Teenage Movie Assignment

Lillian Kemp presents a teen movie presentation on the film Clueless. The movie follows the journey of Cher, a glamorous high school student, as she navigates friendships, relationships, and adolescent development. The film explores themes of sexuality, identity, and the influence of external factors on behavior. Cher's relationships with her father and her stepbrother Josh are important in her personal growth. The movie also showcases adolescent subcultures and challenges stereotypes about self-centeredness and maturity in teenagers. In conclusion, Clueless highlights the complexities of being a teenage girl and the importance of personal growth and self-discovery. Hello, my name is Lillian Kemp, and I did my teen movie presentation on the movie Clueless. So we'll start with our background and developmental themes. So this is a fun movie. It's pretty old, from 1995, and it's more than just glitz and glamour, and it's more than just romanticizing a famous lifestyle. But we have the star character, Cher, and it's about her journey of navigating through high school. Cher is known for her glamorous lifestyle, her fashion sense in her world, but she really does struggle with friendships and building relationships within her life, but in the end finds a way to grow as a teenage girl. She uses her glamour and her lifestyle to help build those relationships, and while there are many acquaintances in her life, she mainly goes through these stages with her best friend, and these two are the most popular at their school. And one of the main developmental themes in this movie is adolescent development through sexuality and identity. They openly have conversations with their female friendships with other girls about their sexuality, which is helping them grow with their experiences with no judgment. They also bring another character into the friendship circle, Ty, and they include her in all of the lavish lifestyle experiences, and in their mind, this is how they show their true friendship and love. And the girls in the movie, they use their experiences of their friendships, and they improve their developmental standpoint as adolescents, and it captures all the ups and downs of being a teenage girl with their amount of wealth. So then we're going to move on to our theoretical foundation, and there are many for this movie, but the one that I've chosen is the behaviorist and social learning theory, and as we discussed in class, this is credited to Albert and can be best summarized as the theory that people actively possess information. They think and feel emotion that thoughts and feelings influence their behavior. So ultimately, it describes how adolescents learn through observing and intimidating others around them, as well as acting within the environment that they're in. So this theory emphasizes external factors. So we're going to dive into how this plays out in the clueless. So Cher comes off as a typical, quote, dumb blonde, rich girl who cares nothing about anything but voice and fashion. Quote, as the movie plays out, you can see how Cher is a really sweet, open-hearted, caregiving person who wants to use her advantages in life to help her friends around her instead of just being self-centered. Examples like this are in the beginning of the movie when she brings her teachers together to form an intimate relationship, and other instances like including that not so popular tie to the group and making her feel important. It did take a toll, and Cher also learned that sometimes your kindness may be taken for granted, but it really just shows how she uses her environment as her way to navigate their love, pain, considering others, making friendships, relationships, things like that. And her friends also grow from their experiences, and they learn from each other. So this leads us into cultural and relational themes. So adolescent subcultures are portrayed all throughout this movie, and they're best described as the way that the girls carry themselves to school. Cher and DeYoung dress almost the exact same and behave the exact way. And examples include the infamous scene where the girls share the famous, clueless outfits with the checkers on them. And when the girls first meet Ty, she has no fashion sense and is not popular. And all throughout the movie, they're trying to include her in the lifestyles and let her talk to the boys that they think she should talk to. Other students and people in the community see the girls as sex symbols and having high social status, which they use to their advantage to get what they want, which ultimately they all come together to learn that there's more deeper meaning behind just being popular and pretty. All the girls share different races, and they all treat each other equally. The girls share a unique and united aesthetic where they bring their cultures together to unite as one and learn off of each other. Since Cher has no mother figure in the movie because she supposedly died from a liposuction accident, she really takes advantage of her friendships with her girlfriends to get advice and to give them advice. Some relational themes are really just seen with Cher's father and the character Josh, who we're just introduced to, who once was her stepbrother. And then she ultimately forms a romantic relationship with him. Josh is not popular. He works with her father with law practice that he owns in the movie, and she has a pretty typical relationship with her father being a 16-year-old girl. Cher's relationship with her father is pretty age appropriate. He cares for her dearly. And there's a scene where they get into arguments about certain outfits and boys that she has in her life, and it's scenes where her father tries to teach her real-life morals with his lawyer mentality. The only family figures in her life are them, but they still