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Mean girls analysis
Analysis of the movie mean girls
Analysis of the movie mean girls
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The movie Mean Girls, is the most popular and accurate representation of adolescent society in today's adolescent culture. It is sincerely one of my favorite movies because of its satirical portrayal of different facets of high school life. Mean Girls is about a girl named Cady Heron, who relocates from being homeschooled in Africa to high school in the United States. At first, she is naive to the status hierarchy of cliques that are prevalent in the school. But what turns from innocent sabotage of the school's top-of-the-food-chain clique known as "The Plastics" with the first friends that she met upon arrival to the school, becomes her transformation into their cold, hard, shiny, egocentric world. The first aspect of the movie that is comparable to real world adolescent experience is the clique subsystem. On Cady's first day, she is introduced to the organization of the school's hierarchy by the layout of the lunchroom. The cliques shown in the movie are the freshman, the ROTC guys, the Preps, the "cool Asians" and the Asian nerds, the J.V. jocks, Varsity jocks, the burnouts...
The film Mean Girls is about a young girl, Cady Heron, born and raised in Africa by her zoologist parents, who were also her homeschool teachers for sixteen years. When Cady moves to the United States, she enrolls in a public school for the first time. Here she realizes that high school students have the same hierarchy as the animals she observed in Africa. The lowest ranking group in this high school hierarchy is the outcasts, who also happen to be Cady’s first friends in the U.S. The highest on the high school food chain are the “plastics”. The “plastics”, are the most popular girls in school. The plastic’s notice Cady’s charming personality and stunning good looks and invite her to join their clique. In order to avenge her first friends,
“I viewed each of the films at least once…taking notes on the role of the teacher, peer relations, among students, relations between students and adults, student attitudes toward schoolwork, extracurricular activities, the role of the family, the resources of the school, the use of violence and drugs, exploitation of sexuality (4).”
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.
"Cold, shiny, hard, PLASTIC," said by Janice referring to a group of girls in the movie Mean Girls. Mean Girls is about an innocent, home-schooled girl, Cady who moves from Africa to the United States. Cady thinks she knows all about survival of the fittest. But the law of the jungle takes on a whole new meaning when she enters public high school and encounters psychological warfare and unwritten social rules that teen girls deal with today. Cady goes from a great friend of two "outcasts", Janice and Damien to a superficial friend of the "plastics", a group of girls that talks about everyone behind their back and thinks everyone loves them. Adolescent egocentrism and relationships with peers are obviously present throughout the film. I also noticed self worth in relationships, parenting styles, and juvenile delinquency throughout Mean Girls.
The movie main character is Cady Heron who is a homeschooled girl. Her and her family lived in Africa for 15 years. They return back to the states and place Cady into a public school for the first time. Cady meets her classmates and finds a few good friends the introduce her to a group of girls called the Plastics. She ends up joining the plastics with the motive of bring them down because her new friend don’t like them very much and thought it would be funny. However, she eventually gets assimilated into the group of three unkind girls and starts to be just like them.
The movie The Breakfast Club is a perfect example of peer relationships in the adolescent society. It shows the viewer some of the main stereotypes of students in high school you have a jock, a nerd, the weirdo, a rebel, and a prep. Over the course of a Saturday detention the different types of peers learn a lot about one another by hearing what each one has done to get into Saturday detention as well as why they chose to do it.
Rachel Simmons was amazed there were so many books regarding aggression in boys, but was unable to find any books on the subject of girls’ aggression. The experiments that were conducted regarding aggression were also only performed using males. Many psychologists considered aggression to be behavior such as hitting, punching, name calling and threatening others as a male issue. Simmons discovered from the many interviews she conducted on women that aggression is just as much a female issue. In her book, “The Odd Girl Out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls”, Simmons interviews many women and girls who were victims of bullying, were the actual bully, and also people who witnessed the abuse. Simmons’ purpose for writing this book was to make everyone aware of the secretive way girls bully each other, and to show how they hide their aggression, which many times is the result of their own struggle for acceptance. This book was effective because Simmons also gives the reader suggestions to help everyone involved in some form of aggressive behavior know how to deal with this behavior, and the lifelong consequences it has on everyone involved.
