Reflective Analysis
Caddy soon discovers that surviving in the African jungle is very similar to surviving the jungle that is her high school. On Caddy’s first day of school at a regular high school after being homeschooled her entire life she realizes how closely people’s behaviours resemble that of animals in the jungle. Many people can relate to the way she felt entering this new world as everyone has been in such a situation. Perhaps not to this extreme but I was once the new girl desperately trying to find my place in a new atmosphere. Caddy’s journey can also be related to recent recruits adapting to a new work environment, unknown to how things regularly go about. One of my jobs provided me with an outline of normal office habits; casual Fridays, on birthdays there are potlucks, the outline even provided me with some of the regular office language, short forms for certain documents, etc. This was a map to help me familiarize myself and integrate with greater ease. Unfortunately Caddy did not have this luxury, as many people don’t. She is forced to figure it out for herself. This hardship of adapting can easily lead us to not portraying our true selves to potentially avoid being shunned as an outsider.
There are many stereotypes integrated into the movie. When Caddy is introduced as a new student from Africa the teacher welcomes an American black student instead of her. People easily believe her when she tells them that in Africa everyone can read Swedish, which portrays the ignorance of her fellow students and they’re ignorance regarding other cultures. People are unfamiliar with Caddy’s African culture just as she is unfamiliar with the American high school culture. She learns that there is an unwritten social rule preventing her from acting on her crush due to Aaron being her new friend’s ex-boyfriend. She learns that being good at math is not the key to gaining social hierarchy. She discovers that by infiltrating “The Plastics” she in turn becomes more like them, soon to realize it is not as she was hoping.
Throughout the movie Cady compares her new surroundings to the wild African jungle. On her first day of school the people at school remind her of the animal world, they portray similar behaviours to apes. When Caddy is at the mall the fountain reminds her of a water hole in Africa where the people act like mating animals. Caddy has an abundant knowledge of how animals interact, where conflicts are settled through head to head fights but she is lost when facing the harsh world of teenage girls and gossip. After the incident with the burn book pages containing rumours of every girl being spread across the school the principal’s secretary announces that the girls have gone wild literally causing jungle madness, confirming how Caddy views her high school. Ironically the school mascot is a lion providing a direct relation to the jungle. Later in the movie when Caddy is talking to her dad at the dinner table explaining to him that she feels like a hog surrounded by lions. Once again relating her situation to the jungle world, which she knows and understands so well. She feels returning to school after admitting she wrote the burn book she will be prey for the harsh stares and rumours of everyone else, the lions.
When Caddy is still familiarizing herself with the new culture she is incapable of resisting becoming part of it even though she understands little about the culture. She began as an outsider and ended up becoming the Queen Bee of the main clique “The Plastics”. At the beginning of the movie she is very innocent and naïve, even experiences language barriers with the jargon only known by people a part of the culture. When a boy asks her if her muffin is buttered she does not understand. One of the members of “The Plastics” group refers to Caddy as a Martian as she does not share the same core values.
It is not only Caddy that is unfamiliar with the American culture but her family as well. Her dad did not comprehend that grounding implies Caddy not being allowed out. The movie begins with Cady at the extreme of an outside culture, the African jungle world, and ends up at the extreme of the new American culture, the Queen Bee, before she finds the in between where she fits in.

Critical Analysis
Two concepts from the course material that I found relate to the characters in Mean Girls are Individual Motivation specifically how the different characters fit in with McClelland’s Need Theory and Organizational Culture examining the high school as an organization with its own culture.
David McClelland looked at the way people think and feel not the way they behave. He used the Thematic Apperception Test, where subjects were asked to write stories in response to pictures. These stories were analyzed to reveal dominant human motives: the need for affiliation, need for power, and need for achievement. He believed people had a degree of each of these motives in their thoughts. Mean Girls can be evidently related to the need for affiliation and the need for power.
