In the simplest terms, and most convenient definitions...
Hello and welcome back, friends. I recently watched (or re-watched, rather) The Breakfast Club. It is one of my favorite of all John Hughes' films. It reminded me of some older illustrations I made featuring the 5 main teenage characters. It also made me think of personality types, tropes, and cliches.
If, by chance, you have never seen the film (which I highly recommend you do), The Breakfast Club is about a group of 5 teenagers who spend a Saturday in school detention together. Each character represents one of the five high school personality cliches: a princess, a jock, a brain, a basketcase, and a criminal. The film begins with the characters, themselves, only seeing the perceived label that lies on the surface. You can hear it in the way that they speak and interact with each other. However, as the film progresses, they each find out that they are more like each other than they thought. The film is, what is known as, a "talking heads" film. A film where there is little action but the drama is played out in the exposition of the dialogue and interactions between the characters.
Unlike many of its 80's teenage film counterparts, Breakfast Club turns the normal character tropes and personality cliches on its head and asks us to look beyond the surface. It held a mirror up to society and how we interact with other people. I think that is what makes the film compelling to watch and rewatch and rewatch. It has stood the test of time and become a classic that many continue to enjoy and discover.
In an interview, John Hughes said that the impetus for The Breakfast Club was to get a group of completely different people stuck together for an extended period of time; just long enough to where those people begin to open up about who they are and break down any preconceived notions about what others might think that they are on the surface. I'm glad that in the consecutive drafts, Hughes decided to set the story in a high school with the characters being student-age. For many of us, middle school/high school is really where we begin to form preconceived ideas about who other people are and what they are like based on surface observations. This aspect of human nature is part of our premature development in human interactions and, in many cases, builds the foundation for our interactions with other human beings as we grow into adults.
The artwork that I made, inspired by the film, was really a means to an end. They were college class projects for a Materials & Techniques class. The subject matter you select for those projects is really less important than your ability to learn and execute the technique with the materials you're working with. Often times in those classes, I would just select musicians or actors, or characters from films that I liked and would create portraits utilizing whatever technique and material I was being asked to use for said project. The techniques used in these five examples are the same techniques that illustrators use when they want to capture the likeness of an actor in a film for a film poster, or something akin to that. The Star Wars posters are a good example of how this technique is employed.
So there is no grand inspiration behind my choice to illustrate the Breakfast Club Five, aside from the fact that I love and admire the film, I needed a quick subject for a class, and I thought the aesthetics of the film's backdrop (the library) were just as interesting to me as the figure in the foreground. They are certainly NOT the BEST work I've done, past or present, but they are a favorite; enough so that I hung them on my walls.
What I would really like to discuss in this post is Personality analysis. It is at the heart of what the film is about and it is always an exciting topic to explore. Who are we, really? I'm sure as we each have watched the film, there is a character that we can immediately identify with. And as the film progresses, we can also see ourselves in the other characters. I have always held an affinity for Allison, personally. She was the first character I identified with in the film. Strange, anti-social, shy, creative, and a bit of a loner. While some of these characteristics still ring true, as I have aged over the years, I can find aspects of the other characters in my personality as well; even the adult characters that are out of touch with the youth of that time. What character did you identify with the first time you watched it? Which character do you identify with now?
We each contain multitudes.
I really wanted to talk about how The Breakfast Club could be used as a basis for personality assessment. However, no one has ever written anything about the film in that context. Not exactly; not what I was looking for anyway. So, I had to kind of change the direction of what this post was going to be about. I did however find the following psychological analysis of the characters in my research. The following excerpts are from the essay The Breakfast Club: Psychological Analysis by Savannah Payne.
"John Bender shows symptoms of borderline personality disorder. He has unstable relationships with his family and girlfriends and can't form strong relationships. So, he feels emptiness, he is impulsive, aggressive, and emotionally unstable. He often reflects on the abuse he receives from his father at home.
Claire Standish shows symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. She is the popular one of the group and requires attention and admiration. She lacks empathy towards people who she considers below her social status. She also believes that others are envious of her and that the whole school loves her.
Brian Johnson shows symptoms of depression. He was sent to detention because he was caught with a gun in school and was planning on committing suicide. He has low self-esteem and feels forced to get good grades to please his parents. He shows his desire to fit in with others when he easily falls into peer pressure and smokes with the group.
Andrew Clark shows symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and anxiety. He requires admiration, especially from his father. When he fails to succeed at his father's goals for him, he becomes anxious and feels like a failure. He is somewhat arrogant and was sent to detention for bullying another student.
