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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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,
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.
"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.
Modern America, in accordance to course materials and personal experiences, overtly sexualizes people, specifically among the youth, engendering new versions of gender expectations, roles, relationships, and how society views people based on appearance, sexual promiscuity or supposed promiscuity, and so on. Easy A (2011) represents an example clarifying how gender socialization impacts today’s youth via several concepts such as slut shaming, slut glorification, challenging masculinity, dating/hooking up, gender expectations and social acceptance. This film primarily focuses on a female’s promiscuity. Olive, the main character, is automatically labeled slut, after a rumor she unintentionally sparked by a bathroom conversation. Soon, the rumor spread and Olive became “school slut” in minutes.
The movie that I chose to do my analysis on, is Mean Girls because it is my all-time favorite movie. I watched it a million times, it never gets old and plus I know every single line in the movie. The main character Cady, played by Lindsay Lohan, exhibits how to go from being a nerd, popular, hated and rehabilitated all in one school year. It’s hilarious movie about high school but, it also covers many interpersonal concepts that we learned in class like: verbal communication, conflict and relationship dynamics. Before I provide my analysis, I’ll present my brief summary on the movie Mean Girls.
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.
Feminism is a movement that supports women equality within society. In relation to film, feminism is what pushes the equal representation of females in mainstream films. Laura Mulvey is a feminist theorist that is famous for touching on this particular issue of how men and women are represented in movies. Through her studies, she discovered that many films were portraying men and women very differently from reality. She came up with a theory that best described why there is such as huge misrepresentation of the social status quos of male and female characters. She believed that mainstream film is used to maintain the status quo and prevent the realization of gender equality. This is why films are continuously following the old tradition that males are dominant and females are submissive. This is the ideology that is always present when we watch a movie. This is evident in the films from the past but also currently. It is as if the film industry is still catering to the male viewers of each generation in the same way. Laura Mulvey points out that women are constantly being seen as sexual objects, whether it is the outfits they wear or do not wear or the way they behave, or secondary characters with no symbolic cause. She states that, “in traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote it-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey pg. 715). Thus, women are nevertheless displayed as nothing more than passive objects for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Mulvey also points out through her research that in every mainstream movie, there is ...