MovieChat Forums > Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) Discussion > Was this what the social structure was l...

Was this what the social structure was like at your high school?

posted 14 years ago by djroars
24 replies | jump to latest

So after watching this movie, along with a few other Hughes' ones like Pretty in Pink or, to a lesser extent, The Breakfast Club, something has been bothering me. In all these pictures he portrays high school cliques as divided very rigidly upon financial class. The rich kids are cool and popular and flaunt their money, the blue collar kids are shunned, left on the outside looking in.

This has been bugging me because this was nothing like how the social status was built at my high school, and because of that it seems really inauthentic and cheesy to me. I still liked the movies; regardless of wealth the message of being an outsider and wanting to be understood still rings true, but it seems like this economic hierarchy is just added to give us one more reason we should sympathize with/root for the protagonists and view them as underdogs, and it just seems forced to me.

So my question is, are most high schools actually like that? Is popularity based stringently on how much money a kid's parents make? If so I guess I should start cutting these films some slack, but it just seems so foreign to me. My high school was similar to the one portrayed in Some Kind of Wonderful I'd say, relatively middle class with a spectrum of family incomes from working class to upper middle class. And there were certainly cliques, there were popular kids, jocks, goths, theater dorks, etc, but membership in these groups had almost nothing to do with money or material stuff, it was attitude and interests that determined your place. And yeah, I s'pose the in-crowd tended to wear "trendier" clothing, but no one bragged about their exotic vacations or their big houses, because half the time they were working-class anyway and the other half wouldn't want to offend their friends.

Maybe it was just an 80's thing, I dunno.

Any perspectives would be helpful, I'm quite curious.

[–] chaoscoyote 14 years ago

funny you should ask that as I always thought of these teen movies as an older person's memory and perhaps simplification or glamorization rendering as opposed to what it was really like. Maybe I was oblivious to those things but I don't ever remember feeling inferior because someone else had parents with money. I was really poor, welfare poor, but I went to school with other social classes and it wasn't an issue. behaviour, cleanliness, (yes cleanliness) being funny, if you shared smokes or helped people with stuff, they were more of the important aspects in school. maybe we were more innocent but I don't think so. I still think overall that is how we decide if we like someone or not. I am very successful now, but when i walk in a room, it's my smile, my interst in others, not my ability to buy them drinks (or a car!) that make them like me.
Of course on these message boards no one seems to like anybody! lol

"Mom's gonna fix it all soon. Mom's comin' round to put it back the way it oughta be."

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] djroars 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, both of you. This makes me feel a little bit better about my assumptions; maybe Hughes really was just stretching the class thing for the sake of drama. I can forgive him, but it's just nice to know that most real high schools probably aren't actually as rigidly class based as these ones.

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[–] sccrplyr7771 14 years ago

The school I went to wasn't a ghetto school, but most kids came from a lower-middles class background, a lot of immigrant families. Let me tell you, when we played the schools we considered "rich" schools, there sure as heck was a HUGE difference in the way we played in regards to sports when we played them. It seemed MUCH more personal from what I recall, we wanted to beat them and do it harder than we did against other schools that were somewhat like us.

It also carried over to the social aspect as well, keeping friends from elementary school you had who went to those type schools was a hazard to your health sometimes.

I am talking about Canadian schools here in the 80's mind you, i'm sure it was far easier here at that time than it must have been in the U.S. during that same time period.

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] sccrplyr7771 14 years ago

Heck yeah it was for us. The private schools had coaching staffs from pro teams, while we had volunteer teachers coaching us. I still remember destroying them 8-0 in soccer, and they had a coach from the pro's, and a few players from the pro reserve teams. If you have money and connections, you get further ahead most times. In the end though, most of our players went on to scholarships and played in college, their players never amounted to anything...LOL!

[–] starrs13 14 years ago

yep. hate to say it but my high school was like this as was middle. i went to middle school in a small town in North Carolina and very large high school in Cincinnati and yes...like this. there is always some crossover but... just my experience.

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[–] ross_99-1 13 years ago

Not even close. I went to high school in Encinitas, CA. We had cliques, yes, but they were more separated by interests such as athletics, theatre, music, surfing and to a lesser degree, race. Although I would say most all got along pretty well. Incomes ranged from poverty to wealthy, but I can honestly say no one really talked about wealth and people from all range of incomes mixed and socialized fairly well. People were judged more by their character then by the size of their parents' bank accounts.

[–] lisaweird 13 years ago

I went to a private middle school, so naturally they looked down on you if you bought your sweater at Value Village. They were very, VERY trend obsessed and the more expensive the better.

However in high school we were all lower middle class. Kids were bored and found other ways to alienate you, like inventing rumours. Money never really was an issue.

That's evolution, baby. So mutate or step aside.

[–] BigEasy1203 13 years ago

I went to high school in the 1980's (graduated in 1987, same year this movie was made). It was nothing like this, granted, it was a small school. It was not uncommon for jocks to hang out with stoners or geeks to hang out with popular kids.

[–] Noufa 12 years ago

Financial snobs still exist. They just have new ways of expressing themselves. Remember that website Stuff White People Like? It's self-aware & ironic. But it's still just a list of of things that upper-middle-class urbanites "should" like. What is that, if not snobbery?

I think we ignore racial & economic divides because we (including myself) don't want to admit we sometimes enforce them.

Recently talked with older family members about wealth in the 80s. These folks all attended a suburban school which was the product of forced-bussing. The project was intended to ease the racial divide. Instead it intensified the class divide as the more wealthy white folks fled. So Hughes was right, though he could have focused more on race. Plenty of other movie-makers could have, too. I don't blame them for avoiding such a risky topic.

Things cooled off in the 90s. Grunge & Gangster Rap made it acceptable for upper middle-class kids to dress like hobos. I'm not sure why this happened though I have some ideas. Increased quality of cheap synthetic fabric clothing made expensive natural fabrics less desirable. Also, the dot-com boom made CEOs of unfashionable geeks & they relaxed corporate dress codes.

I guess my point is that a snob in 2010 doesn't look like a snob in 1980, 1950 or 1920. But they're still snobs. We've always had them & always will.