"You Can't Sit With Us": Interpersonal Conflict in "Mean Girls"

Mean Girls portrays the relationships between new student, Cady Heron, and the Plastics, a clique composed of  Regina George, the mean queen bee, and her two minions, Karen Smith and Gretchen Wieners. In the film Janis and Damien, two misfits, convince Cady to become Regina’s friend to ultimately sabotage her in the end by eliminating her “hot body”, “army of skanks”, and her boyfriend “Aaron Samuels” for revenge. Once Regina realizes Cady is fake, she frames her by giving the principal the Burn Book, a gossip styled scrapbook that the Plastics wrote about their peers. The classic comedy revolving around four high school girl’s fluctuating popularity is the perfect hunting ground for interpersonal conflicts.

The strongest interpersonal conflict theme presented in the film is power. Regina George is the most popular, beautiful, and mean girl at North Shore high school. She has control over the staff, boys, and most importantly, her closest friends. The Plastics’ friendship suffers from a balance imbalance. Regina dominates their relationship, making irrational rules like “on Wednesday’s we wear pink” and “you can’t wear your hair in a ponytail more than one time in a week”. When these rules are violated, the violator is told “you can’t sit with us” during lunch. This gives Regina complete control and power over her friends. She switches between disregarding their feelings, playing favorites, and treating them all like royalty. This leads to Karen, Gretchen, and Cady enduring her verbal abuse in hopes of becoming Regina’s favorite. Naturally, every group of friends has a leader, but Regina completely abuses her power. She says hurtful things like “people always forget about Karen because she’s such a slut”. Regina’s relational goal with her friends is complete dominance, while the friend’s relational goals is acceptance. This fuels an unhealthy cycle of enduring abuse to achieve a sense of belonging with the abuser, also known as a power dependent relation. For the reasons mentioned above,  Mean Girls shows ineffective use of power balance. The short terms effects from the unhealthy relationship can be seen in the film. For example, Karen tries to have a sexual encounter with her first cousin. Cady, once innocent and naive, begins throwing parties without her parent knowing, drinking alcohol, and trying to have drunken sex with Regina’s ex boyfriend. Lastly, Gretchen has an emotional breakdown during her English class while simply reading an essay. Long term effects of the power imbalance can include the girls being victims of domestic violence. Their desire for acceptance supersedes their self worth, which is extremely dangerous. It would also be plausible for them to develop a drug dependency to combat their low self esteem. Either way, I would predict the girls engaging in some sort of power dependent relationship.

There are also two examples of different conflict styles and tactics in Mean Girls. More specifically, once Cady Heron is corrupted, she tends to use a competitive style to deal with conflict. She begins to pursue her own concerns at the expense of Regina George’s life. However, she also uses avoidance. She never expresses to Regina that she does not like the way she is treated. This results in Regina being unaware of a brewing conflict. Cady gets caught in the avoid/criticize loop. She constantly talks about how mean and unfair Regina is, that even Janis and Damien get tired of hearing it. Instead of confronting Regina, she tries to ruin her life. For example, knowing that Regina “really wants to lose three pounds”, Cady gives her kalteen bars, but tells Regina they are for weight loss. When none of Regina’s clothes fit anymore, she is forced to wear sweatpants two days in a row, a violation of one of her own rules. Cady, Gretchen, and Karen tell her that she cannot sit with them resulting in Cady being the new leader of the Plastics. These are ineffective conflict styles. None of Cady’s actions resulted in Regina to treat her differently, it only made things worse because Regina ends up framing her. If she had used a more collaborative approach, she could have had more luck. On a different note, there are clear verbal destructive competitive tactics. Cady uses personal criticism quite often. She makes remarks about how Regina is not good looking and how unintelligent she is. She also uses denial of responsibility. The clearest example is her saying, “It may have seemed like I was acting like a bitch, but that’s only because I was acting like a bitch”. This statement allows Cady to justify her neglect for other’s feelings  by saying she was pretending to be mean. Short term consequences for Cady’s inability to use a collaborative style include her being grounded and unable to attend North Shore’s Spring Fling dance. Long term consequences can involve unstable and/or limited relationships due to her manipulative ways. I predict Cady participating in conflict-habituated relationships in her future.