Like most of the "bad kids" at a middle-class school, he's largely a poseur. He wants to act tough and be thought of as a bad boy, and he genuinely dislikes school and his boring middle-class schoolmates and neighbors... but he doesn't actually want to leave school and sink into poverty because he'll never be able to get any well-paid jobs, or join the underworld and spend his life getting shot at or jailed.
Don't get me wrong, I think most high school kids are poseurs of some kind or another - hell, I went to a middle-class suburban school in California, and a bunch of the boys were posing as "rednecks"! They'd wear plaid shirts, jeans, cowboy boots and hats, and they lived in suburbia and none of them had ever been near a cow in person, but they wanted to be thought of as tough manly guys who weren't like the soft suburban kids around them. That's how kids learn who they are, trying out various identities on for size, they get over it and hopefully without dropping out of school in the process.
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ExTechOp (2742)
3 years ago
Otter's got the best answer so far
It goes to the heart of what the whole flick is about - seeing each other as stereotypes that they intentionally cultivate
So in the end, it's not just about seeing past each other's masks but getting past their own defenses
Funny, I actually saw this in the theaters back freshman year of college and thought Bender was unrealistically wise. Now I can see him as a scared kid wearing cynicism as a mask. So did Vernon, which makes him even more contemptible for bullying him one on one.
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