Can an Nineteen Eighties film assist us have more healthy conversations with pals and family members throughout traces of distinction?
That’s the query raised by “The Breakfast Membership,” which is coming again to theaters September 7 and 10 as a part of its fortieth anniversary celebration.
For many years, social psychologists have supplied a transparent answer to the issue of prejudice: intergroup contact principle. The concept is that, if I’m prejudiced towards X group of individuals (whether or not due to their pores and skin colour, their faith, their politics or one thing else), then the antidote to prejudice is to place myself in a room with an individual from X group.
This social contact will scale back prejudice and assist me to see the humanity I share with my interlocutor. As researcher Brené Brown says, “persons are arduous to hate shut up.”
The issue is that, on the subject of politics, intergroup contact principle can seem like it breaks down. Based on a 2018 ballot, majorities of Democrats and Republicans agree: once we spend time speaking politics with of us from the opposite aspect, we truly come away considering that we’ve much less in frequent.
Fifty-three % of People described all these political conversations as “worrying and irritating.”
One in all America’s most basic political divides. https://t.co/F3NcgQDPCA
— David Marcus (@BlueBoxDave) August 29, 2025
We’ve all been there. We’ve tried to have a civil dialog with our liberal cousin or our conservative uncle, solely to return away feeling like we have been banging our heads towards the wall. We went in hoping to get to know our member of the family higher, however left with a deeper sense of the divide between us.
However what if the issue isn’t the act of speaking to one another, however how we speak to one another?
In “The Breakfast Membership,” an iconic story of 5 youngsters from completely different walks of life who come collectively for one unforgettable day, the characters don’t spend time speaking about superficial variations. They don’t argue over whose view of the world is correct versus whose view of the world is mistaken. As a substitute, they go deeper. They pay attention to one another’s fears and struggles.
If the John Hughes movie have been solid immediately, we might see extra racial range because the movie tried to seize a broader slice of American life. However regardless of being all white and suburban, the way in which through which the movie’s characters work together with one another has an everlasting takeaway for us in 2025.
They naked their souls to one another. That’s one motive that Eboo Patel, founding father of Interfaith America,referred to as “The Breakfast Membership,” “the only most related film about individuals from completely different identities getting together with one another.”
What if extra of us took a lesson from these characters? What if once we got here along with pals, members of the family and coworkers who voted in another way from us, we didn’t focus a lot on surface-level discussions about most well-liked insurance policies and who we voted for?
What if as a substitute we went deeper and practiced listening to the opposite particular person’s story and attempting to see their shared humanity?
This isn’t a simple path. It takes braveness.
In some methods, it’s rather a lot simpler to maintain the dialogue surface-level than it’s to disclose our hearts to somebody who would possibly damage us. Our well-rehearsed partisan speaking factors can operate as a form of armor.
It particularly takes braveness to follow seeing the center of our interlocutor, as a result of that new perspective can change how we see the world. If we conflate our politics with our identification, that form of new data can really feel psychologically threatening.
But when carried out proper, this sort of bonding can change our lives. It may soften the icy partitions of prejudice and assist us to see the humanity of individuals whom we’d in any other case caricature or choose. It can provide us a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world.
The act of actually listening to a different human being can symbolize a profound present, not solely to our interlocutor but additionally to ourselves.
The excessive schoolers in “The Breakfast Membership” spent a single day letting down their guard and baring their souls to one another, and their lives have been by no means the identical. Possibly we owe it to ourselves and to the individuals we care about to do the identical.
Steven Olikara is the president of Bridge Leisure Labs, a corporation devoted to “constructing a tradition of brave engagement and real connection throughout communities and renewing the promise of a various democracy.”