"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.