Totally Fetch “On Wednesdays we wear pink. ” Most teenage girls would catch this popular Mean Girls reference. This pretty pink picture features the four main characters from the Paramount movie Mean Girls. The image focuses on Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). Her three friends, Regina George, Gretchen Wieners and Karen Smith, are surrounding her fixing her hair, applying her makeup, and attempting make her perfect. The girls surrounding Cady symbolize the constant pressure placed on high school girls today to look a certain way in order to fit in. Girls are judged everyday.
Not only by guys, but also by other girls on their appearance. They are expected to be petite, have long healthy hair, flawless skin, pretty eyes and eyebrows, and have straight teeth. In this picture, Cady is the girls’ personal Barbie doll. The girls in this picture are meant to appear shallow, high maintenance, and conceited. It fits their personalities in the movie. The photographer meets those expectations by posing their bodies and facial expressions. One thing that attracts my attention almost instantaneously, is the overwhelming presence of pink.
There is a pink background, pink clothes and pink makeup. The color pink is significant in this picture because pink is commonly thought of as a feminine color. Society accepts pink as a color that stands for all things girly. The photographer’s decision to feature excessive amounts of pink in this picture also had ulterior motives. The choice of color supports the earlier statement- about pressure placed on girls to look a certain wayby focusing the person’s attention to the femininity of this image.
It doesn’t show girls surrounded by blue worrying about their appearance. It intentionally shows girls surrounded by pink worrying about their appearance. Showing Cady surrounded by the “plastics” symbolizes the painfully common occurrence of conformity in high school students. Cady is being blended, teased and lined at the hands of the plastics. They are called the “plastics” because they are extremely beautiful like plastic dolls on the outside, but lack inner beauty and personalities.
As a result of there being no words on this image, one must recall the plot of the movie, and use that to find the deeper meaning hidden in this photograph. I think this picture suggests that these girls corrupted Cady. Experiences from both public school and the people who attend it changed her. When Cady attends her first week of public school, she is her own person. She wears clothes she is comfortable in, wears her hair in a ponytail and doesn’t wear makeup. She is a little too naive, and Regina George takes advantage of that.
It doesn’t take long for her uniqueness to be conquered and reshaped to fit the mold of a self absorbed seventeen-year-old girl: one who is obsessed with her appearance. Someone I wouldn’t want to be friends with. Gretchen Wieners teaches her the rules of feminism like: you can’t wear tank tops two days in a row, you can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week, and you can only wear jeans or sweatpants on Fridays. Cady becomes obsessed with this new way of life, and loses herself. In the picture Cady’s face is fierce and emotionless, this shows that she has lost her once caring personality.
She has become plastic. Her personality has been replaced by a cold hearted one. Cady’s transformation is hard to capture in just one picture, but this photograph does an impressive job. Although this image is used as a promotion for the movie Mean Girls as opposed to an advertisement or another form of propaganda, it still possess an ethos appeal. If an image has an ethos appeal, its intentions are to make a person feel a certain type of way when he or she looks at that image. What caught my eye about this photograph was the people in it.
I recognized the girls as the stars of one of my favorite movies. If people who see this image are familiar with the movie Mean Girls, then this picture would probably make them chuckle. They know the personalities of the girls in the picture and they think about how their personalities changed through the movie. Even though the picture portrays them as high maintenance bratz, the girls learn that their appearance isn’t as important as they thought. What is on the inside is significantly more important.
Way too often people overlook the pressure placed on teenagers to fit in. They don’t understand the lengths, girls especially, go through to be accepted. This picture, however, is a good portrayal of these occurrences. At the end of the movie, “girl world is finally in order. ” The plastics finally realize that there’s more to life than the way they look. So for me, a person who knows the movie well, I have to applaud the irony of the situation captured by the photographer in this pre-realization shot.