Allison Reynolds shows symptoms of antisocial personality disorder. She is reckless, deceitful, and disregards others. She is a kleptomaniac; causing her to have urges to steal things. She may also be schizophrenic. Her way of thinking is somewhat disorganized and she is a compulsive liar. She also shows inappropriate behaviors and emotions throughout the movie."
I found this analysis very intriguing. It certainly made me think of the film in a different light when I rewatched it. But let's take a look at another way that personality is being assessed in the modern age.
Have you ever taken one of those silly personality quizzes on Facebook? I'm sure you have. You see some weird post a friend has made, you click on the link, answer a few questions, and then all of a sudden, you are an Orange Hippopotamus that prefers living in Alaska. While whatever label the quiz designer places on the personality profile, the profile (more or less) tends to be pretty accurate in most cases. Why is that? How do they get it right? I decided to do a little investigation into how these weird and silly quizzes are made.
In all honesty, most of them are made very quickly, are not usually well-researched or based on psychological science, and are thus usually unreliable. Sorry to burst the bubble, but it is true. More accurate and reliable personality tests (Like the Myers-Briggs test) are not usually "thrown together" in a short period of time for mass entertainment on Facebook. They take a very long time and go through many phases of refinement. So... How are they made?
Most personality tests/quizzes are constructed by developing a deep knowledge of the criteria you are assessing and by answering the following questions:
WHAT WILL WE MEASURE?
While the answer to this question may seem obvious, you really have to start with what your test or quiz will be assessing. These "things" are called constructs. Constructs are specific characteristics or phenomena that we can define and measure. Some constructs are easy to define and measure: blood pressure, weight, and height. Personality traits are not so easily defined and therefore are more challenging to measure. Let's use the Myers-Briggs test as an example. It has four key constructs: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving
HOW WILL IT BE MEASURED?
There is a variety of test items that can be used for measuring personality. Many tests use multiple-choice questions, others use a scale of statements, and some use images or ask test takers to arrange words into formulated patterns. The possibilities are perhaps endless as to how you might measure your chosen constructs. However, only 10-20% of items created for a personality test actually make the statistical cut. At the end of the day, your test items have to be efficacious. They need to indeed measure what they are meant to measure. The more effective they are, the more reliable your quiz/test is.
WHO WILL TAKE IT?
Most personality assessments are created with a specific group in mind. For example, an employer might devise a personality test as one of the ways to measure who might be best suited for a leadership role at the company. A test might be devised by a school to help students decide what possible vocations are more suited for them. Other tests are made for the general public. Finding your test groups for your personality test/quiz will help you to begin to determine how effective and accurate the test is. The more information you can gather at this stage of test development the better.
HOW WELL DOES IT WORK?
There are 2 key components that determine how effective and accurate a personality assessment is. They are validity and reliability. A reliable assessment will produce consistent results. If a person takes a reliable personality assessment in January and then again in July, their scores will be roughly the same. A valid assessment measures the construct that it is intended to measure. If a well-respected CEO takes an assessment of her leadership ability, we would expect that she would receive high scores. If her scores were low, we would question the test’s validity because it would not be consistent with our real-life observations. This stage is also what separates the superficial quizzes from the tests with real scientific intention. The difference here is time. The more serious and accurate personality assessments take more time at this stage. Test items are tested, refined, replaced, and reintroduced. Measuring how well the test works is based on four components: Correlation, Test/Re-Test Correlation, Cronbach's Alpha & Factor Analysis. While I WILL NOT go into what each of these factors is today, each of them requires expertise and advanced software, and lots of time to test, retest and revise. This is why most of your casual and quick internet personality quizzes may not be as accurate as the Myers-Briggs test.
I hope this gives you all some food for thought.
"Now that's 30 minutes for lunch!"
-Mr. Vernon
In our modern and busy lives, we often will see others the way that we want to see them: In the simplest terms and most convenient definitions. But let's take a leaf out of the Sherman High 85' Yearbook and remember to take a closer look at who we and the others around us really are. I hope that maybe this inspires you to rewatch the film. That would be a nice cozy evening indoors. Before we go, and because I can't resist, I ask you to take this quick internet personality quiz to find out which Breakfast Club character you are. 😜
CLICK THE IMAGE TO TAKE THE QUIZ
until next time, friends...
Keep sketching, keep thinking, keep laughing, and most important of all, keep making art.
Cheers,
LEWIS
***Information on personality assessment construction was sourced from the article How A Personality Test is Made by Molly Owens
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