Analysis Of Female Representation In The Movies Carrie And Mean Girls

Teen films have demonstrated that female youth can be represented as complex, multi-dimensional characters. When analysing this statement through the lens of Carrie (1976) and Mean Girls (2004), we can see that many of the female characters presented have their own unique personalities.

Coming out in the 1970s, Carrie was created in a world where social change was monumental, whilst Mean Girls in the 2000s was created in an already established liberal world, allowing for greater freedom in the creation of characters, which in turn as created wildly popular characters that have stood the test of time. Unconventionally, these two films focus on the female characters and almost have an absence of males altogether. It is important to understand how these two films feel unconventional due to the nature of male and female roles. In a post about Carrie, Kakmi says Carrie “. . . portrays a world from which men are either absent (Carrie’s father abandoned his family, Sue Snell’s father is never mentioned) or relegated to the periphery as awkward headmasters and ineffectual boyfriends, manipulated by women. ” In the film we only get to really know two male characters, Billy and Tommy, who truly resonate with the statement of being manipulated by the women around them. Tommy is convinced to take Carrie to the prom by his girlfriend, Sue, and Billy is told how to talk and act by his girlfriend Chris. In the universe of Carrie, we see that the girls are the ones who rule and manipulate, and the males are either subject to their power or disappear completely. This sense of the missing male was not lost on audiences, as “virtually all the main characters are women”.

Mean Girls has a similar but less extreme approach towards its male characters. Rather than being entirely absent, the males are often pushed to the side to make way for the titular group of girls. Damian, Aaron, Kevin, and Mr Duvall play much minor roles in the film to the girls, with most of them almost never becoming the catalyst for change in the film, except for Aaron who drives the initial wedge between Cady and Regina; instead, we see Janis and the Plastics befriending the new girl Cady, Janis hatching the plan to destroy the Plastics, and the subsequent implosion at high school as Cady and Regina become more vicious towards each other, all lead by female motivations. Both films also reflected this idea through their promotional material, where the men were entirely absent on the posters for ‘Carrie’ and ‘Mean Girls’. As such, we see the women throughout Mean Girls and Carrie driving their own fate, rather than taking a backseat and following male orders.

Now, we see Carrie, who is described as the “the shy, friendless outsider among her classmates. ”, in stark contrast to our most popular girls at school of Mean Girls. The first time we see Carrie, she is berated for her lack of skills in volleyball, then is isolated in the corner of the locker room whilst the other girls are carelessly wandering around the room naked. Instantly, we understand Mitchell’s statement and Carrie’s mentality, as Sissy Spacek contorts her body to hide, while the other girls freely expose themselves. Her isolation in the room further demonstrate these qualities, and begin building a clear vision of the complex life Carrie White lives. This scene follows a major turn in tone as Carrie gets her first period and, as Kakmi explains, “. . . we are privy to an enclosed, oppressive female space, in which the women turn on each other in vengeful combat. ” In the first minutes of Carrie, that audience is subject to the overtly female act of menstruation, demonstrating Carrie’s unapologetic sense of femininity and womanhood. She is a woman, and the audience will know that. In the context of horror films, Carrie White is an entirely original movie monster, a seemingly ordinary high school girl with a troubled life. As Mitchell puts it, “Where Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is human but wholly grotesque… and The Omen’s (1976, Donner) Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) is the literal embodiment of evil, Carrie White is a richly complex character that engenders a range of contrasting emotions in the viewer”, signifies that female youth have been portrayed as complex as male characters, or even more so in some situations such as the horror villain. This status is often contested whether it harbors misogynistic views of the world, something that Carrie dispersed in audiences through its representation of the female characters. “Journalist Brianna Wu shared: Horror is one of the only genre films where women get to be the star, and have rich emotional lives”, whereas “. . . Anna Biller, who dislikes the misogyny of slashers, is an enthusiastic fan of Carrie, which, she says, “is a movie that is intensely psychological and is full of truths about human nature and feminine power”. For some critics, Carrie may be monstrous, but that monstrosity can also be seen as a feminine agency rare in films”. For Carrie, this means for once we are seeing a truly real female character, with genuine motivations and power to change the cause and effect within her life.

From the enormous torment Carrie experiences rises a character with deep complexities that show a real side to the high school experience, something many other teen films have failed to capture. The audience watches “a profoundly sad, pathetic wretch who undergoes a class, cliched even, swan-like transformation, only for it to mutate her into something uncontrollable, supernaturally powerful and vengeful”. Carrie’s representation of female youth demonstrates a deeply complex view of the demographic through the eyes of a bullied girl at school.

