Sunday, August 25, 2019

Please analyze Claire Standish in The Breakfast Club (1985) from psychological standpoint.

Claire has learned from her rich, dysfunctional parents that appearances are all-important: what clothes you wear, what car you drive, and what friends you have. She's internalized the idea that she has to look enviable and be popular at all costs. Although she often wishes she didn't have to, she feels compelled to conform to the stereotypical snobbish, rich-girl, queen-bee image that others have cast her into.
During detention, Claire makes it clear that she thinks she is superior to the others. She says won't even acknowledge their existence after the detention is over, as it would lower her status in the school. She seems at first to be a very nasty person.
As time goes by, however, we learn that beneath the harsh facade, she is in psychological pain. The cruel things Bender says hurt her. She feels her parents don't really love her but instead use her as pawn in their own marriage warfare. While she seems to be following in their shallow, appearance-oriented footsteps, she passionately doesn't want to be like them.
We learn that keeping up appearances at all costs has taken a psychological toll on Claire, forcing her to stuff down who she really is. There really are "two" Claires. By the end of the movie, she has shown her other side: she can behave generously and kindly toward the other "breakfast club" kids, even if, in her mind, they are outcasts and losers. Put into the more honest setting of the breakfast club, she can allow herself to be vulnerable and see "outcast" teens as human. One has hope by the end of the movie that if she can be around people with some depth, she can become the person she really is inside and have a better future than becoming just like her parents.

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