Mean Girls, a movie about the horrors of high school that adolescent girls face on a daily basis. This movie focuses on a girl named Cady Heron, who was homeschooled in Africa and forced to move to the United States to go to a public high school. Cady is sixteen, a junior in high school, and is unfamiliar with public schools. She is forced to figure out the “rules” of high school, alone. That is, until she meets new friends who inform her of the cliques that their high school has. Some of these cliques have certain rules that must be followed and they usually do not allow just anyone in their clique. This applies to a clique called “The Plastics” whom includes three of the school’s most popular girls, Regina George, Gretchen Weiners, and Karen Smith. This is not particularly the nicest trio but they take Cady in, although she is not very interested. Cady is a shy and sweet girl who is easily taken advantage of by The Plastics, mainly because she is the new girl who does not have many people she can turn to. Before having met The Plastics, Cady befriends Janice and Damian, two students who encourage her to skip a class on her first day of school. She and her friends Janice, and Damian, devise a plan to sabotage The Plastics when Regina stabs Cady in the back. The movie goes on to show the cruelness girls have towards each other during adolescence. While mainly focusing on The Plastics, the movie occasionally displays the aggression other girls in the movie exert towards each other. The movie ends with the girls being at peace with each other and doing their own thing.
Cady is in the adolescent stage, with the age range being from age 11 to age 18. Cady obviously is not very familiar with American culture but she is an adolescent who seeks freedom, just like other adolescents. On her first day of school, she realizes that she does not have as much freedom as she wishes. This is due to her being unfamiliar with the rules of the classroom. Cady begins to feel as if adults are mistrusting and that everything she does is wrong, due to the amount of times they yelled at her on that first day. She is not able to go the restroom without a pass, limiting her freedom. As a teenager, Cady’s hormones and emotions are in control of her thinking. she is unable to think very logically due to the limbic system being matured before the prefrontal cortex. This means that teenagers have trouble regulating their emotions and have very poor impulse control. This causes Cady to come to conclusions that are not particularly true, all due to her inability to think as adults do and understand where they are coming from. This creates conflict between adults and teenagers, adults consistently think badly about teenagers although they are just learning. They are experiencing puberty and hormonal changes that teens do not understand or even realize.
Cady is in Piaget’s formal operational thought stage, in this stage teenagers are now able to think logically, hypothetically, and abstractly. Adolescents in this stage experience adolescent egocentrism, which causes adolescents to think they are being watched by an imaginary audience. Adolescents start to become self-conscious, they worry about their hair, their clothes, makeup, etc. This is the case in Mean Girls, each of The Plastics is self-conscious about some part of their body and begin to pick at their imperfections, although they have society’s body standards. Girls who do not need to lose weight feel that they need to, “many adolescents obsess about being too short or too tall, too wide in the hips or too narrow in the face, too hairy or not hairy enough, with fingers too long or legs too fast, and so on,” (Berger, 324). Regina, for example, has a body that plenty of other girls probably wish they had, but she is unhappy with it. She tells the others that she would like to lose three pounds and begins an unhealthy diet, where she eats less. Other female characters in this movie suffer from poor body image as well. There are cliques specifically for anorexic girls and for girls who binge-eat. The Plastics have a book of filled with rumors and insults about the other girls in their grade, this book is called the Burn Book. The Burn Book displays the girl on girl crime that occurs in adolescence.
Cady starts off as a sweet, kind girl and ends up being a mean, selfish girl. This is mainly due to peer pressure and her desire to fit in. She wants to be a cool girl, in adolescence this is a recurrent problem. Teenagers want to be cool and popular, they do not seem to really care for actual close friendships. Cady lets the popularity of The Plastics get to her head, she begins to lose sight of the “plan” and in turn loses her only real friends, Janice and Damian. Adolescents rely on peers rather than adults and will do anything to impress their peers. For example, in Mean Girls, Cady wants to join the mathletes because she excels at math, but she is told that it is “social suicide”. Cady decides not to join because it is uncool to join academic programs in the adolescent years, but it is cool to be attractive and popular. When a popular person wears a certain style it is usually followed by those of a lower status. This is displayed when Janis cuts holes on the breasts of Regina’s tank top, numerous girls followed Regina’s lead and cut their tank tops the same way and wore them. This is an example of the social learning theory, these girls presumably wish to be popular and what better way to do it then to follow someone who is popular.
Cady experiences role confusion when she realizes that she has become a mean girl, she becomes just like Regina, who is disliked for being evil. This happens when Janice and Damian end their friendship with Cady, she realizes that she lost two good friends. She was caught up in herself, she became selfish and lost herself in the process. In order to get her crush, Aaron, to like her Cady purposely fails in her math class to get him to tutor her. Although she knows this is wrong she does it anyway, just to get him to like her back. As a junior in high school, she should be focused on passing her classes, but as an adolescent she is not very focused on her future. Towards the end of the movie, Cady realizes that she must stick to her true self in order to be happy and have friendships that mean something. She realizes that being popular is not important. She was punished by her mother who says she does not know who Cady is anymore, she makes things right by reverting back to herself. Her mother is helping Cady learn a lesson, that she should own up to what she did and be herself. She does this by owning up to the Burn Book that she hardly contributed to, proving that she is no longer the person she pretended to be.
Cady’s parents help her grow as an adolescent by giving her the freedom she desires. In the beginning of the movie her parents pack her a lunch for the first day of school and her father tells her to ask the “big kids” for help, talking to her as more of a child rather than a teenager. Later in the movie, Cady and her parents have plans to go away for a night, Cady asks for permission to stay home and her parents grant it to her. They are giving her freedom and show her that she is old enough and mature enough to stay by her lonesome. They are helping Cady grow as a person by giving her the space she needs to do so. Cady’s friends also help her grow as a person unknowingly. They ultimately helped her find who she really truly is, although she still has a long ways to find that out, she knows that she is not a mean girl.
Cady spent the last twelve years in Africa, she is more familiar with African culture than she is with American culture. When The Plastics pointed out their own imperfections Cady did not, and when she eventually did it was about her bad breath, rather than a bodily imperfection. This may mean that while Cady was in Africa she was not exposed to girls being unhappy with their bodies. It seems that American culture has corrupted adolescent girls, the media often displays women with “perfect” bodies. Adolescent girls then compare themselves to these models and begin to feel bad about their own bodies if they do not meet societies expectations, as presented in the movie.
To conclude, Mean Girls is a movie that displays the struggles girls face during adolescence. Experiencing adolescent egocentrism the characters in Mean Girls feel as though they are constantly being watched because they are popular. They feel as if they must always look good and as if being dumb is attractive. Adolescents do not care much for their future at their age, they care mainly about impressing their peers and taking unnecessary risks. Adolescents have a need for independence as portrayed by Cady, they also need to be trusted by adults. Cady does not feel trusted by teachers but when her parents grant her a night to herself, she feels trusted. A positive relationship with her parents will help her grow to be a happy person. Cady Heron, new to American public school, lost her way while letting popularity get to her. She becomes a new person that is unrecognized by her friends and mother. An adolescent who is ruled by emotions, Cady lets her emotions get in the way of who she is. Instead of sticking to herself and joining an academic program that she would excel in, Cady decides to act as if she is dumb, only to get a boy to like her back. All in all, she realizes that she does not like the person she had become, and reverts back to who she truly is. In finding herself, she helps other girls to accept themselves and helps the girl world find peace.