Analysis of Josie Gellar’s Inspirational Speech From Never Been Kissed There is always a point in life when a decision needs to be made. All people in the world need to make the decision of what they will become in the future whether it be career wise or even as a person in general. The motion picture Never Been Kissed, written by Abby Kohn is about a young journalist Josie who has been offered her first undercover report and is sent back to high school. While her own high school experience was ruthless, she quickly learns the second time will not be any easier. Popularity in the new school she attends is filled with superficial conceited teenagers that only include those who are just as self-admiring as them selves. Josie endures bullying …show more content…
to a whole new level while she still makes new friends with people who are not in the popular crowd it is not enough for her report, so she stays with the “in crowd” by posing as someone she is not. In the end, Josie becomes prom queen. A repulsive prank is plotted on a nerdy unaccepted friend and Josie stops it. The popular crowd pronounces Josie is not fit to be queen. During this prom scene, Josie, played by Drew Barrymore, enlightens teenagers in a moving monologue using pathos to persuade the teenagers popularity is not important in the real world, ethos to acknowledge the outcast kids, and logos to establish there is more to the world than social status and admiration. While Josie attended her real high school she had an older brother, Rob, who was in the “in-crowd”.
Although she was related to him she was still considered a loser because she was smart, did not dress the right way, and was just not accepted. Josie knew what it was like to be an outcast. At her own prom, the popular guy at her school asked her to the prom as a joke, when he arrived at her house in a nice tuxedo pulling up to her house in a limo. Instead of stopping he slowly drove by standing out of the sunroof with another girl and threw eggs at her ruining her dress and her prom. Josie’s background of being the center of the joke gave her credibility in the speech. After stopping the popular kids from throwing dog food at her nerdy friend at the new high school she asks them, “Why her? Let me tell you something about this girl she is unbelievable. I was new here and she befriended me no questions asked” (Line 5). It still traumatizes Josie that those who are the kindest and most innocent are the ones who are bullied for being kind hearted and genuine. Due to Josie’s experience in the popular group and the nerdy group she has the perspective of both sides and still finds trouble understanding the issue the popular kids have with the nerdy kids. As an adult, Josie knows from real experience whether a person’s reputation remains after high school and if it follows them to the real world. The movie displays her brother, Rob, who was popular in high school working at a post …show more content…
office in present time and herself being the youngest under cover reporter in the Chicago Times. She was more successful than he was as an adult and in high school but when it came to social status she was the biggest loser in her school. This gives Josie the ability to be accounted for her reassurance that there is more to the world than high school and she is credible due to her personal experiences through being the nerdy kid and the popular kid. Due to Josie being able to be credible for her speech, more people were able to connect with her. She uses logic to support what had to happen for her to finally be accepted at the school. Her brother decided to enroll himself in school and pose as a student to help her become “cool”. When he showed up, she explained to him that you can not come into the school in one day and automatically be popular. He proved her wrong by out eating a varsity football player at lunch, and then everybody knew his name and wanted to be his friend. His personal gain for going back to high school was to play baseball again, he was star athlete during his time but caught mono and missed his opportunity to be scouted so he tried out for the baseball team and became a star again. Through out the time of him reliving his past he tells everyone lies about Josie to boost her reputation. Every lie was told for the specific group of people he was speaking to. For example the queen bees were talking about their diet for prom and Rob told them that Josie’s dad invented the diet they were going on which made the girls use their brains and think “she must be rich” while their minds at work he adds in that her family travels to their vacation house making her seem that much more interesting. The baseball team took an interest to her because Rob pretended they dated but she dumped him, it is ok though because she is s the “best” he ever had. While all these lies gathered Josie liked the attention she was receiving. She was invited with the popular girls to go shopping, the most popular guy asked her to the prom, she was apart of the prom committee because when the tragedy of another school having the same theme as them came they looked to Josie for the answer. She was finally accepted. In her speech she realizes it was all fake, “But you, you only became my friend after my brother, Rob, posed as a student and convinced you to like me.” (line 7) When she delivers this statement, a shot is focused on them. Some look ashamed while others seem to ignore it. Using this, Josie makes the teenagers feel guilty about their actions but it is the start of her teaching them a lesson, that they should accept people as they are not how they should be. Josie’s most effective support during this speech is the use of pathos.
