Before Lindsey Lohan was in and out of rehab, she was Cady Heron, the “mean girl” that teenagers everywhere knew and loved. After its debut in 2004, the movie Mean Girls quickly grew into a popular teenage movie. The film is one that can be related to Leesville and other high schools across America.
The film provides such an accurate portrayal of high school life, it’s almost scary.
The comparisons start the second that Cady Heron walks into the cafeteria on her first day of school. Her new friends, Janice and Greg, double as her tour guide as they point out all the cliques in the cafeteria that range from “freshmen, varsity jocks, preps, Asian nerds, cool Asians, unfriendly black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who eat nothing at all, sexually active band geeks” and many, many more.
Leesville doesn’t necessarily segregate as precisely as the kids in Mean Girls do, but it would be wrong to say that Leesville isn’t cliquey.
Like the movie, Leesville students tend to separate themselves into groups with people whom they are alike. It’s rare to see a trumpet player hanging out with a football player, or a pot head hanging out with an AP English student.
In the film, Cady Herron befriends two entirely different sets of friends: Janis and Damien, a pair of outcasts, and “The Plastics,” a group of perfectly primped, popular girls. Throughout the movie, Janis and Damien use Cady as a saboteur within the popular group, using her insider status as a tool to take down the plastics.
This is where Leesville is different. It’s safe to say that students at Leesville are generally kind to each other. Perhaps I am naive, but as far as I know, no clique at Leesville has a “burn book” where they write crude criticisms about fellow students.The closest thing that Leesville students could relate to a “burn book” is formspring.com, the site that low-confidence teens set up to learn what people “really” think.
The scene in Mean Girls where the pages of the “burn book” are spread throughout school could be compared to scenes that happen online, when dozens of anonymous “haters” post crude remarks on each other’s formspring.com pages.
Despite these far fetched comparisons, I’d like to continue to believe that students at Leesville show more maturity and respect when regarding each other than “The Plastics” regard their followers in the film.
“Students at Leesville are definitely cliquey, but we are nice to each other,” said Morgan Burke, senior. “I think there’s a mutual respect between students at Leesville. We may not all be friends, but nobody hates each other. Nobody would ever push another student under a bus!”
Cody Beckett, senior, holds a similar point of view. “I mean, we definitely have cliques here, but everybody follows a general rule: you don’t mess with me, I don’t mess with you.”
The film Mean Girls shows an extreme representation of cliques in high schools, but Leesville shows Pride in being different nonetheless.
Katy has been on staff since her sophomore year, starting as a staff writer. With hard work and diligence, she earned a junior editor position and ultimately became Editor-in-Chief her senior year. She will pursue a degree in journalism in college.
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