Mean Girls

Watching mean girls really over emphasizes the stereotype the media pins on teenage girls. the movie portrays us to be bitchy, conceited, worried only about our appearances and where we sit on the social hierarchy. The 'mean girls' on this movie sabotage and backstab each other; they care only for themselves. Is this a fair representation of the way teenage girls actually are? I'd say half and half. Girls are worried about their appearances and about what people think of them, that's only natural but movies like this make it seem like bagging on your own appearance and other peoples appearances is a normal thing to do. Although the focus of the movie was to show extreme examples of the typical teen stereotypes and to discourage girls from wanting to be like that, the movie somewhat gave the younger more 'easily influenced' teenage audience an idea on how they should be acting. The main character Regina George is your typical 'barbie doll, mean girl' main character. shes gorgeous and flawless to the naked eye but when you see her inner working she's bitchy and two faced but also incredibly insecure about her herself deep down as was shown in the mirror scene. shes used to getting what she wants when she wants. then theres her opposite Cady Herron. Cady is also flawless but to begin with she's much more confident in her appearance, its not that she's arrogant about the way she looks but shes just actually happy and unworried about what others think about her, she is what she is and shes happy with that. As the film progresses however her character evolves into a 'mean girl' and we can see just how easily it is to be influenced by your peers if youre naive enough or insecure enough to believe them instead of standing up for yourself and what you believe is right.

Mean Girls was written from the book "Queen Bees and Wannabe's" by Rosalind Wiseman and  the book shows insight to the way high school girls form their cliques and groups and ways to combat angry, aggressive teenage girls and the bullying that accompanies them. The aim from this film was to show teens what not to be like but it did send images to young teens of what the older teenage girls are supposedly like and this can potentially lead them to behaving like the characters in the movie, those girls are not good role models. Teenage girls raise the expectations of themselves and lower their expectations of others meaning they're ridiculously hard on themselves in regards to how they look, act and speak but allow others to treat them like rubbish as they don't expect as much of them. because they lower their expectations of others it often leads to girls surrounding themselves with people who have different morals and beliefs and this can lead to all sorts of peer pressure and bullying issues. from the outside looking in at the life of a teenage girl our appearances differ dependent on the age of the observer. for example young girls look at teenage girls in admiration  the 'older girls' to them are who theyre aspiring to be like and so they absorb every shred of information in regards to them and take it on board, often taking it too far and in the case of acting out stereotypes too literal. Teenage girls from the perspective of their parents generation see us as being rude, hormonal and temperamental but they also see the deeper more caring side that is what real teens are like. We can be obnoxious and conceited but deep down we're really sensitve girls that really just want to be loved. We see slithers of this reality in Mean Girls, like when the burn book is photocopied and spread all over the school, at first the girls are all really angry and fired up but in the end they realise that theyre just hurting inside at the fact someone actually thought those things about them, that they confirmed the fears they might be having about themselves. teenage girls just wanna be loved by their peers and they feel that to do that they must live up to the expectations the media lays down by using stereotypes, airbrushing of models in magazines and by never placing an 'unattractive' actor/singer/model anywhere within the public eye. 

Girls are so insecure and this is very well portrayed in the Mirror Scene in Mean Girls. 'The Plastics' all stand around a mirror and point out tiny details about themselves that they dont like. The supposed flaws they have are things like their hairline and their nail beds and since when has anyone ever insulted or complimented you on the size of your pores? This scene just shows us that even though these girls are 'THE' girls to be like at school, they still cant be happy with themselves. and Cady's line is something i could not agree with more, "I used to think there was only fat and skinny, but apparently there can be alot of things that can be wrong with your body." This totally sums up for me the reality of a teenage girls life, you cant be happy with yourself, people wont let you, but is it you that notices your imperfections or your peers? and why do you notice these and are they in fact imperfections at all? why cant we be content with our appearances? because the media is constantly forcing themselves down our throats telling us who we can and cant be. If tomorrow a movie was to be released that was about intelligent teenage girls who were fighting for a cause, something like world peace, would it get an audience? not in comparison to films that contain pretty girls, bitchiness and boys, there doesn't even have to be a moral to the story or a half decent plot because the majority of teenage girls will go watch it because it would have been advertised and waved in front of their faces by their friends and they think 'hey i have to go see that, i don't wanna be left out'. they get to the end of the movie and think it was terrible but their friend next to them thinks it was fabulous and so you just go along with the flow because if she says its good and the reviews said it was good then im just wrong and i should keep my opinion to myself. and it works both ways, if that same group of girls had gone to see the world peace movie the majority would say it was terrible because thats how much the media has influenced the way we think and they we respond to things that actually matter, we cant care because if we did thats 'just not cool.'

This scene was well constructed and was visually appropriate and educating to watch. As each girl identified her flaws she was shown from the mirrors point of view in a single shot mid-close up. Every time they said something they disliked about themselves you could look for it on them, and not once did you see it. You didn’t see that weird hairline or the huge pores, the man shoulders or the weird calves you only saw one stereotypically perfect girl staring back at you and you wonder how on earth she can find anything wrong with that perfect image she has. Playing in the background is a song that is clearly ‘popular’ at that time and we’re told that. This allows the audience to see that the plastics clearly know ‘what’s up’ with the modern tastes. Their costuming is similar to what we see them wearing everyday at school and at this point in the film we still see Cady in her pink polo acting as naive as ever when she mentions her bad breath, something the plastics don’t seem to consider a legitimate flaw. But the main focus of this particular scene is the dialogue which is where the stereotype of these ‘teenage girls’ is confirmed. As they continue going on and on about their bad points we see that they’re only saying these things to bring themselves down as there’s nothing much else wrong with them.

Image from:https://www.facebook.com/meangirls‎