison Reynolds (“The Basket Case”) is portrayed as eccentric, immodest and messy (both in appearance and in her nature) whilst Claire Standish (“The Princess”) comes across as put together (again in both appearance and nature) and certainly a product of emphasised femininity: white, thin, conventionally beautiful and heterosexual.
All of this certainly draws upon Hall’s idea that “stereotyping, as a form of representation, reduces people to a few simple characteristics or traits”. Throughout their time in detention, the socially constructed constraints which surround each character is broken down so that we as the audience as well as the others around them can start to see the complexities of each individual which creates a lesser sense of distance between this ‘divided’ group. We see this evolving breakdown in scenes such as when they’re messing around (most partaking in taking marijuana) and even the quieter moments such as when they sit around and openly talk about themselves.
Overall, The Breakfast Club is a film which is evidently aware of stereotypes, builds around these constructed ideas through a variety of codes, and then takes time to start to dismantle these reducing characteristics by showing us that “we’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it; that’s all”.
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