Flak Magazine: Review of Mean Girls, 05.07.04

Mean Girls boasts a screenplay written by the queen bee of hip comedy, Tina Fey, who used Rosalind Wiseman's parental self-help tome "Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence" as a reference point. Wiseman's book offers little that hasn't been covered by Jane Austen, Emily Brönte or Louisa May Alcott; mostly it describes age-old social situations in pop-psycholgical terms under the guise of candidness.

All you need to know about Wiseman is that she has spent time on "Dr. Phil" promoting Empower, her organization that works to "empower" adolescent girls to proactively synergize their diverse energies into interpersonal win-win situations — a Coveyization of "Girl World" understanding. Ultimately, her method yields little actual insight because it's so reductive; she employs charts, graphs and tables to organize all girls into "types" (queen bee, sidekick, torn bystander, messenger and target), then interviews a bunch of them and plugs their comments into her analysis where handy. By simplifying humans into sub-archetypes, they become less like actual humans and more like stock movie characters. It would be a good starting point, perhaps, if the reader were unaware how treacherous adolescence can be. Fundamentally, though, it's an incomplete understanding of the complexity of human relationships that masquerades as deep analysis — Wiseman doesn't attempt to get under the skin of her subjects, like the better efforts of Rachel Simmons' "Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls" or Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls."

The reality is that most high school boys and girls are acutely aware of "types," and most fit bits and pieces of several. Yes, there are "popular girls" and "sexually active band geeks" and "JV jocks," but the masses exist between the obvious stereotypes — the opposite of the high school movie, in which the protagonist is the only different, diverse and interesting character swimming through a sea of stereotypes. No doubt "types" populate our high schools, but ever since John Hughes' The Breakfast Club told us that "You see us as you want to see us — in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions," this arrangement has ironically been taken for gospel. What's worse is that this theory of the high school social milieu has become the standard narrative to "understanding" school violence, even when the classifying of groups isn't relevant. At its best, the high school movie transcends its setting, using high school as a metaphor for something larger (think Alexander Payne's Election); mostly, though, films from this genre have become basically naïve versions of Robert Altman movies.

Mean Girls thrusts Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), the new girl who was raised in Africa by missionary parents, into the sexually charged world of the suburban high school — so sexually charged, in fact, that the first thing the bespectacled math teacher (Fey herself) does is take off her spilled-upon shirt in front of the class. Cady is befriended by fringe homosexuals Janis and Jason (Lizzy Caplan and Daniel DeSanto) and given the tour of "how things work around here." The director Mark S. Waters (The House of Yes, Freaky Friday) flow-cams through the cafeteria, borrowing Altman's technique with one key difference: Altman uses his gliding eye to eavesdrop on overlapping conversations, showing us characters as if they're real human beings we're merely observing. Waters, however, force-feeds us the standard jocks, math-whiz Asians and band geeks under the same old voiceover narration. Altman's complex social portraits may be populated by "types," but in his best efforts (The Player, Nashville, Short Cuts), the types are infused with humanity through the realness of the dialogue. Waters just intends the characters to exist strictly as archetypes.

Cady is coaxed by Janis to infiltrate the clique of mean girls, or Plastics, by pretending to be one of them, intending to later report back on all their superficiality. Cady intrigues the Plastics because she's a head turner, even when sporting a frumpy Garanimals polo and asking if "Ashton Kutcher" is a band. Of course, Cady crushes on ringleader Regina's ex-boyfriend (Jonathan Bennett, who comes off as a miniature Peter Gallagher), which draws her into the mortal struggle between the Plastics to the point that she becomes one of them. The Plastics are modeled closely on Wiseman's queen bee, sidekick and messenger, which unfortunately leaves Fey little room for character development. Lohan uses broad facial gestures to suggest that her neophyte Cady is simply acting in front of everyone, but the screenplay only allows her to react with her surroundings. Because no one has the same depth Cady does, they just bounce off her.

The movie treats its non-Lohan characters in the same way Wiseman treats her "types." Fey also seems to have an agenda: She has confessed to being a geeky type who delivered the caustic scorn familiar to those who love her "Weekend Update" shtick. The problem is that this same scorn is directed at the Plastics, which prevents the movie from engaing some larger truths about its deconstruction of the social milieu. What the hell kind of sense does it make for popular girls to be mean (or, as Regina is told, "You think everyone loves you when everyone hates you.")? Often, popular girls are nice — that's why they're popular. Where things get more complex are in the motivations and sincerity of their niceness. Are they just naturally nice? Ambitious? Does their niceness front for aggressive impulses underneath? Are they deeply insecure, and if so, why? This is where "Girl World" gets more difficult to navigate, but it's also respectful and closer to the truth. Fey, instead, settles for making fun of her subjects and simply accepting the fact that they're mean girls, dammit.

After being immersed in 90 minutes of the Plastics' narcissism, Fey is faced with a fatal question: Who really cares what happens to them? Though Fey's observations of the many different high school types is often persuasive, this self-acclaimed "mean girl" blinds herself to this most obvious aspect of her own kind. Their insults wear off, and like the high school movie, they become self-caricatures ripe for ridicule. Most kids are way ahead of the diabolical meanness of the Plastics — in fact, the pervasiveness of these movies has cultivated an awareness of types so complete that we know the Plastics are menaces mostly to themselves.

Fey resorts to an awkward and unrealistic group therapy scene that seems more like her own personal confessional than audience carthasis — truly enlightened geeks would have stopped caring long ago. Is it a part of Fey's "mean girl" schtick that requires her to rip her shirt off and show us her bra, as she has alarmingly insisted upon in this movie and recent episodes of "SNL"? Does she think we really care that much about her tits? There's being a mean girl to carve out the woman's place in a man's world, and then's there's being mean to settle scores and feed your own ego. Proving yourself in the male-dominated world of comedy doesn't mean objectifying yourself. That's so very, you know, like, Plastic.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)