The Breakfast Club: A Reflection on Stereotypes and Deviances



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“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.”

 –Andrew, The Breakfast Club

Watching The Breakfast Club, three realizations came into mind:

First, as cliché as it may sound, nothing is always as it seems. There are deceptions all around society: from the actress that promised there was no surgery involved in her youthful face at the age of 50 to the politician that said he will rid the country of drugs in 6 months. There is always deceit present. But when we look at society nowadays, like the scenes in The Breakfast Club, we can assume that people actually like being deceived. People like being deceived through the formation of stereotypes in society—putting people into boxes of supposed facts that society perceives to be appropriate and true. Things are not always as they seem; same goes with people, especially when you look at them through the eyes of society. Stereotyping is deceit, and when the time comes an individual rejects the call of society to generalize and stereotype himself, that is when deviance happens.

Second, everyone is different yet everyone is the same. The statement might be confusing, but it does make sense. The Breakfast Club focused on five stereotypical students, all with different personalities and hobbies from one another, yet in the end, they managed to realize that they are all similar at some point after all. I realized that people are cut from the same cloth, or rather, the same quilt. You see, quilts are patches of cloth sewn to form big blankets. A patched up quilt is made up of many colors, many different cloths, yet they all belong to one whole big picture: the quilt. And I realized that people may actually be just like that: all sewn into one big collection of different cloths containing different traits, qualities, and hobbies, yet still part of the same big quilt. Cutting the quilt may bring forth flat characters into life’s storyline, yet cutting it in overlapping cloths may bring in someone more dynamic. People are stereotyped in society, but what others don’t know is that we are all just overlapping cloths cut from the same big quilt.

And lastly, we are all pretty bizarre. Honestly, we really are. As I’ve said, society puts us in labeled boxes based on our perceived personality, and truth be told, we actually let them. They label us, we label us. Yet some part of us still want to deviate from all of it, realizing that we are somewhat more dynamic than that, that we were born not to be inside a box, but rather, outside of it. There are brains, brawns, beauty, wit, charisma, kindness, and brazenness in this society, but one of those things do not necessarily define who we are. Because what we are depends on us, and what we choose to become will depend on how bizarre we want our lives to be lived, on how strange we may want to live it.

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