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Film Analysis Paper: The Breakfast Club

“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others”. -Anthony Robbins

All living beings are, in one way or another, drawn towards each other. We, as humans, strive to “communicate” with individuals who are in our environment. Communication is literally defined as: “the sending and receiving of verbal and nonverbal messages between two or more people”. When pondering on what film I should base my essay on, many factors came in to place; such as, “How many different types of communication are taking place? What is the predominant type of communication? And how many characters are communicating at the same time? After much thought, I decided on the world-famous cult-classic, The Breakfast Club. The setting for the film is Sherman High School; Sherman Illinois on a Saturday morning. Five very different students gather to serve their sentence of Saturday school under the careful hawk-like watch of the school’s vice principle Mr. Vernon. They are classified as a jock, a princess, a brain, a basket case, and a criminal. After arriving and selectively taking seats in the library, they are assigned an essay of, “no less than a thousand words, describing who [they] think [they] are.” After a short time the students completely ignore the assignment and begin interacting with one another. As time progresses the viewer finds out their names and why they received Saturday detention. John Bender (criminal) pulled a fire alarm to get out of class, Andrew Clark (Jock) taped a boy’s ass cheeks together with tape, Claire Standish (princess) blew off class to go shopping with her friends, Brian Johnson (Brain) blew up his locker when trying to kill himself with a flare gun, and finally Allison

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