Eight and a Half, or Otto e Mezzo, is a beautiful Italian
movie directed by Felini, a famous Italian director, and is filled with
wonderful Italian existentialism. The main character, Guido, is a director who
has made eight and a half films and he is trying to finish the last one by
taking experiences from his life and his past to try to find an ending. The
themes in this movie are overtly existentialist, so writing a film blog about
this movie will be a cinch. Or it would be, if that was the movie I selected to
blog about...
Mean Girls is a 2004 comedy starring Lindsey Lohan, Rachel
McAdams and Tina Fey, and upon viewing it, it probably does not seem like the
most existential work one would imagine, but beneath the surface of one of the
most culturally relevant movies of my high school career (for some reason), it
has strong existentialist themes driving about as obviously as a bright yellow
school bus.
Let's talk about inter-subjectivity:
As Sartre puts it, "The subjectivity which we thus
postulate as the standard of truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism, for
as we have demonstrated, it is not only one's own self that one discovers in
the cogito, but those of others too... Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a
world which is, let us say, that of 'inter-subjectivity.' It is in this world
that man has to decided what he is and what others are." In plain English,
when discovering ones self, they also need to discover those around them, and
vice versa. People need to evaluate each other, and if the definitions of self
by self and by others don't line up, you do not truly know yourself. This theme
is perfectly exemplified by the two main characters in Mean Girls: Cady Heron
(Lindsay Lohan) and Regina George (Rachel McAdams). Regina George and the rest
of the Plastics (teen royalty, girls who are perfectly popular in every way,
for the 3 of you who haven't seen this movie) see themselves as the girls all
the guys want and all the other girls want to be. Although they aren't
incorrect in this thinking, there's one part that they seem to forget, which my
favorite character, Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) sums up nicely (for the record,
this scene is something I will return to later, because Janis very nicely sums
up a lot of the existentialist themes in this film, so please bear with me...):
"See?
That's the thing with you Plastics. You think everybody is in love with you
when actually, everybody HATES you! Like, Aaron Samuels, for example, he broke
up with Regina and guess what? He still doesn't want you! So why are you still
messing with Regina, Cady? I'll tell you why, because you are a mean girl!
You're a bitch!"
(-IMDB,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT8wMBeVffk&feature=related)
Eloquently
put. The Plastics' views of themselves are radically different from everybody
else's, which according to Sartre, means that they have not found (or at least
accepted) their real identity. Furthermore, if you look at all of the
characters portrayed in this movie, peripheral or not (I see you too, Glen
Coco), nobody in the school knows their own identity because they don't see
themselves the way others see them. Each character is like the Mirror of Erised
from Harry Potter: the mirror shows you what your heart most desires, but
that's not the part that I'm relating it to. When people look into the mirror,
they each see something different, and that's the way peoples' opinions of each
other are in the movie. One person could look at Cady and see a lovely new girl
who just moved here from Africa, and somebody else could see just another Plastic walking the halls, ruining lives (as life ruiners often do), and a
third person could see something else entirely. No character in the movie is described
the same way twice by two different characters. For example:
"Janis: Regina George... How do I begin to explain
Regina George?
Emma Gerber: Regina George is flawless.
Mathlete Tim Pak: I hear her hair's insured for $10,000.
Amber D'Alessio: I hear she does car commercials... in
Japan.
Kristen Hadley: Her favorite movie is Varsity Blues.
Short Girl: One time she met John Stamos on a plane...
Jessica Lopez: - And he told her she was pretty.
Bethany Byrd: One time she punched me in the face... it
was awesome."
(-http://www.moviemistakes.com/film4175/quotes)
There
are one or two other places in the movie where these lightning fast descriptions
take place about another character, and none of them are identical. No matter
how ridiculous they are, they show how differently people see each other, and
how removed from some specific and unique "cogito" each of them is.
The
other existentialist theme that really jumped out at me while watching the film
was Sartre's idea of what makes a hero and what makes a coward, or in this case
what makes a Plastic and what makes everybody who isn't a Plastic. Again, I
look to Janis Ian to basically sum up my thoughts on the subject.
Cady: You know I couldn't invite
you. I had to pretend to be Plastic.
Janis: Hey, buddy, you're not
pretending anymore. You are plastic. Cold, shiny, hard plastic.
Damian: Curfew, 1:00 AM, it is now
1:10.
(-IMDB,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT8wMBeVffk&feature=related)
Damian's last line is unrelated to my point; I just love him
so much. But I digress. Sartre says that a coward is not born a coward, they
become a coward by acting cowardly, and the same is with a hero. It also
doesn't just happen after one time. You can't be heroic once and ride on that
wave for the rest of your days; you need to live up to that title and continue
to be a hero to legitimately earn that title. Cady definitely earns the title
of Plastic because by the end of the movie, she's gone from sweet innocent
Cady:
To acting like a Plastic to the point where, as Janis points
out, she's not acting anymore:
The transition is apparent in her mannerisms, her vocabulary,
her clothing, everything about her screams Plastic, because she has become one.
She has ceased acting like herself and has taken up the mantle of acting like
somebody else. As Sartre states, "The existentialist says that the coward
makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic, and that there is a
possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being
a hero. What counts is the total commitment." And Cady gives that
commitment: blowing off her friends, hurting Regina George just as Regina hurts
others, acting just like a Plastic and probably most symbolically, writing in
the Burn Book (educate yourselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrGGaKVesMc).
Cady abandons the mantles of a normal high school girl and of Cady Heron and
becomes a full blown Plastic simply by acting like one, almost like forcing
Alex to act like a "good boy" technically makes him a "good
boy." It's all about the attitude and all about the commitment, and Cady
has both.
I wasn't kidding when I said that Mean Girls was probably
the most relevant movie of my high school career, because without seeing it, I
wouldn't have understood about half of the jokes made by my peers. Its a
wonderful movie about what you should be, what you shouldn't be, what you can
become if you're not careful, and that there is a chance at redemption for
everybody. And yes, somewhere below that wonderful swath of comedy, there are
some existential themes, but I do recommend, before looking for these themes,
sit back, relax, and enjoy the movie first (also count the number of times they
make yellow school bus analogies... its quite amusing).
-ed rosini
hi
ReplyDelete