Sixteen Candles Sociology

In the film “Sixteen Candles” shows the power of social groups and cliques during adolescence. The image of women and the standards and stereotypes they are held to play a big role. It depicts the power cliques and social groups have during teenage years. This film allows many to rethink how their high school experience, even those who have recently graduated can relate to this high school experience in 1984.
The high school sophomore Samantha "Sam" Baker has a hard time getting through the day of her 16th birthday, which her entire family forgets because her older sister is getting married the next day. Sam is also distracted by her love for the popular senior, Jake Ryan. Her day at school is not any better when she finds out that her completed …show more content…
Jake asks more about Sam, and Ted explains the situation. Jake makes a deal with Ted to lets him keep Sam's underwear, then he will let Ted drive home his intoxicated girlfriend, Carolyn Mulford, in Jake’s father's Rolls Royce. Ted never takes her home because, the very drunk, Carolyn makes moves on Ted while he's driving before passing out. He instead takes her to his friend’s house to ask them to take a picture of him with Carolyn together in the back seat of the car. At Sam's house the next morning, after the madness with all the relatives, the family eventually makes up before the wedding and apologizes for forgetting her birthday. They drive to the church, where her sister, Ginny, takes a few too many sedatives and causes a scene throughout the wedding ceremony. As Jake was out looking for Sam he finds Carolyn and Ted passed out in the back seat of the Rolls in a nearby parking lot, where he uses the excuse of finding them together to break up with Carolyn, who had fallen for Ted, and thus doesn't mind the breakup very much. Afterward, Jake drives to the church just in time to meet Sam after her sister's wedding. Jake and Sam finally meet face to face, and Jake invites her over …show more content…
A social role are expectations of a person in a specific status, or in a social position, these roles are learned through socialization. The social roles in this movie are popular, prom king and queen, and not so popular, geeky or unnoticeable. In the movie with these established social roles, Sam knows she will never get Jake Ryan due to his social standing in the hierarchy of high school. Many students in high school know exactly where they stand and who they are the day the enter high school, their identity shows greatly through the way they hold themselves. At the beginning of the film Sam wakes up and feels know different with another year of age. She knows that when she goes to school she will be the same Sam and no one new will notice her. Her identity is the quite teenage girl that wants what every kid wants for their sixteenth birthday: a date, a car, and maybe some cake, but most of all like most high school girls she lacks self-confidence. The identity Sam has related to is the girl you want to be, and the girl you already are. With different agents of socialization, groups or social contexts in which significant processes of socialization occur, in Sam’s life she identifies with a different behavior for each one. The first agent, family, is seen as your traditional family. This is this environment where Sam is most comfortable. In