The Visual Aesthetic of Teenage Social Hierarchy

By Jack Miller, Edited by Emma Smith

What comes to mind when you think about Hollywood’s standard representation of the American teen? Maybe it is the sturdy jock, clad in a varsity jacket. Perhaps it’s the popular prom queen, decked out in glinting formal wear. Or possibly it’s the rebel who ditches class, donning dark leather and spiky jewelry. Nearly every Hollywood portrayal of high school teens builds on existing stereotypes to help audiences place characters into distinct social groups. Whether it’s the people they hang out with, the after-school activities they do, or the things they value, high school-aged characters often separate into explicit social titles like “jock” or “nerd.” While these clique-driven categories may seem restrictive, countless films have used them to actually highlight the consequences of social divides. John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985), one of the most rewatched teen films of the 80s, tells the story of five drastically different teens who are forced to serve the same Saturday detention. Each character is a different, easily recognizable archetype that the audience is already familiar with, from jock to nerd to popular girl, rebel and outcast. The grouping of vastly different characters makes more compelling their eventual realization that they have more in common than they thought. Created nearly two decades later, Mean Girls (2004) follows a similar narrative arc as Cady Heron becomes a member of the popular social group, The Plastics. She eventually realizes from the top of the social food chain that the divide between cliques at her high school is causing dissolution and tension. Both The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls utilize dialogue and action to place their characters into specific social hierarchies, but it is the visual aspect of costuming that becomes the most revealing in denoting characters are part of a specific social group. If the “jock” wore a cardigan and glasses or the “nerd” sported a football jersey in these films, their styles would not demonstrate the prominent and visible social divides within high schools that are being highlighted. The outward presentation of characters in The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls helps audiences place individuals within a larger social hierarchy. These films then use their visual presentation of social divisions to eventually expose the fallacies of high school’s hierarchical systems.

Filmmakers may choose to utilize the way a high school-age character acts or talks to associate them with a particular social group, but nothing helps determine where a character feels they belong as much as what clothes they wear to school. Take, for example, a quote that has woven its way into pop culture from Mean Girls. Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), a member of the most popular group in school, the Plastics, chirps up at the lunch table: “On Wednesdays we wear pink” (11:53). The quote garners its meaning–and tremendous pop culture relevancy–because it makes clothing extend beyond the physical. The act of wearing pink for the Plastics is not the donning of specifically colored clothes but the proud declaration of membership in the most socially revered group at school. It becomes a tradition, a uniform, a broader symbol for their popularity and position atop the high school social food chain. 

The very concept of a high school food chain is reflective of high school’s unique opportunity for interactions between disparate social groups. Creators like Hughes as well as Mean Girls writer Tina Fey and director Mark Waters benefit from this. As Elissa H. Nelson–an expert on 1980s Hollywood and CUNY Bronx Community College associate professor–writes, “as people get older, their regular social associations are with individuals who share similarities . . . In high schools, however, teens can mix with people from a range of social strata, classes, and educational levels.” In very few other real-world environments do individuals witness such a broad range of social experiences happening under one roof. Hollywood seeks to incorporate the uniqueness of the setting into its fictional narratives because it can cast a wide range of compellingly distinct characters. And in a film, unlike real life, costume designers get to control every action and every piece of clothing a particular character wears. This means that each outfit plays a part in representing the social group a character belongs to.

In Mean Girls, Mary Jane Fort, the film’s costume designer, opts for a bold first introduction to the Plastics by choosing to dress them in ultra-stylized gym clothes. Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) wears her blue P.E. shirt cropped; Karen Smith has somehow found a way to cut off her shirt’s sleeves and turn it into a tank top; and Regina George (Rachel McAdams), the leader of the group, is pointedly wearing a sparkly “R” necklace that pops against the plain shirt fabric (7:27). In a sea of other students who are gearing up to engage in the typical, sweaty athletic activities of a P.E. class, the Plastics immediately stand out as more obsessed with how they present themselves. Mimicking how popular individuals are noticed by others in real world high schools simply by their recognizable appearance, Waters aims to steer the audience’s attention to the Plastics and their wardrobe by keeping the camera’s focus on them. It’s as if their distinctive outfits demand to be given priority in the frame’s composition, mirroring the way fashionable outfits stand out against more common attire. Rather than capturing Regina’s introduction like most other scenes in the movie, she is filmed in slow motion as she is carried like royalty and then set down by a group of five boys. The change in frame rate highlights her bright necklace and clean, poised appearance. Fort has taken a giant leap to suspend reality in conjunction with the manufactured slowness of the scene: Would Regina not want to safeguard her necklace in a gym locker? Would a P.E. teacher allow their students to cut the fabric of the required class uniform? How does Karen’s shirt-turned-tank top look so perfect–did she cut out those sleeves with scissors on her own? All these questions are ignored for the sake of highlighting the Plastics’ social status. They turn their gym outfits, which are usually baggy and meant for performance, into chic representations of who they are. Their unique, carefully presented style choices denote a desire to stand out and be seen as fashionable and popular. 