McClelland defined the need for power as the need to influence and lead others and be in control of one’s environment. There are two sides to this need, the positive being socialized power, which is the need to influence for the good of others. The negative being personalized power, which is unsocialized concern for personal dominance. Personalized power is observed in Mean Girls through Regina George, the head of “The Plastics”. She is the Queen Bee of the high school with a need to always be on top. She has a very snotty attitude, intimidating everyone and being a bully. Nevertheless, most girls wanted to be like her and have her good looks. She has a great need for personal dominance and is very dictator-like. Cady eventually overthrows Regina. The main reason for this to have occurred is Regina broke the social contract with her clique; Cady exposed Regina’s true thoughts about Gretchen and Karen. Cady became encompassed by the new power she held as reigning Queen Bee. Power has the potential to corrupt turning Cady into the worst version of herself. Cady requires everyone around her to point out that being Queen Bee has destroyed the goodness in her. Cady later changes her power to Socialized Power and seeks to make the high school culture a better place. One where everyone is equal, destroying the hierarchy that has for so long hurt the members of the culture easily turning friends to enemies. We see this being represented at the Spring Fling when she uses her new title as Queen to engage and empower others to change and be better people. She shares the crown saying everyone deserves a portion allowing everyone to benefit from the title. By doing this she destroys the dominant culture and allows a better culture of equals to take its place.
The need for affiliation is defined as the desire for friendly and close interpersonal relationships. Again there are two sides to this motive, the positive being affiliative interest which is a concern for interpersonal relationships but not at the expense of goal oriented behaviour. The negative side is affiliative assurance, which is a concern with obtaining assurance about the security and strength of one’s relationships and avoiding rejection with the expense of their true goals. Cady begins the movie with affiliative interest where she wants to make friends but her like for math does not get expended. She can later be related to having a high need for affiliative assurance due to her worry about being disliked by the people in her high school. She avoids issues and conflicts that might threaten her relationship with Regina. Even though Cady hates Regina after she promised to put in a good word to Aaron but instead backstabs Cady and gets back together with him, Cady does not confront Regina. Another instance where Regina comments on a skirt of a girl walking by saying she likes it but then turns to Cady saying it’s the ugliest skirt she’s seen makes Cady remember when Regina commented on her bracelet her mom made for her, again she compresses the want to address Regina’s harsh actions. Cady devotes her effort to maintaining certain relationships and her image as a plastic letting her math work fall behind and not joining the mathletes even though she truly loves math.
Caddy’s high school is defined by an array of subcultures and countercultures. At the beginning of he movie when Janis gives Cady a map of the school Janis has identified all the subcultures in the seating plan of the cafeteria, from the jocks to the nerds to “The Plastics”. Organizational culture can be defined as the pattern of shared assumptions, values and beliefs that lead to certain norms of behaviour. They are often accepted, but not discussed. The dominant culture manifests the values shared by a majority of the organization’s members. Subcultures usually share the dominant culture’s core values as well as other values that characterize themselves. There are also countercultures whose values are in opposition to those of the dominant culture.
“The Plastics” can be described as the dominant culture. Everyone else in the school follows their lead and believes what they believe in. If “The Plastics” demonstrate a certain style is no longer in style then the subcultures follow. For example, when Janice tries to sabotage Regina by cutting holes in Regina’s top, Regina instead wears it with pride showing a “new trend”, the next day everyone else has cut holes in their shirt to follow Regina’s example, they are all part of subcultures. The subcultures are outlined in the movie when Janice provides a map to help Cady navigate in this new culture. The map shows all the subcultures and where they sit in the cafeteria, from the Asian nerds to the cool Asians to the desperate wannabes and even the sexually active band geeks. Janis defines her counterculture as the “greatest people you will ever meet” and warns Cady of the dangers of the dominant culture “The Plastics”. Janice and Damion, the counterculture, reject the general cultural values set by the “The Plastics” and respect their own values; they will not follow what the dominant culture sets out, but instead work to undermine “The Plastics”. The high school culture that Cady is introduced to has stories, rituals, symbols even it’s own language. She does not understand the culture at first. When a guy asks her if her muffin needs buttering she has no idea what he is implying because she is unfamiliar with the cultures jargon. When being recruited by “The Plastics” they inform her of the main things to be aware of in order to be a part of their dominant culture. They tell her about the ritual of wearing pink on Wednesday’s, the rules against wearing track pants or jeans on any day except Friday, and that you can only wear your hair up once a week. These rules and rituals are made very clear to Cady indicating the dominant culture being a very strong culture where their values and beliefs are widely and strongly held and not adhering to these values comes with a negative consequence. If it were a weak culture the values and beliefs would be less clear and less important. With such a strong culture in the school especially in “The Plastics” it is difficult to change. The way for a change to be facilitated is through a crisis and perhaps a turnover in personnel. The overthrowing of Regina act as a turnover in personnel and the downfall of Cady being a crisis allows change to occur in the high school culture.

Bibliography
Mean girls. Dir. Lorne Michaels. Perf. Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey. Paramount, 2004. DVD.
Organizational Behaviour. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc., 2007. Print.