Why Mean Girls is exactly what we need right now
Is ‘fetch’ finally going to happen? As a musical version of Mean Girls opens on Broadway, HADLEY FREEMAN explains why this high-school story is one for the modern sisterhood
Each decade, if it’s very lucky, will produce one great American high-school movie that enters pop culture forever. Rebel Without a Cause in the ’50s; Grease in the ’70s; The Breakfast Club in the ’80s; Clueless in the ’90s… Although most people outside the US have never been to an American high school, this setting has become the universal signifier of youth, just as the Wild West was the signifier of potential in pre-’50s movies. And, just like the Wild West, the high schools in these movies come with a serious set of rules and hierarchies – something no movie has explored more brilliantly than 2004’s Mean Girls, the only great high-school movie produced so far in the 21st century, and quite possibly the most influential of all time. News that it is now coming to Broadway as a musical surely sparks only one response: Get in, loser, we’re going to New York.
“Mean Girls’ genius lies in Tina Fey’s idea to write the story straight, because she knew that, when it comes to teenage girls, no exaggeration is necessary
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“That is so fetch!”; “I’m not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom”; “You smell like a baby prostitute”; “Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen!”: ever since I saw this movie when it came out, I have quoted from it at least once a week, sometimes to friends, often to myself. It is impossible to think of another movie from this century that has had as long a tail as Mean Girls. Even its title has entered the lexicon: when Ivanka Trump was photographed with her similarly blond step-sister, Tiffany Trump, and counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway at President Trump’s inauguration, one TV pundit referred to them as looking like “the Mean Girls”, and, of course, everyone knew immediately what she meant, all glossy and plastic and weirdly identical. My friends and I frequently describe female celebrities as “such a Regina George” to one another, referring to Rachel McAdams’ queen bee character. My friends and I, incidentally, are all in our thirties and forties.
Many movies had been made before about high-school cliques, and especially about how completely terrifying popular teenage girls are. Mean Girls’ most obvious antecedent is 1988’s Heathers, in which Winona Ryder and Christian Slater (at his most impishly sexy) murder the popular kids in their high school in luridly exaggerated fashion. But Mean Girls’ genius lies in Tina Fey’s idea to write the story straight, because she knew that, when it comes to teenage girls, no exaggeration is necessary. These girls are extreme enough on their own.
“The movie is both cutting and reassuring, vicious and empathetic, superficial and necessary – just as girls and women are, too. This is a movie about the sisterhood, in all its varieties
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Because Mean Girls isn’t, of course, actually about high school: it’s about girls, and what they can do to one another. Based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 pop-culture book about teen girls, Queen Bees & Wannabes, Fey cleverly creates the character of Cady (a height-of-fame Lindsay Lohan), an outsider who watches her contemporaries like an anthropologist bemused by a new species. (Less clever was Fey’s decision to make Cady come “from Africa”, a detail as ridiculous as having a character say they come “from Europe”. Africa is a continent and not a country.) Thus, the observations about how girls interact with one another are startlingly subtle and wise. Probably my favorite scene is when Cady watches The Plastics (McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert) stand in front of Regina’s mirror and competitively hate themselves:
“My hairline is so weird!”
“I’ve got man shoulders!”
“My nail beds suck!”
They then turn to Cady, expectantly. Hating oneself, it turns out, is a form of female bonding. There is too much truth in that scene for girls and women of, sadly, all ages.
Unlike other high-school movies, it understands how porous cliques can be – the dorky boy in the Mathletes can also be a fan of hip-hop – because teenagers are so much more than one thing. Whereas previous teen movies either celebrated the angst of the outsider kids (The Breakfast Club) or the coolness of the popular kids (Clueless), Mean Girls shows how insecure the most-liked girls really are. For me, the most interesting character in the movie is also the most ridiculous: Regina’s awful mother, played brilliantly by Amy Poehler, shaking her Juicy Couture booty, determined to be a “cool mom”. When a teenager grows up without an adult imposing boundaries, Fey says, it’s no surprise she has no moral compass, and suddenly Regina becomes a rather pitiable character.
And this, I think, is largely why Mean Girls has had such a legacy: as much as the characters seem like stereotypes, there is depth and empathy beneath the jokes, and this makes them go beyond archetypes. They are characters we can imagine growing beyond the limits of the screen. Thus, the movie becomes both cutting and reassuring, vicious and empathetic, superficial and necessary – just as girls and women are, too. This is a movie about the sisterhood, in all its varieties. It’s already easy to imagine the groups of girls and women going to the Broadway show, ready to cheer on Cady and maybe even Regina, too. Because being a girl, and a woman, is hard, the movie tells us, so let’s all cheer on each other. And as messages go, that really is totally fetch.
Mean Girls previews on Broadway from March 12
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