In stark contrast to the Plastics’ outfits, which scream stylized and trendy, the less popular and more rebellious Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) is dressed in a baggy top that boldly reads “RUBBISH” when she introduces herself to main character Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). While the large block letters draw attention, it is unclear what exactly Janis is trying to say through her fashion choice–is she declaring that the reader of her shirt is rubbish? That she sees herself as such? Fort’s decision to introduce Janis with a loud but ambiguous style helps juxtapose her social grouping with that of the Plastics. While the Plastics turn their gym uniforms into conventionally appealing outfits, Janis opts to make hers a more undecipherable statement. The Plastics desire to be understood as popular through clothing that is tight and trendy; Janis doesn’t desire to be understood at all. This paints her as a rebellious character from the moment the audience meets her.

The Breakfast Club similarly depends on how the costume designer, Marilyn Vance, dresses the teen characters to emphasize distinct parts of their personalities. Though the audience eventually confirms the characters’ social standings through dialogue, by only looking at them in the opening minutes they can start to piece together where their interests and social loyalties lie. Claire (Molly Ringwald), for example, is dressed in a brown leather jacket and matching gloves as she sits waiting for the others in detention to enter the library. On its own, the outfit isn’t necessarily a clue as to what group she belongs to. But when other students start coming in, the outfit stands out as more trendy and upscale than the others, painting her as someone highly concerned with appearance–a member of more popular social standing. 

Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), meanwhile, enters with khakis and a sweater, clothes that are more formal than the typical high school student and markedly preppy. This correlates with his interests in academics and the tendency for his peers to view him as a “nerd.” John Bender (Judd Nelson) comes strutting in wearing a thick coat, a red scarf draped over his shoulders and black sunglasses covering his face. The act of wearing sunglasses indoors marks Bender as out of line with social norms and traditions. Bender also dons fingerless gloves and stocky boots, completing an outfit that showcases his desire for social rebellion rather than conformity. These three specific characters serve as examples for how presentation through dress immediately associates each individual with a particular social clique.

However, The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls are not only applauded for their clear portrayals of the social divides perpetuated within high schools. They are films that eventually topple the notions of these social hierarchies. In Hughes’ 1985 work, the five characters engage in open and honest dialogue about the pressures they face to conform to expectations. A contumacious social rebel like Bender and a straight A student like Brian really aren’t so different from each other, the group realizes. Though Bender’s parents are harsh and physically violent, Brian’s parents are demanding in a different way, hounding him over his grades. At the outset of The Breakfast Club, there was not only a theoretical divide between the stereotypical nerd and rebel characters but a tangible one too. Khakis and a sweater present Brian as put together, classy, and maybe a little bit unpopular. Bender’s choice of wearing sunglasses inside and his grungy fingerless gloves suggests his rebellious spirit. Perhaps Vance’s choices were made to emphasize the broader moral of Hughes’ work. The teens realize that assuming values based on social presentation can become dangerous. As American film scholar Timothy Shary writes in Teen Movies: A Century of American Youth, “One day of honest conversation has exposed the fallacies of facades they’ve erected to cope with their doubts, and the film ultimately suggests that all teens (and adults) could be unified in alleviating their collective angst if only they would abandon their fixation on assumed identities” (70). In some ways, the audience has not been primed for this conclusion. The five people who walked into the library at the start of the day looked so different from each other that it seemed impossible they would grow past their differences. The clothing they wore likely symbolized years of membership on a particular level of the social hierarchy. But within a day, they are able to relinquish those memberships, which were really just “fallacies of facades.” Social divisions are not real or tangible beyond external expressions. What keeps Bender from wearing khakis is a psychological mindset. What keeps Brian from wearing sunglasses inside is the same social-clique driven lie. Indeed, as his voiceover at the end so clearly claims, “we were brainwashed” (3:32). But if clothing items can be used to divide, so too can they be used to unify. Bryan does eventually wear Bender’s glasses inside (56:06). As the teens learn more about each other, the rules about what they can and can’t wear and who they can and can't be grow to become less fixed. External expression becomes a collective effort rather than a divisive one.

