Celebrity and Social Hierarchy in Mean Girls: Where the Power Ultimately Lies

2622 Words11 Pages
Fadhilah Abdul Rahman Zamawi UWC2101H: Power, Space and Pleasure Group 2 Dr Johan Geertsema Celebrity and Social Hierarchy in Mean Girls: Where the Power Ultimately Lies Paper 3 Final Draft 16.11.2010 Mean Girls is a teen comedy film released in 2004, directed by Mark Waters with a screenplay written by Tina Fey. It was partly based on the non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman. The movie chronicles the experiences of 16-year-old Cady Heron who recently relocated to suburban Illinois from East Africa and attends North Shore, a school where the girls follow a strict social hierarchical system. At the top of the social ladder are the ‘Plastics’, an elite clique made up of the three most popular girls in their junior class - Regina George, Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith, with Regina being right at the top of the social hierarchy (the reigning ‘Queen Bee’). Cady is invited to sit with The Plastics during lunch, an offer only extended to a privileged few. In the beginning, Cady kept up the pretense of being friends with them in order to plot Regina’s downfall, but the more time she spent with them, the more obsessed she became with the idea of being in The Plastics: “Being with the Plastics was like being famous. People looked at you all the time and people just knew stuff about you.” (Mean Girls) When Cady’s plot finally works out and Regina was overthrown as the reigning ‘Queen Bee’, Cady swiftly replaced her at the top of the social hierarchy, without any protest from the other Plastics or the other girls in the school. There is something that I find particularly striking in this movie - the girls in the school hold Regina in such high regard even though it is evident in the movie that she acts nastily towards most of them. In fact, despite this, there seems to be a certain degree of honor attached to coming into any form of contact

More about Celebrity and Social Hierarchy in Mean Girls: Where the Power Ultimately Lies

Open Document