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Signature Assignment # 2
Mean Girls
Kamree Jorgenson
Salt Lake Community College

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Mean Girls
The movie Mean Girls is about a girl named Cady. Cady is homeschooled for most of her life,
but her family moves and she then goes to a regular public school. Her first friends are Damien
and Janis. She learns about different cliques from them. Damien and Janis also tell Cady to avoid
this clique called the plastics. The plastics is a group of popular, pretty girls. Their names are
Regina, Gretchen and Karen. They arent very nice and thats the reason why Damien and Janis
tell Cady to avoid this group of girls. However, Cady gets involved with these girls anyways.
Cady pretends to be friends with them instead to get revenge on Regina. Cady does things like
ruin her relationship with her boyfriend Aaron Samuels, and gives her candy bars to try to get her
to be fat. Cady then becomes one of the plastics and becomes a mean, popular, pretty girl. At the
end of the movie though, she learns who she is and becomes a normal teenage girl.
Throughout the movie Cady reflects Eriksons view of the identity crisis; identity vs. role
confusion. The primary task for adolescents is to find ones own identity. During this time,
teenagers will reconsider the goals and values of their parents, accepting some and discarding
others. Cady reconsiders her values when she goes to school. She never had to question her
identity prior to this because she was homeschooled and just accepted her parents values
without questioning it. Cady tries to figure out where she belongs by hanging out with different
cliques. She question whether she is a homeschooler, mathlette, art freak or a plastic. She
resolves this at the end of the movie. She develops her identity when she owns up to everything
shes done wrong and makes things right. One thing she dies wrong when she is in the clique

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the plastics is say that her teacher is a drug dealer. She then later has to clarify that her teacher
is not a drug dealer.
Other identity view that are shown throughout the movies is Marcias identity stages.
There is identity confusion, foreclosure, moratorium and achievement. Cady doesnt show
identity confusion because identity confusion is when the person has no commitments or values
or goals. They are unfocused or unconcerned about their future. I dont think Cady is like that.
However, Cady does show to have identity foreclosure because she takes her family's values and
traditions and that is who she is. She never questioned it. But then she goes to school and she
does question this and enters into identity moratorium. She is exploring which clique she fits into
and who she is. By the end of the movie, Cady own up to what she did wrong throughout the
movie and also gives a nice speech when she becomes the spring fling queen. By the end of the
movie she has achievement because she knows who she is and accepts it.
Cady makes bad choices when it comes to the boy she likes. Cady likes Aaron Samuels
and even though she states to really enjoy math and by good at it she tries to dumb herself down
to get Aaron to like her. She wants reasons to talk to him so she pretends to be bad at math so
that he will help her and tutor her. When Aaron finds out that Cady did all of that to get him to
like her. He is not impressed and her plan to get Aaron Samuels to like her doesnt work. She
does get him at the end, but that was after she owned up to everything she did and she was
herself.
Prior to going to this public school, Cady had a very close relationship with her parents.
However due to Cadys actions her parents get mad at her and ground her. This rebellion is a
result because Cady is exploring who she is and along the way she made some bad decisions.

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Cadys friends had a huge role in her decisions thats how we know that she had not yet
found her identity and who she was because she basically did anything for her friends or
anything to impress the people she liked. For example, in the beginning of the movie Cady meets
her first friends in class. They show her where the health class is which is outside. Her friends
take Cady outside to ditch class. Cady then say I know its wrong to skip class, but Janis said
we were friends. Despite Cadys strong belief that skipping class was wrong, she does anyways
because she wants friends. Also Cady is interested in joining mathletes, but then she doesnt
because her friends tell her that it is social suicide.
In the end, Mean Girls is a movie about a group of teenage girls that do through finding
their identity. It also shows social accepts of an adolescence life and how friends and finding
people who like you is really important to a teenager.