Similarly, in Mean Girls, the social hierarchy is broken through an external object. Even though Cady has won Spring Fling queen, she decides to share the crown awarded for the title (1:28:42). While the scene is iconic because of Cady’s rebellious gesture, the use of a fashion object being broken works to impart a greater level of symbolism onto the scene. The crown is the result of Cady’s popularity and is as sparkly and noticeable as the Plastics are in the high school. But just like the Plastics, it is flimsy and, well . . . literally made of plastic. When it is broken and Cady tosses it to people of all social statuses and rungs of the teen social hierarchy, there is a physical demonstration of the film’s message that popularity comes at a cost. In this way, external markers of expression become more than aesthetic–they become symbolic of societal barriers being broken. 

Many dismiss teen films as simple and stereotypical portrayals of high school life. To put it more harshly, Frances Smith writes in Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity that “Part of the critical dismissal of the genre’s aesthetic and narrative concerns can be traced to the teen movie’s frequent designation as ‘trash’” (2). However, from a more in-depth look at how the use of wardrobe impacts symbolic representations of the social hierarchy overlaid onto students’ lives at school, there are clear visual intentions at play in the work of filmmakers like Hughes and writers like Tina Fey. Costume designers such as Mary Jane Fort and Marilyn Vance aim to outfit characters with styles that emphasize these intentions. Whether it is pink on Wednesdays, sharing sunglasses during a Saturday detention, or splitting a plastic crown into many pieces, the clothing characters wear and the objects they carry matter.

Works Cited 

Nelson, Elizabeth H. The Breakfast Club: Youth Identity and Generational Conflict in the 

Golden Age of Teen Film. Routledge, 2019.

Shary, Timothy. Teen Movies: A Century of American Youth. 2nd ed, Columbia University 

Press, 2023. 

Smith F. Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity. 1st ed., 

Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Queer Melodrama: Analyzing the Aesthetics of 1987’s Law of Desire

By Pau Brunet-Fuertes, Edited by Bridget Zhang

When Nicholas Ray combined a colorful, vibrant female melodrama with the  traditionally masculine Western genre when directing Johnny Guitar (1954), he indirectly  opened the imagination of many directors. Pedro Almodóvar was one of them, and he recognized  the potential to combine melodrama with other genres, such as film noir. Law of Desire (1987) is the product of that reimagination of a classic Hollywood genre with a radical sight, resulting in the queer melodrama. Melodramas are considered female territory, a type of cinema that delves into domestic situations with a tint of social conflict, primarily caused by patriarchal constructions. Hollywood has a rich tradition of melodramas and so do other national cinemas such as Mexico, India, and Spain. Because of their iconic weight in popular culture and the exploration of the female universe through drama, music, and aesthetics, melodramas are a particularly rich space for queer filmmakers. Law of Desire tells the story of a filmmaker who gets entangled in a complex homosexual relationship with a devoted admirer, while longing for his lost soulmate and navigating an intricate bond with his transgender sister. The film is a distinct melodrama mixing homosexuals, transgender people, passionate crimes, and “la Virgen de la Macarena”. The final scene of Law of Desire encapsulates all of these melodramatic and queer elements. The scene's complexity relates to the setting, the symbols, and the representations that the three main characters embody in a post-dictatorial country that is beginning to explore a liberal future after years of political and social repression. Almodóvar's cinema is crafted around many visual elements charged with cultural considerations within symbolic orders of gender, sexuality, and desire. In the final scene of Law of Desire, Almodóvar uses allegories and symbols to highlight the film's central theme of a new generation of individuals moving on from Spain's political and social dictatorial past. 

Almodóvar’s aesthetics constantly challenge hegemonic powers by twisting religious iconography and cultural symbology from a queer perspective. Because of the relationship between film language and social context, Law of Desire reaches a complex significance when analyzed as a cinematic apparatus engaged in an oppositional gaze. From a mainstream perspective, cinema has been analyzed by first interpreting the content and then creating a meaning that can be digested easily. Susan Sontag critiques this analytical dynamic in her 1966 book Against Interpretation. She argues, “by reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable [sic]” (Sontag 5). This dominant approach avoids understanding cinema’s form and significance from an ideological perspective, but movies are social agents with the capacity to engage with symbolic meanings and political significance. Jean-Louis Baudry defined cinematographic apparatus as, “[cinematic mechanism] destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization (Note 1) of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism” (46). While Baudry frames cinema as a mechanism to maintain dominant ideologies, the inverse of this concept is also possible, in which cinema becomes a mechanism against dominant ideologies and symbolic meanings. This framework allows the aesthetic and visual elements of Law of Desire to be analyzed from a queer and deviant perspective.  