Have you ever met someone who acted just as teens are stereotyped? Not many people have because they do not exist. Real teens are poorly portrayed in the media and are the complete opposite of their stereotypes. Books and TV shows make teens out to be wild or crazy, irresponsible and out of control. One hardly ever hears about teen-heroes. Instead, newspapers and magazines are plastered with stories of teens and crime. And while looking at commercial billboards and other related media, the regular teen seems to be sex-crazed and image-obsessed.
The film being analysed is the Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes. Trapped in Saturday detention are 5 stereotyped teens. Claire, the princess, Andrew, the jock, John, the criminal, Brian, the brain, and Allison, the basket case. At 7 am, they had nothing to say, but by 4 pm; they had uncovered everything to each other. The students bond together when faced with the their principal, and realise that they have more in common than they think, including a hatred for adult society. They begin to see each other as equal people and even though they were stereotyped they would always be The Breakfast Club. The Breakfast Club highlights a variety of pressures that are placed upon teenagers through out high school. One of the most challenging aspects of screenwriting is creating characters that an audience can identify with, relate to, and be entertained by.
Despite an inappropriate music-video sequence and a phony up-tempo finale, The Breakfast Club offers a breakthrough portrait of the pain and misunderstanding which result from the social hierarchy created by youth themselves. The lookers and the jocks are popular and can do whatever they want — except relate to those outside their social circle of winners.
In our case, Cady is faced with the biases and pressures that occur in at her school, North Shore High. Towards the beginning of the film, Cady continuously knows every answer to the equations that her math, Ms. Norbury puts on the board. Cady soon gets offered to be a part of the North Shore Mathletes, who would ultimately be the only girl on the team. However, being a female who was very good in math was something that Cady ultimately felt wouldn’t seem cool. As mentioned in Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture by Julia T. Wood, “as females pass through puberty and become more aware of themselves as gendered and sexed beings, many young women shy away from being geeky or seeming overly smart” (Wood, 169). As Cady becomes influenced by her new friend group called the Plastics, the more she feels she cannot act smart around the men she finds attractive. For example, in one scene of the movie, Cady pretends to be totally lost during a class lecture. She asks the boy she likes for help and pretends to act like she has no idea how to do the math equations. After Ms. Norbury realizes that Cady is dumbing herself down to impress a boy she explains to Cady, “I know that having a boyfriend may seem like the most important thing in the world. But you don’t have to dumb yourself down to get guys to like you” (Michaels). Julia T. Wood writes, “Because cultural stereotypes of femininity do not include
In the film Mean Girls, teenager Cady Heron was home-schooled in Africa by her zoologist parents. When her family moves to the U.S., Cady finally gets a taste of public school and learns a vital lesson about the cruelty involved in the tightly knit cliques of high school. She eventually finds herself being drug into a group of “the worst people you will ever meet”, The Plastics; and soon realizes how they came to get their name.
Mean Girls is a comedy film aired in 2004 this film captures the influences on lifespan development during adolescence. The main character Cady Heron was home schooled in Africa and now she must transition into high school where she is tested in different areas of her development. Throughout the film she becomes known as the new girl who is trying to figure out her self-identity. Cady integrates herself into a clique of girls known as the Plastics, soon enough Cady understands why they are known for their name. The Plastics run the school by the norms they have created and must always be followed otherwise it will lead into exclusion from the group. In order to be socially accepted social norms determining attitude, behavior, and status must
Set on the fictional, historically black Mission College campus, the movie follows four people from different social circles and how they interact with one another. Dap, a militant activist who is very critical of the university and of Greek life, is in a relationship with Rachel who has decided to pledge one of the Greek organizations despite being considered a “jiggaboo”. Julian, who serves as chapter president of Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity and has contempt for Dap’s opinions, is in a relationship with Jane, who is the leader of the “wannabes”. There is a sharp division on the campus that explores how black women feel about their skin color and how black men choose women as it relates to skin color. This division reaches back to the establishment of
To most people the movie Mean Girls is simply a silly teen chick flick and is not good for anything but pure entrainment. Even though Mean Girls is slightly dramatized, high school in reality is perfectly portrayed through this movie. Every high school varies but there is always a domain group of students. The socially powerful are the rich and beautiful girls and everyone else are the loyal subjects to their castle. However, there is a twist in Mean Girls, the message is actually positive. Mean Girls is sending a message that women should not criticize one another to feel empowerment, it is unattractive to men to be mindless, and that White Americans have domains over other races. This movie also implies that nothing wrong with being different from what society accepts.