Personality Analysis on 'The Breakfast Club'

Essay by tzasiadczykHigh School, 12th gradeB+, October 2014

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Released in 1985 and directed by John Hughes ' The Breakfast Club' is a film about teenagers that seem different on the surface but come to discover otherwise . When five students from different high school cliques are forced to spend their Saturday in detention, the brain, athlete, basket case, princess and the criminal together are faced with the question of who they think they are. The five characters put aside the ir dissimilarities in aid to survive the painful eight hour detention and in the process they discover they aren't as unalike after all.

The Breakfast Club is a n all time classic film that portrays a number of individual and complex personalities. It is visible in the film that each teenager has their own traits and characteristics due to various circumstances such as; environmental and parental influences .

The character focus will be John Bender, the so-called 'the criminal' of the five teenager s . Upon first glance, Bender seems to be the average high school 'bad boy' getting his position in this specific detention for pulling a false fire alarm . This gives viewers th e idea that his character does whatever he can for attention. Bender also has a tendency to say and do things that will get a negative reaction out of a person, by insul ting and antagoni sing every character at some point in the film . By applying Maslow's hierarchy of needs and B. F. Skinner's theory of personality you ge t a more intellectual psychological understanding of Bender's personality.

Abraham Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs theory in 1954 to help himself and other humanistic theorists to better understand what motivates people. Maslow believed that people are motivated to satisfy specific needs, in saying this he created a five stage pyramid...