The particularity of the final scene of Law of Desire lies in its division into two different locations that are interconnected in time and space through sound and editing. At the beginning of the scene, the police inform Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) that his sister, Tina (Carmen Maura), has been held hostage in her apartment by Antonio (Antonio Banderas), his former lover and passionate fan. When Pablo arrives outside the building, he agrees to go upstairs with the police to free Tina. Almodóvar establishes the connection between the two spaces when Antonio appears on the balcony with Tina while the police are stationed downstairs, pointing lights and guns at him. He demands that Pablo come upstairs alone. At this point in the story, the audience is aware that Antonio experiences his homosexuality secretly, far from the sight of his conservative family. Similarly, Tina and Pablo's gender and sexuality (transgender and homosexual, respectively) also experience a degree of privacy from the exterior world. In both cases, this reality creates a personality split between public and private persona in which these queer individuals need enclosed spaces to experience their freedom. As Marta Saavedra suggests in her essay about Almodóvar’s cinematic world, the director “understands the filmic space as a basic element for the emotional development of his characters” (378). In this last scene of Law of Desire, the filmic space reflects the dualities and dichotomies used by the director as the primary mechanism to create the characters and conflicts developed in the plot. The director establishes the spatial connection between both spaces using cross-cutting and diegetic sound continuity, particularly in the form of dialogue and music.  

Almodóvar's unique visual world is charged with relevant narrative information, which makes it essential to decoding the melodramatic tension in Law of Desire, especially in the actions done by his characters during the climax of the movie. Cross-cutting and sound editing help unify and create tension by using discontinued spaces connected by sound, music, or dialogue (Bordwell 244). Two examples are the use of the song "Lo Dudo" and the fire. One of the most emphatic moments is when Antonio plays the song "Lo Dudo," and that song becomes a connection between the exterior space where public opinion awaits and the inner space or intimate space of the apartment where desire can exist. Because of Antonio’s secret homosexual desire, his relationship with the exterior (social pressure) and the interior (sexual freedom) of the apartment appear connected through the song, which at the same time speaks to the development of the story. With this song, Almodóvar seems to foreshadow the fatal ending as the lyrics are about a love that was intense and wild, but is now over. While this song could have achieved the same functionality as non-diegetic sound, it is vital to point out that Almodóvar uses it in diegetic form to support the idea that Antonio wants the world to know he loved Pablo, even though it is over because of the social pressure placed on him. 

Furthermore, Almodóvar uses fire as a symbol of the inevitable tragedy pushed by the  external (law, order, conservative society) and the internal (the passion of an impossible love). The aesthetic relationship between love and death through the fire inside the apartment serves as a powerful melodramatic mechanism to finish a love story that is still not easy to showcase in the exterior of the apartment. As José Quiroga points out in his book Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic, “Almodóvar found a cinematic language that allowed him to represent both aesthetic distance from a sentimental notion of life, and the affective triggers that allow for identification with life” (15). The other fire in the scene is happening outside of the building, in front of the police cars. The presence of fire in both public and private spaces links the two worlds together, symbolizing a society that is changing and still dealing with a traumatic past. This convergence of spaces and dualities created first by diegetic music and later by the two fires is essential to understanding the visual and dramatic complexities of the movie.  

On top of the visual elements mentioned, Almodóvar uses another significant aesthetic element charged with critical semiotic significance throughout the scene: the religious installation. The Virgen de la Macarena is an essential symbol that illustrates a radical understanding of sexual repression and liberation from a queer perspective. The director employs such religious symbols to delve into the complex social conflicts of the film. While religious symbolism can be associated with sexual repression and violence, for instance, the controlling mother and the priest who abused Tina as a child, Almodóvar subverts their meaning to something almost mestizo. As Brígida M. Pastor affirms, "the inversion implies the transgression of a culturally designed model of conduct that is heterosexual and therefore implies the complete negation of that model or norm" (8). The Virgin in Tina's house becomes a positive symbol, a female one whom she and Ada trust for protection and the one that will become an almost mystic observer of Pablo and Antonio's love and tragedy. Almodóvar's use of religious symbology combined with Hollywood iconography aligns with what José Esteban Muñoz coined as the disidentification process. Disidentification is the strategy used by minority groups to manage historical trauma and systemic violence by reassembling how the majority sees and oppresses them (Muñoz 35). In the movie, the Virgin, Saints illustrations, crosses, and candles are detached from a Christian meaning to become protective symbols and objects of worship and inspiration almost equal to posters of old Hollywood actresses (Saavedra 382). The fact that a negative symbol in Pablo and Tina's world becomes positive reflects a queer perspective that reclaims traditional symbols from mainstream and conservative spaces to a more radical one. Through this, queer artists developed a complex analysis of the dichotomy between tradition and queerness, which is vital in the last scene of the movie Law of Desire. 

