Mean Girls written and starring Tina Fey was a romantic teen comedy released April 30th 2004. Directed by Mark Waters, this movie, based on a novel by Rosalind Wiseman is a film about a high school junior who up to this point has attended home school while living in Africa with her parents. Her parents lose their tenure and thus they have to move back to the United States. Cady (our young heroine) is cast into a world, “girl world� as she calls it, that she knows nothing about. Being home-schooled in a country with a completely different culture then her new life, Cady is easily swayed by her fellow class mates. She makes friends with a young gay man, Damien and a socially awkward Goth-like girl, Janice, who are later described as “art kids�. They convince her to befriend the popular girls, also called “the plastics� in order to exploit their relationship and out their truly evil nature to the rest of the school.
“The plastics� lead by Regina George, are a group of three girls with strict rules on dress, dating and social code. However their plan backfires as Cady becomes friends with “the plastics� and turns into one of them. Through a variety of different rather insane scenes all the girls in the junior class find out their darkest secrets have been revealed, a bus hits Regina and Cady loses the friendship of the art kids.
However, in the end everything is okay because Cady shares the spring formal crown with everyone that she had upset while making an impassioned speech about equality between women focusing on the stereotypes of the disabled girl and the fat girl as people who need their self esteem reassured.
Looking at the poster, a lot of things are apparent. The movie will most likely be humorous because Tina Fey is acting in it (although basing movie genres after leading actors can often be a problem such as Will Ferrel in Winter Passing… drowning kittens in not funny). And since Tina Fey is an ex-writer of Saturday Night Live, we know its at least intended to be funny (whether it actually is funny is all depending on who is watching it). Lindsey Lohan is a popular teen star so we can assume it’s going to be a teenage, most likely high school, film.
Looking at the three girls on the left the first thing I notice is their aggressive stature. It is obvious who the “mean girls� are. This is further supported by the text underneath them stating, “watch your back�. This is not referring to getting stabbed in the back literally but more to the idea that women don’t deal with conflict head on, they just talk sh** about each other behind their backs. Which is something the girls in this film do regularly to each other. The next thing I notice is their dress. Why are they dressed so scantily? I don’t really know. There isn’t anything in the movie, other than the character of Karen, who is called a “slut� on many occasions, which would leave reason for these girls to dress like this. I believe this is just one way to market this film to men. Because at first glance, since this is a “chick flick� men supposedly wouldn’t be interested in seeing it. But now that we’ve added barely legal almost naked young ladies, the men are supposed to come a running. They are all wearing pink, a nod to their femininity, and also a rule for Wednesday apparel.
And on the left, we see Lindsey Lohan, dressed in full jeans, covering all her legs and a modest red shirt. As we’ve discussed in class red is a symbol for a lot of things, in this case, I think blood and murder is one of them as Lohan’s character, Cady is later accused of pushing Regina in front of a moving bus. However, although Lohan is dressed far more conservatively than her pink counterparts, she is still being quite sexualized by her exposed navel and tight fitting top. On her face is a look of fear and confusion. She has entered a world she knows nothing about and is going to suffer the consequences of that.
Lohan is separated from the “mean girls� by text. Most of the text is the fine print with details of the movie but also by the title of the movie. MEAN being in bold large font and GIRLS being in a smaller less threatening font. What does this mean? Girls are supposed to be sweet and innocent and not show anger. By making MEAN bold and threatening but not following through with this font through the rest of the title, it shows that these girls are not the norm. Not all girls are mean; most of them are sweet and innocent. It attempts to disconnect the two ideas, we hear MEAN girls, instead of MEAN GIRLS. One is yelled the other whispered.
So although I really did enjoy this movie and it is on my top ten list, it does carry a lot of damaging images, just on the poster alone. It would have been easy, I think, to make this movie without sexualizing the teenage girls as much as they did.
