Tyler Kuch
Although maybe not the most original choice, I decided to analyze the movie Mean Girls, the 2004 comedy starring Lindsay Lohan. This was an easy media choice because almost the entire movie deals with adolescents. Throughout the movie, many social subjects come up, and because all the main characters are high schoolers, we get to see their perspectives.
Mean Girls is not supposed to be non-fiction or a documentary by any stretch of the imagination. It was made purely for entertainment, and supposed to portray an exaggerated view of high school stereotypes. But that doesn’t mean that some of the issues aren’t real to teenagers today. First, we have the existence of cliques. Just like in many high schools around the country (or the world, for that matter), the Mean Girls high school is divided up into many cliques based on almost anything. There are the Sexually Active Band Geeks, the Asian Nerds, the Unfriendly Black Hotties, and many more. Those groups can be divided according to race, sex, class, and almost anything other social characteristic you can think of. Now of course, in the real adult world, cliques are viewed as immature and wrong. But through the eyes of the teenagers in the movie, cliques are just accepted. They don’t necessarily condone them, but they accept them as fact in their dysfunctional high school. And even though they don’t want to admit it, all students want to be in the “cool” group, a side effect that usually isn’t a good thing. In the Education.com article “Social Life in Middle and High School: Dealing with Cliques and Bullies” points out, “Cliques can blur individuality” and “They usually require some degree of conformity”. No matter what the consequence though, these students still wanted to be “cool”. As an adult, that thought process still exists, but to a lesser degree. In high school, and especially in this movie version of high school, it’s a top priority.
Another part of society that is depicted differently through the eyes of teenagers in this movie is the differences between the sexes. In real life, ideally anyway, each person is thought of as his or her own person, and judged based on their personality. That may not happen one hundred percent of the time, but that’s what we like to think is going on in people’s minds anyway. This movie, on the other hand, takes a very different approach. For the most part, the girls are viewed as sluts who will do anything to be on top no matter who it hurts, while guys are seen as super horny with a one-track mind. Even the “normal” guy character, Aaron Samuels, can’t resist Lindsay Lohan’s character, Cady, even though he has a girlfriend. And he’s supposed to be the good guy. This distorted view of reality is the difference between what these adolescents see and what really is happening in the real world. Yes, some people fit the stereotypes, but certainly not everybody.
Like Raby discussed in her writing, adolescence is “obviously occupied as a temporary position”. It’s almost impossible to make teenagers see the world the way it actually is, and Mean Girls helped show us that. Because the adolescents are so skewed in their views, this movie was able to depict the ideas of society in such a different way. Kids don’t see the world the way everybody else does, and that’s exactly what made this movie so entertaining.
Works Cited
Mean Girls. Mark Waters, Tina Fey. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2004.
Education.com. Joshua Mandel. 2006. NYU. 10 Feb 2011. http://www.education.com/reference/article/bullying-in-middle-and-high-school/
Raby, Rebecca. “Across a Great Gulf? Conducting Research with Adolescents”. Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies. New York: New York University Press. 2007. Pp 39-59