Consequently, it is essential to understand how Almodóvar creates the scene using  excesses in his narrative language through the combination of melodrama and film noir as well  as the radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. This use of well-known social norms  and beliefs in an opposite and radical way is essential as part of the queer narrative present in the  film. As Pastor points out in her article, "Almodóvar's insistence on adopting culturally  established roles [police] and attitudes [repression] that are performed through parody and a  stereotypical exaggeration, generates a detachment on the part of his characters in relation to the  cultural reality that surrounds them" (13). The melodramatic scene works thanks to the  extravagant construction and connection between characters and the art direction surrounding them, such as the use of folkloric and religious iconography, music, and passionate love scenes. These symbolic and emotional constructions have a dialectical relationship pointing out the dictatorial society and the new liberal one. In their new present, queer characters are reconstructing their identities within a space that provides new meanings to the conservative world of the past (folkloric and religious elements) and the postmodern reality of the mid-1980s (sexual freedom). 

In conclusion, the final scene of Law of Desire showcases Almodóvar's talent in blending melodrama and film noir aesthetics, exploring a subgenre in which he can employ a radical use of sexuality, religion, and police force. By transgressing established social norms and beliefs, Almodóvar creates a unique queer perspective that not only challenges conventional roles and attitudes, but also generates detachment from the cultural reality surrounding the characters. The scene’s juxtaposition of exterior forces, symbolized by law and order, with the interior spaces, realms of sexual freedom, underscores essential dichotomies inherent in queer cinema. These dichotomies are no longer a subtext since the queer experience does not hide between ideas of representability but lies in representation. Almodóvar's cinematic style aligns with other filmmakers of his time, such as John Waters, Derek Jarman, or Todd Haynes, who similarly explored this radical vision of social conventions and helped to create queer visual representation. The intricacy and elaboration of the visual settings in the movie serve to support its complex characters and their connections to post-dictatorial Spain, highlighting the rich world of gender diversity. Almodóvar's film form, characterized by duality, provides a profound and incisive critique of conservatism in society and explores the contrast between public and private personalities influenced by societal decorum. Finally, the microcosm of the scene in the movie serves as a representation of the larger social issues that Pedro Almodóvar explores in the film such as repression, sexuality, and passion, three elements that are all linked to General Franco’s dictatorial period (1936-1975). Almodóvar's distinct and influential cinematic style has become largely influential worldwide to such an extent that his name has become an adjective, "almodovarian," which refers to this stylization of queer and folkloric Spanish social issues that thanks to him have become universal. 

Notes

1. According to Jean-Louis Baudry, fantasmatization refers to the creation of a visual illusion through images, sounds, and colors.  Baudry affirms that fantasmatization is a method to create visual reality according to ideological ideals that appears to be objective. 

Works Cited 

Almodóvar, Pedro. Law of Desire, feature film, El Deseo/Lauren Films, 1987. Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin; “Chapter 6: The Relation of Shot to Shot”. Film Art. An  Introduction. McGraw-Hill Education 12th Edition, 2020. 

Quiroga, Jose. “Introduction : Queer Melodrama.” Law of Desire, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.  University of Minnesota Press, 1999 

Pastor, Brígida M. "Screening Sexual and Gendered Otherness in Almodóvar's Law of Desire  (1987)—The Real 'Sexual Revolution'." Studies in European Cinema, vol. 3, no. 1, 2006,  pp. 7-23. doi:10.1386/seci.3.1.7/1. 

M. Saavedra Llamas and N. Grijalba de la Calle, “The creative cinematographic process at the  service of national identity: Pedro almodÓvar and the promotion of spanish stereotypes,”  Creativity studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 369–386, 2020, doi: 10.3846/cs.2020.8563.