Mean Girls

My View on Mean Girls:

Mean Girls is a movie that shows high school stereotypes well. It does this by having certain groups like the jocks, "Asian Nerds," "Cool Asians," and "Burnouts" seated together in the cafeteria. Janice makes this obvious to Cady by giving her a map of the cafeteria and where the different groups sit. This is not a seating plan from the principle. It's something the students decided themselves.

Styling

The movie shows us these different groups and who belongs to what group by the clothes the students wear. For example, Janice (Burnout) does do her hair and makeup, but she wears dark colours and makes herself look tough. She does this by having really dark make up and ear piercings. The time she spends on how she looks is telling us that she does care about her appearence but not enough to take the judgements from people at her school seriously.

This is in comparison to Regina and the rest of the Plastics, who wear short skirts and expensive, fashionable clothing and look similar to the models we see in magazines. Also in calling the popular girls "Plastics," the director makes the audience link between the characters and the material plastic, making us think of them as real-life living Barbie Dolls. In this image, they are all wearing pink, which is not only a "girly" colour, but which they use as a type of uniform to show that they are all part of a group. Cady is wearing a pink shirt as well, but her outfit is not as feminine and looser fitting, and she has not styled her hair and make up as much as the other girls. The way she is positioned on the outside of the group, her more tomboyish clothing (even though the shirt is still pink) and her awkward body language all show us that she is not part of the group yet.

Dialogue

The director also shows the groups by using the character Cady, who is an innocent girl from Africa and who has been homeschooled all her life. Cady is a good student, but she doesn't understand how the social side of high school works. You can tell this by when she says " Girl world has a lot of rules"

But this soon changes when Cady slowly turns into one of the plastics without realizing it. When this happens, Cady doesn't even seem to care about whats happening around her because she was focused on the present moment. Like when she says, "I know it may look like I'd become a bitch, but that was only because I was acting like a bitch". This dialogue is a good example of her starting to change. Also in Calculus, she pretends to not understand the qestion so she could talk to the boy that she has a crush on, but this boy is also Regina's ex boyfriend so she has to do this very discreetely so no one will know it's that obvious. "In Girl World," she says, "all the fighting has to be sneaky." She also gives two candy canes to just Karen and herself and tells Gretchen that they were from Regina. This is so Gretchen gets jealous and the friendship of the Plastics splits up. When Cady achieves her goal, her appearence starts to change. Her hair gets straighter and her clothing is much more revealing to everyone. She is starting to look a lot more like Regina. The change in her dialogue, behaviour and appearance shows that she is no longer just pretending to be a Plastic anymore. As Janice says after she catches Cady in the act of throwing a surprise party (when she had lied to Janice and said she couldn't make it to her Art show), "You're not pretending anymore. You're plastic. Cold, hard, shiny plastic."

Scene Analysis

In this scene, Cady meets the Plastics, who invite her to sit down at their table in the cafeteria. They instantly start to interrogate her and ask her a lot of personal questions. Regina is positioned in the centre of the group, which shows that she is the dominant member of the group. The director also uses dialogue to show Regina's dominance, as she is the one who is doing most of the talking in this scene.

The director also uses dialogue to show how little Cady knows about "Girl World."  Cady's dialogue is also used to represent how untouched she is. When Regina tells her that she's pretty, she says "Thank you." Regina was really expecting her to reject the compliment and complain about her body, like the Plastics do in the scene in front of the mirror. "So you agree?" Regina responds. "You think you're really pretty." This shows that in the Plastics' world, when someone gives you a compliment, you are expected to reject it and complain about your appearance.

When Regina tells her to "shut up," Cady also gets confused because she sees "shut up" as a way to get someone to stop talking, but Regina says it as a way to show disbelief. This is easily showing the diffences of each person's personality. Regina also interrupts Cady a lot in this scene, which is not only another way of showing that she is the boss, but that she doesn't really listen to other people and let them finish their own thoughts.

At the start of the movie, Cady is dressed innocently and not really showing a lot of skin. This shows us that the director wanted us to see her as a trustworthy, genuine character. In this scene Cady has her hair pulled back, and is wearing a plaid shirt. This gives the impression of Cady being "fresh faced" and innocent, and the plaid shirt links back to the countryside and her childhood in Africa. As for the Plastics, they are stylish because they spend a lot of time on hair, make-up and expensive jewellery, and wear low cut tops, which are less innocent than Cady's plaid shirt. At one point, there is a long, body-length shot of Janice, who is across the other side of the room. Janice is wearing a long skirt, striped stockings as well as Converse shoes. This was to create an "edgy" sense of style. Like Cady, she is shown to be styled very differently to the Plastics.

The Message of Mean Girls

Mean Girls was based on a book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which was written to make high school girls more aware of social groups and to challenge these. If a viewer read that book, they would be more critical of characters like Regina and the rest of the Plastics, and see the movie in a different light. However, if they hadn't read the book, they may have wanted to be something similar to Regina, and thought that they needed to dress and act that way to be popular. I think Mean Girls may have successfully sent its message across towards the end of the movie, where the characters were being much nicer towards each other and everyone was treated as individuals.


All images from Google. Video from YouTube.