are important relationships to her and teach her a lot. So these are just some images of how their fashion really plays out throughout the movie. They have very similar tastes. They almost, like, do their makeup and hair the same. Very glamorous, very luxury. So we're going to move into part two of the cultural and relational themes. So in this slide, I really wanted to elaborate on the relationship that Cher has with Josh, because this relationship really shows how she grows within herself and from a developmental standpoint. It's very controversial because Josh is 19 and her ex-stepbrother, and he's in college, and she's only 16 years old. But in the beginning, she really hates Josh, and she wants nothing to do with him. She thinks he's just boring, and all they do is argue, and he has no social status, and she wants to be with a boy that does. And how the relationship is so important is it's because the love that she finds for herself that develops into a true love with Josh, because he is a truly good guy despite his social standing, and this proves that Cher goes through developmental changes within her identity and how she views herself. She does have many other relationships in the movie, and she truly finds herself, and that's when she realizes she has feelings for Josh. So here's some examples of how this can play out in the movie and just in real life. From body language and expression, you can see the difference in the way that she portrays herself around the boy that she wants to go with and be seen with and in the way that she acts with Josh. So then we're going to move into our realistic and unrealistic norms. So I picked two myths, both from sources cited on the next slide. So myth number one, adolescents are self-centered and selfish. This is clearly played throughout this movie because the main character Cher shows many examples of helping out adults, friends, and even her family. So it's almost like a contradiction because she seems like she's very full of herself. She knows she's pretty. She knows she's rich, but that's really not the person that she is. And according to HealthyChildren.org, these types of myths hurt the way adults view and interact with adolescents, but just as critically, they undermine the way adolescents view themselves. Cher is seen by her peers and viewers as a rich girl who owns everything she wants, and she's initially portrayed in this way, and that brings this myth to life because it may seem that she's that way, but that's not how she views herself or wants people to view her. So then we move into our second myth. By adolescence, a young person's development is pretty much on autopilot. This myth is also played throughout the movie because it seems like Cher in the beginning is perfectly pleased with herself and her social status, her friendship she already obtains, and as the movie progresses, she finds herself with a new friend and a new real relationship, and she also seems like she's really mature, but she still has a lot of learning left to do, just like all adolescents. So according to my second source, PsychologyToday.com, usually we think that teenagers are irrational and have a difficult time making good decisions, or that they have no self-control. However, this is not completely true. In fact, teenage brains can perform like adults in certain decision-making tasks, but teenagers appear to be heavily influenced by the context compared to adults or even children. So now we have some examples and a little bit more explanation. So for the first myth, Cher and her rich lifestyle. It comes off as she's nothing more than just a normal girl. She's a matchmaker. She clearly demonstrates many acts of caring for others, though, all throughout the movie. She invites the weird girl into her world. She buys her friends clothes. She also brings two of the school's most hated teachers together, which is the main plot at this point. All of this is to say that not all adolescents are self-centered, and if we think this way, and this is how it can be portrayed into real life, it's because this is how adolescents will view themselves, and then it will lead to the wrong behavior and self-image they have for themselves. So moving on to myth number two, Cher and her relationship with Josh. If this type of myth were true, which seems to be because she doesn't realize she needs to grow until deeper in the movie, until she goes through certain experiences, she would have never found her a relationship with Josh. For the fact that she used her environment to grow and develop, and she found real friendships and true love. Although her taste for fashion and arguments with Josh on politics seem adult-like, adolescents still have to grow and learn in order to be what they truly are supposed to be in life. So that's how that's portrayed out into the real world, because if we just assume that they're done developing, then they're never going to fully develop. So we will wrap up with my rating. I'm going to rate it a 7.5 out of 10. And yes, this is a great movie. It helps teens understand development through friendships and romantic relationships. And it does show that, like, you have to be true to yourself. But it probably is going to be a little bit harder for an adolescent male to relate to the developmental standpoint to this movie, because it is very female relationship-based. It's one of the main themes of this movie, having true friendships and learning from them and growing together. It does impact adolescence identity formation in positive ways, because it shows girls coming together and being happy, learning about themselves as a whole. Yes, they did have to go through some bad experiences to get there, but that's all a learning journey. Okay, and that concludes my presentation of the movie Clueless. And here's just some more images. And thank you so much.