Margaret

The plot of Margaret is easy to follow. Basically, Lisa Cohen, a seventeen-year-old high school student, is directly involved in a bus accident at an intersection. To the police, she reports that the light was green, although she this was a lie. Subsequently, she feels guilty and attempts to amend her previous statement. She confronts the bus driver about the situation, but this only aggravates the situation. The bus driver does not comply and actually threatens the 17-year-old with legal ramifications, although he never follows them up in the movie. This accident and situation appears to be a tragic turn in all other aspects of her life, as she begins to argue with her mother, has sexual relations with her teacher, has sexual relations with a friend, and gets into coarse and heated debates with a girl at school over political and ethnic topics. Additionally, it appears as though Lisa has become pregnant through one of the two sexual encounters and has an abortion, although the movie never shows any of this unfolding. The movie is a good example of how potentially stressed one person can be if events unfold due to a lack of personal control. In the movie, Lisa doesn’t believe she really has much control over the events in her life, nor does it appear as though she actually does.

Personal control involves the ability to effectively influence the environment. In Lisa’s case, she displays both the ability to effectively influence the environment and the inability to effectively influence the environment. Our book defines self-efficacy (pg. 233) as, “[the] generative capacity in which the individual organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with demands and circumstances he or she favors.” It is clear that she does demonstrate efficacy to a small degree. She successfully manipulates two males to satisfy her sexual and intimate desires. She also was able to contact almost any one she needed to contact (although, granted, most of these contacts did not comply with her). She did choose to lie to the police. Lastly, she made the choice to do drugs at a house party.

However, the vast majority of the time, Lisa could not control her environmental circumstances or the outcome of the situation to which she was involved. She was one factor that directly caused the death of Monica, although she didn’t intend it. It appears, based on her reaction to the incident, that Lisa had no intentions of getting anyone killed that day. However, her desire to obtain a cowboy hat and her subsequent curiosity over the bus driver’s hat resulted in a fatal accident, where Lisa was left to deal with a woman dying in her arms. This event may have been a trigger in several other malicious events in her life that were beyond her control. This accident is the direct cause of several abysmal conversations between Lisa and her mother. Thus, they continue to have a poor relationship throughout the movie, until the end where the two break down emotionally in an opera that they both attend. Other events that didn’t unfold Lisa’s way include the following: getting pregnant from either her teacher or Paul; her lawyers wanting to sue the bus driver for money only; and the death (or simply just a heart attack) of Ramon, her mother’s boyfriend. Adversely, Lisa suffers through a depressive state and experiences motivational deficit in many aspects of her life. When things aren’t going her way, she doesn’t show the persistence to overcome these difficulties. This may be due, in my opinion, to a lack of intimate connectedness to any individuals.

Tags: Personal control; self-efficacy; motivational deficit; persistence