Through out the whole speech she is using her soul to tell these people there really is a bigger world out there. “Let me tell you something, I don’t care about being your stupid prom queen. I’m 25 years old. I’m an undercover reporter for the Chicago Sun Times and I’ve been beating my brains out trying to impress you people. Let me tell you something Gibby, Kirsten, Kristin, you will spend your lives trying to keep others down because it makes you feel more important.(line 1-4) To catch her audiences attention she stresses how hard she has been working to make them all like her. Her tone is aggressive and makes the teenagers interested about what she has to say. Josie then sets her tone directly towards the popular girls that tell her she does not deserve to be queen. This causes them to really think about themselves as people and attracts the attention to them forcing a lesson to be learned. “All of you people there is a bigger world out there… bigger than prom, bigger than high school and it won’t matter if you were the prom queen, the quarterback of the football team, or the biggest nerd in school. Find out who you are and try not to be afraid of it.” (lines7-10) When Josie begins again ,she addresses everyone as whole, because she knows it is not just the popular people who need to be affected by the speech. The tone in her voice is strained but yet sincere. It is irritating for her to see the
teenager’s perspective of the world and assumes the teens will go into the world with this mindset. When Josie was in high school, she was called horrible names that still affected her even as an adult. In a scene before she became popular she is venting to Rob about her not being able to be what everyone else wanted her to be. To boost her self-esteem Rob made Josie yell out “I’m not Josie Grossy Anymore!!” During this experience for Josie she finally started to accept herself as a person and when her speech came she wanted to encourage the teenagers to not be afraid of who they were either. When she says this part of the speech her voice changes to a calmer tone, showing her exhaustion of being frustrated because she had to pretend to be something she was not when she should have just been herself. The experiences that Josie had to learn were brutal but it taught her to not be afraid of whom she was. Her experiences of being the nerd and the popular background gave her the right perspective and made her accountable and trustworthy to listen to about this problem. The use of her being able to grow into a successful adult and make it big in the real world, even though she was a loser in high school was proof to her logic. While frustration and heart break of her past was the most important part of the speech that moved the teenagers to be something they really were even if it was not socially acceptable. This speech is implied for everyone in the world because everyone their lifetime has at least once pretended to be someone they are not. As Josie states, “Find out who you are and try not to be afraid of it”
Firstly, being in an Italian in an Australian society has affected Josie in many different ways because the way people view her affects her in the start of the novel because she doesn’t know who she is because she hasn’t developed her cultural identity. Later in the novel, she accepts that she is a ‘wog’ and this affects
Do you ever wonder why most girls are insecure? In “So I Ain’t No Good Girl” by Sharon Flake it perfectly explains why girls are insecure at a young age. This short story is about a teenage girl who gets abused by her boyfriend Raheem. Her story begins with her wanting to ride to school with Raheem. He tells her to “go to school without him cause he’s got things to do.” In reply she snaps at him and he slaps her. She reluctantly agrees to go to school without him. As the school bus is driving away, she sees Raheem kissing another girl. Flake shows how teenage girls are taught to be insecure by using realistic problems to show her character’s struggle.
Josie's father has had very little immediate impact on her life thus far. When her father did arrive in back in Sydney Josie is naturally angry at him. This is a totally acceptable form of behaviour considering the circumstance, but her anger not only stems from her own personal experience. Josie had to grow up knowing that her father had abandoed her and her mother, pushing her Christina into being a single parent bringing up her child alone.
Josie feels extreme guilt after reading the note knowing that she could have potentially prevented his death. But, his death also makes her hit a realization that she is not the only one with problems and this is an important lesson in her journey of growing up. The way things progress, how relationships develop and the steps that she takes to grow up all happen through the things that Josephine encounters.
She then immediately follows up with a way to fix it and demand respect. Shes trying to connect with the audience and shows that she has been in the same place, that she can relate. You can see that she has done her research, she uses plenty of statistics to give you a visual of what she is talking about as well as quoting people from organizations and giving them the appropriate credit. She mentions in 2005 at yale, her alma mater, 15 students sat in the admissions office until they were removed by police. These individuals were demanding changes to the financial aid policy.
Though Nomi Nickel from A Complicated Kindness and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye both possess negative attitudes towards school, only Nomi evaluates her attitudes and grows as a result. Nomi’s ...
