Step 13: The Breakfast Club and Synergy

"Strangers passing in the street by chance two separate glances meet and I am you and what I see is me and do I take you by the hand and lead you through the land and help me understand the best I can" -Pink Floyd

Wish You Were Here

I saw a random fact on some packaging once that said "Pet-owners live five years longer than people who do not own pets." And then I thought, how is this possible? Why is this subject not taught at schools and universities? What would the classes be called? What I do know is that pets can generate comfort, warmth, understanding, and most importantly, love. The subject of Love has enthralled poets for all of history. Love rejuvenates and replenishes and is not restricted to one species. It's also a requirement for every script in Hollywood. I don't like generic love stories, but I do like movies where hard-boiled characters slowly let their soft spots mellow up through their surface. Anyone who loves movies with characters with soft spots, I also love.


The Breakfast Club is a love story, but it is also far more than that. It begins with five high schoolers in Saturday detention: The Criminal, The Princess, The Basketcase, The Athlete, and The Brain. Each one of them has personal issues and problems with their parents, but their High School is the archetypal school with students divided into cliques, which typifies everyone and restricts social interaction across groups. What makes this movie so incredible are the ways these characters open up to each other, some, like The Basketcase (Allyson Sheedy) literally opening her purse and spilling the contents across the table. By the end of the movie, everyone has realized that they are not so different as their cliques led them to believe. As the last narrated line of the movie explains, they become an entirely new group: The Breakfast Club.


According to the dictionary, Synergy is defined as "The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual." Synergy is the result of the movie but also the process of the co-evolving characters who undergo the stages of connection on personal levels. Once they open up to each other become friends, their relationship becomes symbiotic, or mutually beneficial to each other. One notoriously symbiotic relationship is fungus and mycorrhizal fungi, where 70% of all plant roots in the world have been beneficially bonded with fungal roots called mycorrhizal to aid growth. According to Phillip McIntosh,

"With the exception of the Brassicaceae (the mustards), virtually all plant families participate in a symbiotic relationship with root-colonizing fungi. Many experiments have proven that mycorrhizal plants---especially trees---thrive, while those without mycorrhizae don't do well. The benefits of mycorrhizae include improved soil structure, beneficial effect on other soil microbes, greater water transport from soil to plant, greater nutrient transport from soil to plant, enhanced mobilization of minerals and better competitiveness against weed-plant species."
Corresponding with nature's symbiotic relationships is the human and pet bond:
According to The American Association of Human-Animal Bond Veterinarians (AAH-ABV), the bond that people have with their pets in part as, "The human-animal bond is a mutually beneficial and dynamic relationship between people and other animals."

In the Breakfast Club, each character lends a new perspective to the missing pieces of each others' views. Even the most unlikely function of the group, the so-called Basketcase, is able to produce realization for the other characters when she tells the Athlete: "You Have Problems." He replies, "Oh, I have problems?" She responds, "You do everything that people tell you to do, and that is a problem." 

  To add a cultural viewpoint to the synergy of a group, Erich Neumann, author of "The Origins and History of Consciousness," writes:

"The group is a living unit in which all members are connected with one another. Moreover, it is the nature of the group to have a permanent character which is guaranteed by the unconscious ties between the members. Every genuine group is a permanent group ... Even temporary groups such as school classes, regiments, etc., show a tendency to manufacture a history for themselves so as to become a genuine group. The group in which the individual is contained represents a natural whole whose parts are integrated."

What force assembles the five characters from individuals to integrate? The answer is, each other. However, as a catalyst to their boundary-crossing interaction, The Criminal  (Judd Nelson) is quick to point out the faults of the other characters - beginning with the least targeted of their cliques, The Princess (Molly Ringwald). 

John Bender (The Criminal): Hey, Cherry. Do you belong to the physics club? 

Claire Standish (The Princess): That's an academic club.

John: So?
Claire: So academic clubs aren't the same as other kinds of clubs.
John: Ah... but to dorks like him, they are. What do you guys do in your club?
Brian Johnson (The Brain): Well, in physics we... we talk about physics, properties of physics.
John: So it's sorta social, demented and sad, but social. Right? 

Behind his multi-layered wisecracks, The Criminal character becomes the fountain for the group's collective unconscious. Erich Neumann continues:

"The collective unconscious of the group manifests itself by taking possession of the individual, whose function it is, as an organ of the group, to convey the contents of the unconscious. In this way he becomes the mouthpiece of the transpersonal and conveys to the group the contents it needs."

Everything The Criminal points out to the other detention hall members is exactly what the other characters were thinking, but would never consider actually vocalizing. Through The Criminal's blunt and sometimes aggressive comments, the group begins to consider themselves in a new light. When the Principal, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) demands to know who removed the pressure from the door, it becomes the first indication of the group's cohesion when none of them decide to snitch. Defending themselves against authority, the group is given a common purpose and cleverly follows through. The next example of their group identity comes from communally smoking, an example of a collective ceremony.

As the characters reach each other's inner cores, where the turmoil is brewing, they finally see that their school identities have been a total sham. Each one of them has some sort of disconnected relationship with their parents that continues to leave them with the feeling of inadequacy and heightens the need for social acceptance. In modern times, these feelings continue to pervade the cultural climate. We can each find a description of the characters from our own experience, but it is important to break away from these monickers. Instead, we must see the world in its richness and complexity, and end the need to typify or organize our identities. This is what director John Hughes illustrates through the beauty of the similarities of each character. Towards the end, The Athlete (Emilio Estevez) remarks that "We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all." The movie ends with the narration of Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), who the group has trusted to write their detention essays: "You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed." 

To see synergy in action, find the nearest concert venue, protest, theatre production, or sports team - or you might just have to find a way to watch the old cartoon, Codename: Kids Next Door.