Who holds the key of power in your life? Is there a person or group of people that you are allowing to dictate your life choices? The movie Mean Girls brings to life the everyday peer pressures teenagers deal with. Main character Cady Heron experiences peer pressure for the first time, from multiple classmates. Although it is said that a person can not be persuaded to do or say anything without their consent, is this really true? Cady deals with situations in which she is being pressured from two sides of the spectrum. In the end she realized what was happening to her, but the peer pressure she endured impacted the entire school. When I watched this movie it was easy for me to see that the Plastics greatly affected how Cady and others at the school acted, talked, and dressed. In one scene Regina George, the ultimate mean girl and leader of the Plastics, returned to the locker room to find that her tank top had been cut in two places. She shrugged her shoulders and put it on, knowing …show more content…
Janice was the force pushing Cady to join the Plastics. She had a long held animosity towards them and wanted to use Cady as a pawn in her sabotage plan. If Cady could hang out with the Plastics long enough to find out their weaknesses, then Janice, along with her sidekick Damian, could claim back her pride that Regina from her stole in the eighth grade. People in real life often believe that if they do the wrong things for the right reasons, then the things they are doing are right. This belief reminds me of Janice. She does not want to be a mean person, she actually likes Cady, but it is easy for her to manipulate Cady. Cady was blind sighted when she entered public high school without any idea of how “the system” works. She had to learn first-hand for herself the consequences of letting other people push you around. By the end of the movie Cady grew a backbone and was able to ascertain right from wrong, becoming her own
Golding shows how children all on their own, can change their own brains to function the way they choose with no one telling them what to do. He as well explains the impact of less clothing has on society, which causes civilization to diminish from where they lay. Likewise, Cady changes the way she dresses from being fully covered with dignity and respect to exposing body parts and changing her way of thinking. However, in the end, both authors reveal symbolism and setting through teenagers and children. Parents should be most cautious about teenagers because they seem to be the main reason why society corrupts and destroys itself, which leads future generations at risk of becoming even
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.
Cady has always been homeschooled, so she did not really know what it was like to communicate with others and make friends. She thought that her actions are what she should be doing in order to make friends. As Cady gets closer to The Plastics, she starts to develop feelings for Regina’s ex-boyfriend, Aaron Samuels. Later on in the movie Cady has to make a choice whether she wants to be officially part of the group or to continue sabotaging it. Eventually she decides to be part of the group, which disappoints Janis; since Cady basically betrayed her. Cady starts developing into a whole new person; she became a Plastic. Cady illustrates different types of interpersonal communication as she tries to make everything right again in her life. Throughout this movie, the girls show how their relationships consists of: social exchange theory, communication privacy management theory, unproductive conflict, and productive
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
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,
Penny is materialistic. I know she is because she forced Cady to tell Harris how much she loves certain things around the house, like table clothes, so she can have them. In the book, it also said she changed everything, in the silverware when Cady’s dad left because material possessions make her happy. Penny is also caring. She does her best to make Cady feel better after the accident, like telling her everyday what happened, even though it hurts her to retell the story. She doesn't like her ex-husband but lets Harris pay for Cady go to Europe with her dad to make her feel
When she ditches Janis’s art show and throws a party of her own later, she uses the excuse that she couldn’t invite them because she “had to pretend to be plastic.” But Janis spills the truth. “You’re not faking it anymore. You’re cold hard shiny plastic.” So Cady Heron transforms from being a “home school jungle freak to a cold hard shiny plastic to an actual human being.” After that, Cady apologises to everyone she hurt. She says, “When you get bit by a snake, you’re supposed to suck the poison out. That’s what I had to do. Suck all the poison out of my
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 insidious idea of the advantaged class is effortlessly transferable to a commoner who embraces a similar conviction framework. Cady Heron, the hero of the story, represents a commoner who receives the way of life and standards of the world class. She emigrates from an underprivileged country (Africa) and tries to absorb into the public-school hierarchy. She is inevitably grasped by the elite upper class, The Plastics, who find her candidly malleable. However, the more time Cady spends inside her social gathering, the more she loses her unique arrangement of qualities and morals. For instance, Cady chooses to remain an individual from The Plastics after Regina George takes Cady’s love interest. The more Cady attempts to acquire her “due”