We can then flip the topic of female representation from the bullied to the bullies in Mean Girls. The first complex character we get to know of in Mean Girls is Cady, the new girl. Cady, having moved from Africa, progressively learns about the two sides to the girl world, “gossip, backstabbing, bullying, innuendo, bitchiness, hypocrisy, jealousy, ostracism, and the instability and fragility of identity are shown as one side of these girls; on the other side, without the make-up or the masks that conceal the adolescent fears and anxieties of teenage girls, are truth, respect, loyalty, inclusion and acceptance of ‘difference’”. Cady not only learns this way of life, but adopts and becomes part of it too. She becomes swept up in the glitz and glamour of this life and loses her identity and agency to fit in, before it all implodes, and she has the realisation and turning point to go back to her real self, highlighted by the ‘social suicide’ of joining the ‘Mathletes’. Cady shows depth in her math ability despite her pretty looks, willingness to not conform until she becomes a Plastic herself, and her ability to regain agency after losing it. We meet the most popular girls in school, the Plastics, which are “a trio made up of vicious queen bee Regina (Rachel McAdams), eager acolyte Gretchen (Lacey Chabert) and walking dumb-blonde joke Karen (Amanda Seyfried)”.

Each character seems to be a walking stereotype, as plain as their plastic name, but the journey they take demonstrates “a clear focus on teenage girls and the games, ruses and obfuscations that they think they have to play and perform for attention and self-esteem”. Regina leads the way with her queen bee attitude feeding into the games and ruses she plays. The audience is introduced to her as she is carried across the football field by the popular jocks, followed by a vox pop of students praising her, indicating that she has the whole school wrapped around her finger. This representation gives mixed feelings as Regina is a manipulative mean girl, but a powerful figure with agency who forges her own path. Whilst Regina adopts a royal persona, Gretchen embodies the mentally fragile follower, while Karen is a walking stereotype. Another potentially problematic representation as Gretchen’s mental state is often joked about, and Karen’s existence is to be the butt of all jokes. Despite Regina and Cady’s complex characters, many teen girls depicted in these films still fall into the trap of a one-dimensional extra. The film still comments on “the representations of arty types as ‘gay’ and consequently marginalised, along with representations of teenage girls as ‘mean’, are just two of the contested identities and stereotypes that the film explores and ultimately debunks”. The debunking of this comes in the film’s finale, as we see Gretchen and Karen move on from being characterless mean girls into finding a clique they belong in.

Upon the film’s release, Mean Girls was praised for its many genuine comments on the state of female adolescent life. Many reviews highlight its ability to convey “the entire obstacle course of girls’ adolescence” and the “rules that prevail in the ‘girl world’ [being] all to do with dress, diet and deportment”. Despite being a comedy, Mean Girls was still able to demonstrate the convoluted inner workings of the girl world, which in turn created a representation of female youth that displayed characters that felt real and multi-dimensional. This effect was not lost on the screenwriter Tina Fey, who said "Adults find it funny. They are the ones who are laughing. Young people watch it like a reality show. It's much too close to their real experiences so they are not exactly guffawing. " Fey’s quote encapsulates the sound representation of teenage girls in the film creating realistic characters. Even though it may still be hyper-stylized, “this film does make some serious points about peer pressure, growing up and the way modern teenagers must learn to cope with life” through the vicious representation of the titular mean girls.

Each film is clearly molded by the society present around it, which in turn helps these films build complex female characters. Carrie was created in the 1970s, and so “the social, cultural and political turbulence of the 1960s and ‘70s in America played a key role in leading many film-makers, both established and emerging, American and international and mainstream and independant, to produce works that as well as updating the horror genre for the modern age contained underlying commentaries on the state of the nation in that modern age”. As such, we see Carrie and the other women of the film break the common tropes of horror films in which they stumble around being led by a man to safety; instead, these women have agency to create their own destinies and are the catalysts for change in the story. Mean Girls, released in 2004, had much more creative freedom as it was created in the world of third-wave feminism. What is interesting is the directors interactions with the ratings board, being described as sexist. As Mark Waters explained ten years after the film’s release, “The line in the sand that I drew was the joke about the wide-set vagina. The ratings board said, ‘We can’t give you a PG-13 unless you cut that line. ’ We ended up playing the card that the ratings board was sexist, because Anchorman had just come out, and Ron Burgundy had an erection in one scene, and that was PG-13”. Despite its release following the monumental social change, Mean Girls was still hassled by institutions for its liberal freedom in expressing girls as girls. As well as this, Mean Girls was released at a perfect time socially, as it showed “the ways sisterhood - the mantra of the Second Wave of feminism - still goes sour in the age of the Third” something that would be impossible to achieve for Carrie as the second and third wave of feminism didn’t exist yet.