Labels and The Breakfast Club
Mar. 29th, 2007 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lallis_follyI watched The Breakfast Club for the first time recently. Despite being of the target age for the John Hughes/Brat Pack movies when they were first released, I have never seen most of them.
In this particular installment in the oeuvre, five students, one representative from each of the high school cliques (Princess, Sporto, Brain, Criminal, Weirdo) are brought together one Saturday to spend the day in the school's library in detention. At the beginning of the movie, the principal, who is their jailer and babysitter for the day informs them that they are to write him a thousand word essay telling him who they think they are.
Who they think they are? At that age? I haven't even figured out who I think I am and I'm more than twice the age those kids are supposed to be. How are they supposed to figure it out? They spend the day delving beneath the labels, but in the end, they resort to the same ones that Principal Vernon has already assigned them.
And that got me to thinking about labels. Labels define our lives. They are how other people think of us, but also how we think of ourselves. While they may change during our lifetimes, they're always there, lurking.
Labels are what we are (spouse, parent, child), what we do (homemaker, teacher, policeman), how we think (liberal, idiot, theologian), how we react to the world around us (fraidy-cat, trailblazer), how we feel about others (putz, hero), how we feel about ourselves (lover, failure, dreamer). Some labels are good (Princess, Brain), some aren't (Criminal, Weirdo). Some pull people together (American, Canadian), some divide (Democrat, Republican). Even names are just personal labels (Ally, Judd).
The point in The Breakfast Club, of course, is that the principal (pinhead, jerk¹) is wrong to see the kids just as neatly labeled archetypes, because each of the five kids is more than just the superficial label. But Vernon isn't necessarily wrong, just human, with the very human need to name, label and classify everything, to make the world an orderly -- and therefore comforting -- place.
¹ Principal Vernon is much more than that, of course, as shown in the scene with the janitor in which he reveals how he was once a passionate teacher, but feels that the kids have turned on him. Watch that scene with adult eyes and you can't fail to feel sorry for a man who has seen his dream destroyed, even if it's mostly his own fault and even if it's only for a moment.
In this particular installment in the oeuvre, five students, one representative from each of the high school cliques (Princess, Sporto, Brain, Criminal, Weirdo) are brought together one Saturday to spend the day in the school's library in detention. At the beginning of the movie, the principal, who is their jailer and babysitter for the day informs them that they are to write him a thousand word essay telling him who they think they are.
Who they think they are? At that age? I haven't even figured out who I think I am and I'm more than twice the age those kids are supposed to be. How are they supposed to figure it out? They spend the day delving beneath the labels, but in the end, they resort to the same ones that Principal Vernon has already assigned them.
And that got me to thinking about labels. Labels define our lives. They are how other people think of us, but also how we think of ourselves. While they may change during our lifetimes, they're always there, lurking.
Labels are what we are (spouse, parent, child), what we do (homemaker, teacher, policeman), how we think (liberal, idiot, theologian), how we react to the world around us (fraidy-cat, trailblazer), how we feel about others (putz, hero), how we feel about ourselves (lover, failure, dreamer). Some labels are good (Princess, Brain), some aren't (Criminal, Weirdo). Some pull people together (American, Canadian), some divide (Democrat, Republican). Even names are just personal labels (Ally, Judd).
The point in The Breakfast Club, of course, is that the principal (pinhead, jerk¹) is wrong to see the kids just as neatly labeled archetypes, because each of the five kids is more than just the superficial label. But Vernon isn't necessarily wrong, just human, with the very human need to name, label and classify everything, to make the world an orderly -- and therefore comforting -- place.
¹ Principal Vernon is much more than that, of course, as shown in the scene with the janitor in which he reveals how he was once a passionate teacher, but feels that the kids have turned on him. Watch that scene with adult eyes and you can't fail to feel sorry for a man who has seen his dream destroyed, even if it's mostly his own fault and even if it's only for a moment.
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Date: 2007-07-09 07:07 am (UTC)Thanks for sharing. Found you through webofbooks. Hope you don't mind that I peeked in.
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Date: 2007-07-09 09:06 pm (UTC)I do wonder if I would have found any sympathy for Principal Vernon if I'd seen The Breakfast Club when I was younger. Probably not. He is easier to feel for than the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, though, perhaps because the latter was portrayed as out to get Ferris.