Discussion of How Mean Girls Conforms With the Teen Film Genre

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Discussion of How Mean Girls Conforms With the Teen Film Genre

(Paramount 2004)

If I was to walk into a video store I would be able to choose from

many different genres as this is how they are organised into

categories. The genre that Mean girls comes under is “teen” genre. A

teen genre is a film that is broadly appealing to a teenage audience.

The film we studied was Mean Girls which is an American teen movie.

The sub genre for this film was the School picture. By this I mean

that it as set and revolved about teenagers at an American High school.

The representation is these kind of films are stereotypes of the

characters and mean girls was no different they put different labels

on the characters for example there were the jocks, cheerleaders,

Asian nerds, plastics (the popular girls kind of come under

cheerleaders) and the people who don’t fit in. The characters were

about 16 -17 about the same age as the target audience perhaps a bit

younger e.g. most teenagers are around 14-15 when they start to watch

the films. The film shows issues that may be the average teenager

might experience through their adolescent years like drugs, sex,

popularity, sexuality and bullies. The Mise-en-scene is things to let

the audience know that this is for them as an audience to relate to.

For example they show the audience the rooms of Regina George and

Cady; the rooms show us another angle of the person’s personality..

The soundtrack for a film like mean girls will reflect the target

audiences taste in music so something that is in the popular music

scene that will probably enter the charts which in 2004 was God is a

DJ by controversial artist Pi...

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hits like “like a pill” which showed the ways she was bullied at

school and felt she had to turn to drugs to solve these problems that

escalated in her life.

The film mean girls conforms with its genre extremely well because it

represents a funny stereotypical overview of a typical American high

school in the present time they show issues that lots of teenagers

face throughout there adolescent years at least once. This

mise-en-scene helps you to eventually relate to the characters and

what makes them the way they are and how they could be helped to

change and often most teenagers know someone a bit like Regina George

and have seen someone a bit like Cady fall into the traps of such

people and take there time to realise just how much they have changed.

This is why I think Mean Girls conforms with the teen genre.

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