The Breakfast Club Research Paper

High school students are no stranger to teachers who treat them unfairly. People across generations can recall a time when a teacher said or did something they weren’t supposed to do. This idea is portrayed in multiple films, however in the movies The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985) and Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018) the teens’ relationships with their teachers are not realistic.

In the film The Breakfast Club by John Hughes, six high school students are put into Saturday detention overseen by Vice Principal Richard Vernon. At the beginning of the film, the teens’ relationship with Vice Principal Vernon is established: the students do not respect Vernon, and Vernon detests the students and believes teens to be ungrateful. As a result,

He makes them write a 1000 word essay, calls them names, and is extremely rude towards them. Although Vernon is insulting towards all the teens in detention, John Bender, the “criminal” antagonizes Vernon to the point where Vernon is verbally abusive towards him. Vernon calls Bender a “gutless turd,” “bum,” “prick,” and tells him that “the next screw that falls out is gonna be you.” After the teens sneak out of the library and Bender lets himself get caught to save the others, Vernon forcibly grabs Bender, and shoves him in a closet. Vernon threatens Bender, egging him on to fight and saying: “I'm gonna kick the living shit out of you, man, I'm gonna knock your dick in the dirt,” and that no one would believe that Vernon

While school rules and policies have changed since 1985, when the film was released, Vernon’s level of cruelty has never been acceptable. If a Vice Principal behaved that way in 1985, they might have gotten away with it, but now they would surely be fired. This extreme cruelty is considered abusive and teachers can be sued and/or go to jail for treating students the way Vernon treats the teens. Not only are the consequences for actions like Vernon’s extreme, these actions themselves are not realistic. Teachers and Principals do not behave that way towards students, especially not in a public school. John Hughes likely portrayed Vernon this way to highlight the struggles of the teen experience, and over-dramatized the conflicts to condone these bad authority figures. Although the conflicts in the rest of the film are pretty realistic, the conflicts between Vernon and The Breakfast Club are not