Film Analysis: But Im A Cheerleader

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In the 1999 movie, But Im a Cheerleader,(Creel, Sperling & Babbitt,1999) a seventeen year old high school cheerleader, Megan, is being set up to believe that she is going on a trip with the cheer squad to the football finals. The next day she noticed that her friends, boyfriend, and parents were acting strange towards her. When she came home from school her family and friends had set up a intervention to express their feelings about her being an homosexual, so her parents decided to send her to a camp, True Direction, to help fix her. While at camp, she falls in love with a fellow campmate who is also a girl, Graham. Megan is struggling on being what her parents want her to be, heterosexual teenage girl, or to embrace her homosexuality. The …show more content…

These people are this way because they have a need to avoid feelings of helplessness; therefore they are okay with being subordinate to others. In the movie Megan displays this trend in the scene when she does not want to sneak out with the others to go to the club, but she does it anyway to get the approval and affection she wants from Graham. She wants the approval and affection so bad that she risks getting kicked out of the camp in order to get it. Also, in this trend there is a need for a powerful partner and Graham fits that role for Megan because Graham is her own person and hates being at the camp. I chose this scene because it also shows another one of Horney’s idea of basic hostility, which is repressed rage towards parents when they fail to meet the child’s need for safety and satisfaction. Basic hostility can come from parents overprotecting the child or overindulging in the child’s life, and in a sense Meagan’s parents were overindulging in her life because they wanted her to be heterosexual and normal. To protect herself, Megan uses submissiveness by submitting to her parents and her religion in order to not be singled out for being homosexual; in the movie her parents threaten to disown her if she does not finish the camp. Throughout the movie Megan is submitting to just about everyone to please them and not herself …show more content…

When she gets to camp the first person she meets expresses that she and the other members are ahead of Megan, but insures her that she get where they are. On that note, Alder’s individual psychology construct inferiority complex comes in to play because Megan feels as if she is beneath the others, but at the same time she does not feel inferior because she is in denial. The inferiority complex can be explained as overwhelming feelings of being beneath others or thinking others are better than oneself, which can lead to problems in social relationships. Megan felt inferior to the others because she was the new member of the group, but she also lost those feelings towards the middle and end of the movie. Adler’s striving for success is when a person is more concerned about how others feel in society rather than their own feelings. This person is altruistic in a sense because they see social acceptance as a main goal without benefits for themselves. Striving for success can be seen when Megan first wanted to get “fixed” after realizing that she was a homosexual and she wanted to prove to herself and the others that she could be a heterosexual member of society. Adler’s striving for superiority is the complete opposite of success because these people are motivated by the need to control others, but is done in a way that

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