The thing about being a teenage girl and having a favourite film that’s also about teenage girls is that even if you’re very pretentious (I was) and know that it’s supposed to be pretty ironic (I think I did?), you are, of course, far too close to the subject for it not to be slightly instructional. Mean Girls came out when I was 12, and like Clueless and Heathers had done respectively in the two decades prior, became the knowing, endlessly quotable teen film of the moment, to be watched, rewatched and parroted among young girls across the world for the entirety of high school.
Most of it went swiftly whooshing over our heads: we knew it was a story about a naive young girl who moved from Africa to the US (Lindsay Lohan), and somehow ended up in a group of terrible bullies called the Plastics (helmed by Rachel McAdams’s Regina George), but I think its central girl clique was somehow still aspirational. Which may explain why I ended up the Cady to someone else’s Regina aged 16, assigned to make a list of the least popular people in the year to make sure they didn’t get invited to the next oh-so-exclusive (not) suburban house party. (I declined, and was abruptly dropped.) In fact, a lot of the bullying and hazing that my friends and I endured seemed to have directly plucked out of that world – there was even a “burn book” of rumours doing the rounds for a bit.
And yet, we inhaled it, too, quoting lines like “on Wednesdays we wear pink” and “that’s why her hair is so big, it’s full of secrets” – half-knowingly, half-wanting to fit in with everyone else who’d watched a film about fitting in. Mean Girls was a meme before the word applied almost solely to jokes on Twitter; a set of blond-highlighted, velour-coated signifiers that we could use to try to make sense of our own screwed-up social hierarchy.
Rewatching it at 27, having come back to it every few years since my teens to mine it for jokes – usually on 3 October – it’s clear that we largely missed the point. There’s a scary Stepfordness to the Plastics that hadn’t fully registered before, when we were all still somewhat in their thrall. The idea of a whole year group orbiting one queen bee also made me think of the popular kids from my own schools – the power they once wielded with every “last team pick” they doled out in PE and how inordinately scared of them I’d been. Maybe Mean Girls was … a horror film?
But I was also struck by how funny and warm Mean Girls is, and how Tina Fey’s script still sparkles 16 years later (highlights include a four-way phone conversation between the Plastics, laden with Shakespearean miscommunication, and the cutting but always affectionate barbs traded by Cady’s real mates, Janis – named for the singer Janis Ian – and Damian). Regina’s underlings Gretchen and Karen were also designed to deliver a good amount of pathos, I now realised, not least when Gretchen fears that Regina hates her, and begins spilling all of her secrets to Cady, only to suddenly retreat (“Maybe she feels weird around me because I’m the only person that knows about her nose job. Oh, my god – pretend you didn’t hear that!”).
I also noted the faint hum of a song by Janis’s namesake, At Seventeen, in the background of one of the scenes, its lyrics barely discernible, but a big wink to those who got it the first time round: “To those of us who knew the pain of valentines that never came / And those whose names were never called, when choosing sides for basketball. It was long ago and far away / the world was younger than today.”
