John Bender's The Breakfast Club

Many would agree that youth behaviour as an area of societal concern is anything but new. Ever since the conceptualisation of the ‘teenager’ as a distinct, emergent demographic category in the early 20th century, the adolescent experience has exponentially garnered more and more attention in both life and art, attracting myths (pun on ‘moths’) to a flame. This blog post will focus on adolescence’s negative (re)presentations; how it has, with much thanks to mainstream media narratives, come to connote volatility, anti-sociality, and questionable morality.
One very current demonstration of this moral panic is unfolding in the United States, where the institutional perpetuation and internalisation of certain aged, racialised, classed, and gendered …show more content…
Might the alienated, angsty, and antisocial Jim Stark of Rebel Without a Cause (Doherty, 2002) or John Bender of The Breakfast Club be a true-to-life representation of the troubled, delinquent teen? In evaluating the relationship between pop culture and public life, I might like to also consider mimetic and, especially, anti-mimetic theory. Is it too naïve to view the “j.d.” trope as a simple, on-screen (mimetic) incarnation of the restless youth? Antithetically, is it too critical to believe that the bored, impressionable teenager finds himself (antimimetically) realising fiction via admirative identification with the edgy gangster …show more content…
By the resistant view, the true crime is overgeneralisation; the perpetrator, authoritarian institution; and the weapon, myth. Indeed, the mass public conception of youth personality and activity as epidemically delinquent is simply unsubstantiated by statistics (Doi, 1998; USA Today, 2001).
These critiques also argue that neither mimesis nor anti-mimesis is at play here: the reality of civic life and the reality presented by mainstream media are two rather divergent entities. Capitalising on narrative technique and their indisputably significant social, political, and economic influence, the media are manipulatively reconstructing a story that upholds news values and pleases the elite (Chamseddine, 2014).
Philosophising aside, discourse around youth identity and behaviour should be built upon shared cultural knowledge of the adolescent experience. Unfortunately, however, a supposedly universal construct such as this can easily be problematised by differing [aged, racialised, classed, gendered, etc.]

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