Are you Plastic?
Satire is a form of insidious comedy that can often teach valuable life lessons. This particular literary device uses various forms of humor, irony, hyperbole and incongruity to mock a person’s stupidity and ignorance. During the Enlightenment era, a time of intellectual and cultural advancement, the use of satire enters into the writings of both Voltaire and Miguel de Cervantes. Although these stories were written in the distant past, the idea of satire can be applied to the modern-day film, Mean Girls. This comedy details the journey of a teenager entering a new school and the steps she takes to be accepted. Using trickery and scheming, she is then included in the “Plastics”, a superficial, often envied clique that runs the …show more content…
Candide, by Voltaire, portrays a naive man whose main objective is for travel to attempt reconnection with his love, Cunégonde. In this journey, he encounters many social issues and hardships exposing the inherent problems with the world. Then, Miguel de Cervantes’s, Don Quixote, depicts an old hidalgo who reads and praises chivalric romances. Comically, he is inspired by these books of gallant knights that motivate him to become one himself. The contemporary film Mean Girls effectively employs satirical techniques, which can also be seen through the works of Enlightenment writers Voltaire and Miguel de Cervantes.
In the modern-day film Mean Girls, director, Mark Waters, uses situational irony, which is similarly utilized in the stories written by Voltaire and Cervantes. Situational irony can be described as what transpires when a discrepancy appears between assumptions of something to happen, and what actually happens. Cady Heron, the protagonist of this satirical film, moves from Africa and becomes the new girl at a stereotypical American high school. After initially …show more content…
Ridicule is evident in the concept of friendships in Mean Girls. Typically, friendships involve ideals such as trust, respect and support. However, the depiction of the fickleness of the Plastics is greatly exaggerated. There is no real substance to their conversations and most of their discussions are quite superficial. True friendship is consequently mostly futile. Additionally, during the film, Cady mentally visualizes and compares the high school cafeteria activity to animals ravaging in the jungle. The idea that teenagers are like savages with territorial tendencies not only shows the unfortunate pecking order in schools but also the overall pettiness among teenagers. Similary, Don Quixote is replete with ridicule. The absurdities in beliefs that he is actually a courageous knight and his confusion about reality certainly are examples of this. He is a rickety, fifty-year old man, quite the opposite of what a young, vibrant knight is assumed to be. Moreover, his outrageous behaviors continue when Quixote appears at an inn, which he believes to be a castle, to be knighted. Quixote does not realize that the innkeeper is not a knight and has no clue how to perform this ceremony. Instead of asking him to leave, the innkeeper plays along with Quixote’s imagination. At the end of his visit, the
Satire is a form of insidious comedy that can often teach valuable life lessons. This particular literary device uses various forms of humor, irony, hyperbole and incongruity to mock a person’s stupidity and ignorance. During the Enlightenment era, a time of intellectual and cultural advancement, the use of satire enters into the writings of both Voltaire and Miguel de Cervantes. Although these stories were written in the distant past, the idea of satire can be applied to the modern-day film, Mean Girls. This comedy details the journey of a teenager entering a new school and the steps she takes to be accepted. Using trickery and scheming, she is then included in the “Plastics”, a superficial, often envied clique that runs the …show more content…
Candide, by Voltaire, portrays a naive man whose main objective is for travel to attempt reconnection with his love, Cunégonde. In this journey, he encounters many social issues and hardships exposing the inherent problems with the world. Then, Miguel de Cervantes’s, Don Quixote, depicts an old hidalgo who reads and praises chivalric romances. Comically, he is inspired by these books of gallant knights that motivate him to become one himself. The contemporary film Mean Girls effectively employs satirical techniques, which can also be seen through the works of Enlightenment writers Voltaire and Miguel de Cervantes.
In the modern-day film Mean Girls, director, Mark Waters, uses situational irony, which is similarly utilized in the stories written by Voltaire and Cervantes. Situational irony can be described as what transpires when a discrepancy appears between assumptions of something to happen, and what actually happens. Cady Heron, the protagonist of this satirical film, moves from Africa and becomes the new girl at a stereotypical American high school. After initially …show more content…
Ridicule is evident in the concept of friendships in Mean Girls. Typically, friendships involve ideals such as trust, respect and support. However, the depiction of the fickleness of the Plastics is greatly exaggerated. There is no real substance to their conversations and most of their discussions are quite superficial. True friendship is consequently mostly futile. Additionally, during the film, Cady mentally visualizes and compares the high school cafeteria activity to animals ravaging in the jungle. The idea that teenagers are like savages with territorial tendencies not only shows the unfortunate pecking order in schools but also the overall pettiness among teenagers. Similary, Don Quixote is replete with ridicule. The absurdities in beliefs that he is actually a courageous knight and his confusion about reality certainly are examples of this. He is a rickety, fifty-year old man, quite the opposite of what a young, vibrant knight is assumed to be. Moreover, his outrageous behaviors continue when Quixote appears at an inn, which he believes to be a castle, to be knighted. Quixote does not realize that the innkeeper is not a knight and has no clue how to perform this ceremony. Instead of asking him to leave, the innkeeper plays along with Quixote’s imagination. At the end of his visit, the