Reception theroy

 Reception Theory

Mean Girls




This is a movie called Mean Girls which was released June 8th 2004. This is a teen fiction comedy movie about a teenager who returns to America after being raised in Africa, this teenager Cady was home schooled in africa and this film follows her experiencing high school for the first time. This film outlines the social cliques and unwritten rules for girls in high school and the effects they have on young girls. Young and Rubicams 4cs model would classify this audience type as mainstream. as it is a very popular film because of its reliability. Many people can relate to this movie because it is similar to the experience of high school and familiarise themselves with certain characters in the movie.

The Preferred Reading of this text would be that high school is made up of many different social cliques and the ideology is that the ultimate clique to fit into is the 'popular' group known as the plastics. This ideology comes from the audiences own experiences of high school. This film strongly represents a stereotype of an ideology that appearance is important and that girls have to be skinny and pretty and girly to be popular and fit in. This is shown by the way that Cady makes drastic changes in order to fit in, she looses weight, starts to wear a lot of makeup and dress in girly clothes.

The Oppositional reading for this text would be that the audience understands the ideologies of this text and has experienced this through their cultural experiences of going through high school. But decides to reject these ideologies and say that appearance is not the most important thing in high school and that just being yourself and being happy is the most important. 

The Preferred reading would be that the audience was maybe a part of the popular group in high school and chooses to reject the stereotype of the social cliques, this could be because they don't like being portrayed as the bitchy characters in the movie or they don't like the specific actors ad choose to reject this ideology.