Catherine Hardwicke’s illuminating Thirteen is a sobering film of uncommon emotional potency. The picture focuses on Tracy (the wondrous Evan Rachel Wood), a sensitive, impressionable, profoundly confused teen, who out of desperation and uncertainty, turns to nihilism. Some have deemed the picture lurid and exploitative, but for the more liberal-minded, its message is significant and has value. Thirteen does not condone or glorify reckless, self-destructive behavior; rather it warns adolescents of the dangers and temptations they will surely be confronted with, while concurrently stressing the need for parental guidance and insight.
No one would talk to her, recess was spent in anguish, and she would find garbage and spoiled food in her book bag. As she progressed into 5th grade, some of the social atmosphere began to shift in subtle but profound ways. Being accepted into a clique is all that matters. Instead of being admired for class participation, as in earlier years she was laughed at and labeled as “teacher’s pet.” She said the rules were simple “shun or be shunned—if you weren’t willing to go along with the crowd, you would become the reject.”
This film contains some classic examples of the kinds of real life issues adolescents deal with. Issues such as popularity, peer relationships, family/sibling relationships, sex, and struggles with identity are all addressed in this ninety-minute film.
When life becomes overwhelming during adolescence, a child’s first response is to withdraw from the confinement of what is considered socially correct. Individuality then replaces the desire to meet social expectations, and thus the spiral into social non-conformity begins. During the course of Susanna’s high school career, she is different from the other kids. Susanna:
These days, as both characters ironically prove, it is difficult trying to be different when being different is a category in itself. Dave and Julia, the two protagonists of this book, are both the cool, “hipster” type kids that would burn themselves drinking their coffee because they have to do it before it is cool. Both of them think high school is the biggest cliché imaginable, which – when you think about it- it really is. How many of us fantasized over being prom king or queen? Having someone ask you out to a dance in the most romantic, over used fashion possible? Wanted to run for class president or some other office? These are the sort of things that Dave and Julia vow never to do during their four years of high school, until one day everything changes. As the summary explains, Dave and Julia start a pact (which they write down and title the "Nevers List") right before high school, swearing off participating in any of the "cliché" high school experiences that were just bound to arise. The list goes as
In this film, Tracy is a prime example of an adolescent and much of what I have learned this year can be applied to her character. “Fitting in” is a concept that is seen a lot in adolescence. Teenagers will do pretty much anything at times to have friends or appear to be “cool.” That is exactly what happens to Tracy in this film. As the film begins, Tracy is a good, simple girl, and her pureness all changes when she befriends the most popular girl in school, Evie Zamora.
Growing up she seemed nearly perfect yet it was only a front, reserving all her emotional turmoil inside. Pressure came in the form of two main figures her mother and her boyfriend Matt Royston. Josie had to make her mother proud which was accomplished “ Many of the accomplishments that Josie’s mother was most proud of … had not been achieved because Josie wanted them so badly herself, but mostly because she was afraid of falling short of perfect.”(pg9). She felt as though popularity is the key to some form of conformity, being on top in the social hierarchy of high school would make her feel good that people liked her. Yet over time for her want of attention would become harmful to her feeling as though people would find who she really was by even creating precautions just incase it ever so happens with the book explaining her possible suicide methods “ It had taken Josie nearly six months to inconspicuously gather only fifteen pills, but she figured if she washed them down with a fifth of vodka, it would do the trick.” (pg 8-9).She felt as though that everything will crumble as if she was like Marie Antoinette with the people coming after but instead she will take matters into her own hands. Matt on the other hand was her source to her popularity, the pair
Miss Desjardin, still incensed over the locker room incident and ashamed at her initial disgust with Carrie, wants all the girls who made fun of Carrie suspended and banned from attending the school prom, but the principal instead punishes the girls by giving them several detentions. When Chris, after an altercation with Miss Desjardin, refuses to appear for the detention, she is suspended and barred from the prom and tries to get her fat...
Heathers, a 1988 black comedy film directed by Michael Lehmann, presents an exaggerated model of social status in high school. The titular Heathers are a group of three girls- Heather Chandler, Heather McNamara, and Heather Duke- who control the school. In the terms of Marx, they represent the powerful bourgeoisie who rule over the proletariat- in this case, they are illustrated by the unpopular students. In the world of Westerburg High School, you are either popular or not, and there is no inbetween. To Nietzsche, this is an example of a binary opposition. Veronica, the main character, is someone who is hailed by both sides and is unsure of where she belongs. At the same time, another student named J.D. presents a different solution to her