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Mean Girls

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The movie Mean Girls explores a huge number of concepts and ideas that we discussed in class. Of course it is meant to be a funny movie, but it does delve into the psychological and relationship influences and models that we discussed in class. More specifically, I chose to explore the subject of Fatuous Love, as well as the idea of Coercive and Reward Power.
In the movie, there is a rather quick and overly passionate relationship that develops between the “mean girl”, Regina George, and the love interest of the movie, Aaron Samuels. Firstly, the relationship happens for all of the wrong reasons. Regina only is with Aaron to spite her “friend” Cady Herron. In the text it defines fatuous love as, “passion and commitment in the absence of intimacy” …show more content…
She is the leader of a group of girls called The Plastics and they are the stereotypical popular girls in an average American high school. When it comes to coercive as well as reward power, the text defines it as, “A person’s ability to bestow various rewards and punishments on someone else” (Miller, 368). Regina certainly has these types of powers within the school. One example of her displaying reward power is when she stops a girl in the hallway and compliments her skirt, the girl is obviously thrilled because Regina is notoriously mean. In this instance, her “reward” would be the compliment, or even the escape of Regina’s cruelness. When it comes to coercive power, Regina displays it pretty consistently throughout the movie. Students are clearly afraid to cross her in fear that she will retaliate and somehow harm them. The “punishment” she doles out has a lot to do with bullying and degrading others. One specific “punishment” she regularly seems to use is her use of the “Burn Book”. It is a book full of pictures of people who she feels have wronged her, and she writes nasty things about them. This comes around later in the movie when she tears the pages out and spreads them around the halls of the school effectively causing a riot. In the Chapter 12 PowerPoint, it states that, “The threat of such retaliation suggests that we should do all we can to assist and protect those who are trying to escape the

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