Mean Girls

When hearing the title of the popular 2004 movie, Mean Girls, there are two common reactions. The first would be that of a teenage girl saying “OMG I love that movie;” the second reaction coming from an adult, possibly a parent, would reveal severe disgust and outrage at the social horrors encountering teens in high school. It is true that Mean Girls seems like a petty film about overly dramatic girls picking fights with each other to fill their meaningless, materialistic lives, but in reality, this film addresses some major social issues present in high school life that need to be brought to attention. The first issue that this movie brings up is the social hierarchy of high school life. Many adults were shocked that girls could be so cruel, after watching the initial “rituals” that Regina put Cady through. It’s as if Regina had to demean Cady to complete nothingness, so that her life would become “plastic.” In reality, this is not uncommon, because so many high school girls make popularity the main focus of their teenage years. What’s worse is the way in which they achieve this status, which usually comes from humiliating and degrading others. The scenes in which Cady views everyone as animals in the jungle, is representative of the animal like nature of teenage girls. All the fighting that is present amongst the animals in the jungle is present among the girls, except in a deceiving, backstabbing way. This suggests the implication that the roles of gender are reversing in society because men are usually considered to have animal like instincts, such as aggression. In Mean Girls the men are rendered weak and scarred of the women, a perfect example being Regina’s boyfriend’s inability to stand up to her. The girls are the ones causing the riot in the end of the film and the plastics are inducing fear in other students.

The basic meaning of this movie is to show the nature of teenage girls being affected by materialist standards of society. The clips of girls from various clicks talking about Regina’s hair, clothes, boyfriend, etc. show how fascinated girls are with status and material possession. This movie renders the plastics as extreme cases of popularity where the girls are completely fake, hence plastic, and empty on the inside. Their entire essence is therefore dependent on the latest Abercrombie trends and daily gossip.

While Mean Girls and the horror films, Scream and Saw are completely different, they do share some similarities brought up in the critiques. Although I have never seen either movies, I was able to make a connection between the female roles in both genres. The Scream critique says that “The genre of horror films has a fascination with the maternal as the creator, instigator and source of fear.” In Mean Girls the source of fear also comes from the women, hence showing how feminism tries to empower the female as the dominant figure that instills fear. More and more movies are characterizing men as the vulnerable figures, dominated by sadistic women. The Saw critique gives an explanation for the increasing violent nature of films as the result of society’s fear of terrorism. Similarly, the backstabbing nature of the girls in Mean Girls is symbolic of the way women deal with their insecurities and pressures of beauty, image, and popularity. In fact, Mean Girls can be viewed as a mockery of itself, because the goddess-like appearance of the plastics, appeals to insecure girls, therefore, exalting the same high school hierarchy that the film tries to ridicule in the first place. This ultimately produces a cycle where the media only encourages such behaviors in high school girls by creating characters, such as the plastics, which are the epitome of every girl’s secret desire to be the most popular.