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`` Mean Girls ' : A New Student At North Shore High School

Decent Essays

In Mean Girls (2004), Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) is a new student at North Shore High School. Throughout the film we hear the narration of Cady and witness the Bildungsroman of her character. Bildungsroman is known as “a specific subgenre of coming-of-age stories that focus on the protagonist’s psychological and moral growth. Hence, character change is extremely important” (Kusina, 2015). She has a major culture shock when she goes from being homeschooled in Africa to being a part of the most popular clique in school: “The Plastics”. In the beginning of the movie, Cady could be described as nerdy, awkward, and a typical home schooled “virgin”. She makes friends with Damian (Daniel Franzese) and Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) who tell her all about the politics of their high school. Janis and Damian give their outsider perspective multitudes of cliques at their high school.
A clip from Mean Girls that showed each of the social groups, or cliques, in their high school. These groups were described as; “freshmen, ROTC guys, preps, J.V. jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians, Varsity jocks, unfriendly black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don 't eat anything, desperate wannabes, burnouts, sexually active band geeks, the greatest people you will ever meet, and the worst... Beware of Plastics.” (filmsite.org) The lack of intersectionality is quite disturbing in this film when the students described as the “desperate wannabes” were shown in the lunchroom. One was a little

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