Let’s look back to the early 2000s again for something that, as rooted in that era it may seem, like so much else still resonates perhaps stronger now. It also just happens to be about those Malebranche taken human form—teenagers. Yep, that’s right, today we’re taking a look at Mean Girls!
Conceived by Tina Fey from her own experiences and from books she had read, this was certainly the project that cemented a young Lindsay Lohan on the map after such teen projects like Freaky Friday, though this one seems to be remembered a bit better. While focused on the US high school experience, it also seemed to make a splash worldwide—did you know, for instance, that in France it was titled as ‘Lolita In Spite of Myself’? …because France.
Anyway—our plot is fairly straightforward. Lohan plays sixteen year old Cady, who through a variety of rather unique circumstances has spent most of her life homeschooled in Africa. Upon entering the wonders of the high school systems, she finds that, as many have in real life, that it’s akin to wading into a tank of piranhas after covering yourself in steak sauce unless you just so happen to fit those very specific criteria that mark you as ‘popular’. And here it seems that those filled in by the ‘Plastics’—a group of haughty girls lead by the archetypal mean girl herself, Regina (Rachel McAdams).
Cady herself has already managed to make the acquaintance of fellow social pariahs Damien (Daniel Franzese) and Janis (Lizzy Caplan), the former being a fairly decent portrayal of a gay person for the early 2000s as an aside. Now, here’s where it gets interesting—for a teen movie, it sets itself up pretty early as being refreshingly brutal and actually genuinely funny in its satire. But from there, as Cady is at first used by her friends to try and essentially bring down the Plastics from within, we do get a pretty thorough look at why such detestable vacuous walking stretches of skin manage to attain such social status to begin with. As Cady puts it—‘I hate her, but I also wanna be her!’
And then you consider—why do certain people beyond just high school work pretty much the same way? Hell, isn’t it rather chillingly obvious that many people, now, then, and throughout all human history, have essentially never matured beyond sixteen, and neither have many around them? And how it is that this Linsday Lohan film is actually so elegantly blunt at tearing into this very idea?
It keeps going—as Cady, like so many people can name, ends up becoming a part of what she wants to destroy, because ultimately those things became what they were for reasons, and anyone can be seduced by that no matter their intentions. Who doesn’t want to be pretty, popular, throw the best parties, and so on? And all the time, it wears its middle finger to it all on its sleeve, making it seem far less preachy than something doing it straight wood, even when the film does start to literally preach at the screen near the end through Tina Fey herself as teacher Ms. Norbury.
And yeah, essentially all the talk on the destructiveness of mindless gossip and name-calling remains spot on—worse than ever perhaps now when anyone can do it by tapping on a phone. Part of me feels so relieved that I got my spotty adolescence out of the way just before all of that really kicked in and got as pervasive and toxic as it is now. Still, while there are things that might confuse teens of today here, like the absence of smartphones and larger backsides being considered unattractive, everything here remains as pertinent and in your face as it should, except done in a way that’s still surprisingly entertaining.
So that’s Mean Girls—a trip back to school that actually holds up way better than I thought it would. It holds up well enough that it got adapted into a musical…and then that musical is being adapted into another film…because that’s just the world we live in. I’ll keep it simple and stick with this one—for musicals, there’s always Heathers, I guess!
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