"You Still Can't Sit With Us" (Mean Girls Extended Edition)

So I figured I might as well pop back around and do the second half of the post I started like a million years ago about Mean Girls, now that several weeks have passed, and nobody is Googling it anymore. I have a person problem with not wanting to write about things that are topically relevant, so this should be way more comfortable for me now, I'm guessing.

So toward the end of Mean Girls, there's a scene where Tina Fey stands at the front of a gym full of female students, Betty Buckley style, and delivers a series of regurgitated culture-of-female-aggression critiques about how adolescent women are backstabbing, two-faced, and manipulative, and the solutions to their (our) problems is to start banding together and supporting each other more instead of being so flaky. Lots of these points are probably salient, but the way they're presented within the larger context of the narrative made me really think about the way female gender identity specifically is often presented in media like this.

As in the real world, male gender identity in Mean Girls pretty much doesn't exist. Though the egotism and stupidity of male characters is occasionally lampooned, the actively predatory characters are all women. The movie is concerned only with the action of being female. The female characters are actively female; the male characters are neutral. In fact, one of the things I didn't like about Mean Girls, from a purely formal perspective, was how dramatically unsatisfying the neutrality of the male characters was. Aaron, for example -- the movie's dumb jock love interest, who constantly waffles back and forth between Cady and her Satanic arch nemesis Regina -- was a really, really boring character. This wasn't just unsatisfying -- it became, at a certain point, problematic. I kept waiting for the movie to take Aaron to task for shifting his alliances so casually, but he just stayed bland and innocuous throughout the whole movie, despite how inherently provocative his character arc was.

Mean Girls acts like it's interested in destroying the concept of constructed, "false" gender. It sees young women's performance of femininity as a shallow way of volleying for social power and distinction, not as a "real" expression of anything. Through its condemnatory dissection of female culture, Mean Girls seemed to be suggesting that traditional gender expression is a dangerous and ugly thing, and that the way women act, think, and see the world as a result of being socialized as women, is the best example of how horrible traditional gender identification can be. This is something that a lot of movies, books, and TV shows are guilty of, even (and sometimes especially) when they are made for a female audience. The concept of "female culture" is almost exclusively negative, something to be feared and avoided, or at least approached with caution (or occasionally, in more affectionate treatments, to be laughed at). When it's not horrible or farcical, it's usually because the "culture" the film or TV show describes is highly non-traditional, or is the result of some sort of self-conscious reclamation.

I'm not suggesting the passive aggressive posturing that Mean Girls depicts isn't real, or that it shouldn't be examined or critiqued. What I am suggesting, though, is that explorations of these problems are almost never as multi-faceted as they deserve to be. Because they're not more comprehensive, more studied, or more sincere, they almost always reveal things they didn't mean to reveal, and unintentionally obscure other facets of their subject matter that could have easily been treated with more resonance and insight.

"You Can't Sit With Us"

Wednesday was the ten-year anniversary of the Tina Fey-scripted movie Mean Girls, a film I had heard a lot about, but never actually saw. Though I had long acknowledged it as a significant gap in my viewing history, I never really understood how hugely important this movie is to other people until I went online Wednesday morning. My social media feeds were inundated, both by film nerds and by plain, regular folk. This was clearly a milestone that people really cared about, far more so than I would have ever expected.

I’ve been watching a lot of coming-of-age movies lately about female characters in high school, and although I hadn’t quite gotten around to Mean Girls yet, it had been nestled snugly in my Netflix queue for probably about three weeks prior to viewing. I can’t exactly say why I’ve been hitting this subgenre so hard lately. I’m at an enduring personal crossroads lately, the exact nature and dimensions of which seem constantly in the process of reshaping themselves. Seemingly frivolous movies like Mean Girls, about the formative struggle between personal and social identity, are unsettling, but also, strangely, bolstering. The fucked upness, doubt, hypocrisy and unfairness of the world are acknowledged with inflated accuracy. Growth and maturity are illustrated as awkward and painful processes. But in the end, reassuringly, everything works out just fine.

Having finally seen Mean Girls in its entirety, I guess I can understand its appeal. It’s is part of a lineage of films that dissect the hypocrisies of social existence for young women on the verge of becoming adults. These films purport to describe only a narrow segment of the population, but like most things supposedly relevant only to “female” interests, they are often eerie and penetrating snapshots of the cultural moment. No film summarizes the surrealistic nihilism of Gen-Xers as comprehensively as Heathers, and what juxtaposition could more poetically define the attitudes of the late ‘90s than the plucky, cartoonish opulence of Clueless contrasted against the Pure Moods-infused, revenge-fantasy nightmare universe of The Craft?

Mean Girls’ most direct antecedent is probably Heathers, but while Heathers uses female social cliques much more casually as a microcosm of a vaster and more profound dysfunctional social landscape, Mean Girls is concerned more directly with dissecting ways that women interact with each other. If Mean Girls is a mascot for its generation along the same lines as its older relatives, it’s both flawed and prescient. It blames women too readily for problems it recognizes as endemic without really exploring their sources.

On the plus side, it does address some re-emerging, (and rapidly mutating) ideas about what being a woman even means – especially the idea that gender is essentially a put-on, and that its only lifeblood is constant and rigid self-enforcement. Although it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, it's not really a Feminist movie. Its ruthless takedown of women is perhaps, at its heart, really intended as a takedown of binaries – and more importantly, of the possibility of losing oneself in the performance of them.

TO BE CONTINUED!...tomorrow, probably.