Difference between revisions of "Mean Girls Movie Project"

Revision as of 16:54, 19 April 2008

AP Psychology Project

How Hollywood exploited or helped the field of psychology? Was the movie biased? Did it help the field of Psychology or did it hurt the field.

Although Mean Girls is a Hollywood movie, it gets its inspiration from real life. Like any good movie, it starts with real life and exaggerates it to tell a compelling story.

Mean Girls is the story of Cady, who just moved to America from Africa where her parents worked. She was home schooled before and is moving to conventional schooling for the first time. Her parents and her have apprehensions of what would happen in school. These apprehensions normally happen at age 6, when a child goes to school for the first time. As Cady walks to the door, she passes many groups of people who pay no attention to her.

When she finally makes it inside, she embarrasses herself on her first day. She mistakenly talks to a girl who she thinks it the teacher and the class laughs at her. She then tries to find a seat, but as she is looking for one, she bumps into teacher and send the teacher's coffee flying. This plays up the apprehensions people have on the first day that they will embarrass themselves. Most people do not, however, embarrass themselves as much as Cady does however. Cady says, "The first day at school was a blur, a stressful surreal blur. [...] I never lived in a world where adults didn't trust me."

Later, going to lunch, Cady walks through the cafeteria. She finds no one to site with, so she eats lunch on the toilet in the bathroom.

The next day she meets outcasts Janis and Damien. Janis does not fit into a clique, although she might be considered to be a goth because of her black hair. Damien is labeled as "too gay to function" by one of the students. The school does not seem to have a goth or gay clique so the two hang out together. They are the first friends she meets.

They explain the Plastics to her, a group of beautiful, but stupid, social butterflies. Regina George is the leader for the Plastics.

Later that day, Janis hands Cady a map of the school cafeteria. In a brilliant sequence, the film breaks down the different tables of the cafeteria (freshmen, preps, Asian nerds, unfriendly black hotties, girls who don't eat anything). In my personal experience at Haverford High School, this is exaggerated to be a bit more clear cut. In general people sit with their friends and their friends usually share similar interests. However no one has ever taken the time to draw a map of the cafeteria, and would have a hard time classifying groups.

This is where Hollywood exaggerates real life in my experience. People do not fit into nice, neat cliques as in the movie.

In the cafeteria, Cady meets "The Plastics", a group of gorgeous girls, so named because they are rumored to have had plastic surgery. The Plastics want to make Cady one of them. Cady, however finds out that they have a lot of rules which they must follow, for example, not going out with someone else's boyfriend and requiring approval before she buys any new clothes.

Cady however, finds out that being a Plastic was not very fun. They were always stabbing each other in the back and making fun of others. Cady remains friends with Janis, who wants revenge on Regina George, the head of the Plastics, who ostracized Janis a few years ago. So Cady remains friends with both groups.

As the movie goes on, Cady finds herself liking the Plastics more and more while continuing to try and sabotage them for Janis.

According to A New Universal Mean Girl: Examining the Discursive Construction and Social Regulation of a New Feminine Pathology by Jessica Ringrose, "feminist psychologists and educators, including Gonick, consistently claim that it is the reactive positioning of girls’ aggression in popular culture and media that has worked to pathologize and naturalize girls’ aggression in highly problematic ways" ([1] Page 3). This indicates that some psychologists think that by recoginizing this behavior in pouplar movies, more girls will adopt the behaviors of the girls in the film. These psychologists strongly believe that Mean Girls has hurt the field of psychology.

However the author disagrees with these psychologists as argues that "these gender equivalency-seeking, sensationalist narratives do not emerge spontaneously out of a ‘popular’ culture or media backlash against feminism, as implied by these critics" (3). Rather, she investigates "how feminism is wrapped up in complex ways in what is a contradictory ‘postfeminist’ narrative of the mean girl" (3). The author goes on to talk about many stories and movies about mean girls including Mean Girls.

animals at fountain biologist gives her a good perspective

Brainstorm

• http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.tran/media_contributions
• Cliques
• Stereotypes
  • Mean Girls enforces them
    • But shows their weaknesses
• Girls mean to each other
  • http://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol36/vol36n32/articles/Ostrov.html
• Review: http://www.slate.com/id/2099693/
• Journal study on Mean Girls: http://fap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/16/4/405.pdf
  • Psychology has followed Hollywood and confirmed it and explored it more