The Film Mean Girls: More Real Than You Know

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The film Mean Girls, directed by Mark Waters, written by Rosalind Wiseman and Tina Fey, and starring Lindsey Lohan as a lost teenage girl, is a hilarious movie about the new life of Cady Heron. After moving from Africa where she previously had lived and been home schooled for the most of her adolescent life, Cady is thrust into a new culture, town, and school when her parents decide to make the move back to the United States. In this laugh-out-loud comedy, the audience giggles along as Cady adjusts to meeting different cliques, falling for the most popular guy in school and becoming Queen B, while making a few enemies along the way. As with most comedies though, Cady eventually establishes her true identity in the end. Though Mean Girls’ is usually classified as unrealistic and overly dramatic and the situations as being far more adult than their age, the film successfully portrays the stereotypes and friendships of high school spot on.
Mean Girls is obviously a bit over dramatic, therefore creating an ambience of unrealistic situations. Throughout the movie comedy is used to catch viewers’ attention, which strengthens the argument that Mean Girls is unrealistic in some aspects. For example, there is an exaggerated presence when the girls introduce all of the cliques. These groups are shown being very over-the-top and theatrical. Each group introduced is strictly defined by common stereotypes: the Goths are in full out black and resemble vampires, while the popular girls are decked out in pink skirts and high heels and “they all wore fashionable clothes every day, except for their one-day-a-week sweat pants day,” Shannon Armes writes. The groups interact in the most clichéd ways, the Geeks only hang out with other Geeks, the Goth...

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...hting has finished as audiences typically anticipate happy endings in the film industry. So while the film can be argued as unlikely and theatrical and some of the situations being above the character’s age level, Mean Girls – through accurate portrayals of stereotypes and friendships – is pretty close to being a genuine idea of what high school can really be like for teenagers today.

Works Cited

Armes, Shannon M. "Mean Girls." Applied Social Psychology (ASP). Movable Type, 14 Feb. 2012. Web. 20 Apr. 2014.
Lawrenson, Edward. "Mean Girls." Sight and Sound 07 2004: 56. ProQuest. Web. 24 Apr. 2014 .
Mean Girls. Dir. Mark Waters. Perf. Lindsey Lohan, Jonathan Bennett, and Rachel McAdams. Paramount Pictures, 2004. DVD.
Resnick, David. "Life in an Unjust Community: A Hollywood View of High School Moral Life." Journal of Moral Education 37.1 (2008): 99-113. Print.

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