On the second day when Jason tried to make fun of her, she did not know how to respond until Regina saved her. She did not know how to react in a situation like this. In the lecture, we discussed that peers allow us to make relations on our own. Peer interactions are spontaneous and non-structured. Peers can have an effect on our socialization and develop our sense of identity. When she entered high school, she was a nerd with good grades and did not know how to socialize. When Janice and Damien forced her to interact with the plastics and tell them what they talk about she agreed. At that time, she was not able to figure out that this is not good for her. Slowly her personality started changing and she became just like plastics. She started misbehaving with her parents, ditching Janice and Damien. She was getting used by people. She did not interact with peers before so she did not have the experience of it. But slowly she began to figure out that it is affecting who she is. In the beginning, Cady could not differentiate between her friends and enemies. Like the first 3 way call. Cady could not figure out about her real friends and she told Gretchen and Karen right away when she started liking Aron
Mean Girls tells the story of Cady Heron’s transition from 12 years of home school in Africa to public high school in the United States when her mother gets offered tenure at a nearby college. Upon her arrival, Cady bonds with Janice and Damian who are considered apart of the “out crowd”. Janice and Damian give Cady the scoop on all of the social cues and how to navigate her new territory. When she is invited to join the most popular clique in the school, “The Plastics” Cady is placed in the middle of revenge and is encouraged to invade the lives of the girls to steal their secrets and eventually uproot their lives. Although this movie is primarily focused on revenge (which can be correlated with coercion, the least ideal form of leadership)
At the climax of the film Cady has figured out “how to control everyone around [her]”, from her peers to her family. She makes the people around her angry and annoyed with her behaviours. “You try to act like you're so innocent” Janis declares frustratedly. Cady’s reasoning for her judgmental and selfish behaviour is that she is pretending to be and act like a Plastic, when in fact she has been influenced by The Plastics so much that she has turned into one herself. Cady had not acknowledged that she had become a Plastic, though in her heart she knows that she had become one. Cady knew The Plastic’s bullying behaviours were not always right including The Burn Book. Cady knew The Burn Book was wrong and that you should only treat people the
"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.
Social influence/peer groups were one of the dominant themes in my observations, survey, and literature. Social influence looks at how individual thoughts, actions and feelings are influenced by social groups (Aronson, 2010).The desire to be accepted and liked by others can lead to dangerous behavior. College life can be an overwhelming experience for first time college students and or transfer students as they struggle to manage class time and social activities in an attempt to fit-in in the new environment that they may not be used to. Students can experience too much anxiety and drop out of college or fall behind classes. Working at the Cambell Student Union information Center, I observed a great deal of students falling into this trap of social influence and peer pressure. A female student tripped as she was going up the stairs to Spot Coffee but did not fall. What appears to be a group of guys who are not popular (guys who are not very well known), were seating where popular students normally seat. The group of guys started laughing at the girl and stopped. One guy kept laughing, but it was obvious he was forcing the laughter as to purposely attract attention. He started making jokes about the girl and carrying on the laughter so he would appear to be funny. Another example, which portrays peer influence, involves parties over the weekend. Multiple students stated they were falling behind in classes on the grounds of their friends wanted to go out the night before and they did not want to seem/appear “lame” so they tagged along. The influence of a group is intensified by the person’s desire to be an accepted member of the peer group. To achieve this desire he tries to conform in everyday to the patterns approved by the grou...
An example of how peers can have more influence then parents from my own life who be when I was in middle school, at the time I was hangout with girls who were not a good influence on me, I know this know but at the time I thought my parents were not wanting me to have friends. Those friends would always be late to school and class, at this school we had seven different classes and had five minutes to get to each c...