The Surprising Endurance of MEAN GIRLS

1. SO NOT FETCH

Nostalgia is a funny drug.

We humans tend to overrate the past at the expense of the present, and use that feeling to inform the future.  “Things were just better twenty or thirty years ago”, we say.  “Life was easier”, which it often is at the beginning of our lives, when we have the capacity to ingest and process sugary crap and the ability to live without major responsibilities.  It can feel like we spend our entire existence trying to enter our peak, only to get there and immediately yearn to return to when we were first starting the climb.  What can I say?  We’re hard to please.

The truth is, of course, that most periods of time are roughly equivalent to every other.  There are valleys (living during WWII) and peaks (living after WWII*), but for the most part for most people, major social plusses came with many unrelated minuses, pushing life to about even.  Kids in the 80’s got to enjoy peak NBC Letterman and the explosion of blockbuster entertainment, but lived with the specter of a Russia-induced nuclear holocaust that could begin at almost any second.  Kids these days have access to essentially all of the world’s information and knowledge at any time and any place, yet must live in a world where making public every moment of your life has been practically de riguer since birth.  So it goes.

*Assuming you were white.  Being male was a good idea, too.

For me, nostalgia is even more of a funny thing.  I more or less grew up in the 2000’s, a decade I now spend way too much time thinking about in the 2020’s.  It’s a set of years I often look back on with fondness, even though I really have no reason to.  I began the decade smack dab in the middle of sixth grade and ended it with just a few more months of college left to go, a time period anthroplogists refer to as The Most Embarrassing Ten Years of My Entire Fucking Life.  It was an excruciating time mostly marked by having to figure out how to regulate emotions for the first time, greatly exacerbated by the advent of LiveJournal and the beginnings of sharing every dumb thought in your head to countless strangers on the internet.  

It didn’t help that, purely in terms of popular culture, the 2000’s were largely a wasteland.  Some grand things were on the horizon in terms of television (LOST, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights all premiered in this decade, all within three years of each other), and I think actually there were some things to like and admire in popular music, although you had to know where to look (alternative college stations were a good place to start).  Even with those silver linings, though, you had to filter through the glut of depressing reality shows (for those who think it gets no worse than Keeping Up With the Kardashians….my brother, you have no idea how much trashier it can get; Calabasas’ favorite family comes off as downright classy compared to something like Are You Hot?) and the continued poisoning of political discourse (his image has been severely rehabbed over the years, but getting the net average Republican and Democrat together in mid 2004 and asking them what they thought about George W. Bush was asking for someone to get killed, possibly yourself).

The worst was the movies*.  The current “IP and Superhero” era we appear to maybe be entering the end of is often cited as the worst one in Hollywood history, which may or may not be true.  However, we often overlook just how…ugly….and goopy…and orange everything seemed to look like in a post-9/11 world.  To get an idea of what every blockbuster looked like in high school, one can look no further than the poster for 2002’s THE SCORPION KING.  It really has it all: a bunch of muscle-bound actors making faces into the camera against uncomfortable fire colors, all with a vague “extreme” aesthetic.  Bleak times.

*Okay, I suppose the worst was the terrorist attack and financial crisis that respectively bookended the decade.  But then again, have you watched BATTLEFIELD EARTH lately?

Crucially, there also weren’t a lot of movies with anything resembling wit.  Just as an example, Will Ferrell was leaving SNL and cranking out the hits (OLD SCHOOL, ELF, STEP BROTHERS, TALLADEGA NIGHTS, to name just a few), and they absolutely have their fans, but they (along with seemingly every other comedy at the time), seemed to dabble exclusively in either manic, obnoxious, frat, or manically obnoxious frat humor*.  Fun times could be had at the mall cineplex or on a date or something, but there seemed to be a lot of empty calories going around comedically.  

*Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Will Ferrell as a comedian.  His countless appearances on late night shows are legendary, and he’s a top-five SNL cast member ever.  His movies just don’t do anything for me, is all.

During my time in high school (2002-2006), there were really only three movies that people seemed to quote with any regularity: ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and MEAN GIRLS.  I don’t really like two of those movies.  I have always been really fond of the third.

So this is the MEAN GIRLS article.

II. ON WEDNESDAYS WE WEAR PINK

MEAN GIRLS is kind of a miracle.

For so many reasons, it feels like it should be one of those things, an artifact of a specific time.  For starters, it stars Lindsay Lohan, maybe the poster child of the decade, the physical manifestation of what the 2000’s felt like.  The precocious child star turned prime tabloid fodder, the performer who burned out so hard on various addictions so publicly, Lohan eventually became such an obvious punchline for a million unfunny talking heads and comedians that you just wanted somebody to air lift her out of Hollywood in order to drop her off at an abandoned silo somewhere for her own good.  There were seemingly hundreds of celebrities that fit this bill that decade (almost always young women), but Lohan always seemed the most tragic.

For second, MEAN GIRLS was created and penned by Tina Fey, as big a guiding directional force for 2000’s comedy as anybody else.  Whether she was a force for good or not, however, largely depends not only on who you ask, but when.  Her oeuvre is one that feels under constant audit; a quick Google search of “tina fey racist” ought to give you an idea of how it frequently goes for her.  Now, in isolation, you can probably successfully defend her on every point of contention.  However, when taking it all in totality, you can sort of see how she epitomized a certain comfort comedy had in the beginning of the 21st century in regard to engaging in racial stereotypes under the guise of “I’m not actually racist so”.  I think intent is way more crucial in unpacking comedic racial commentary than we make it sound sometimes, but it still gives one much to think about in terms of where elegance comes into play.

On that note, for…thirds? I think?  When watching MEAN GIRLS in 2024, you definitely feel its mid-00’s energy begin to show.  Teenage girls at a mall?  The use of landlines (hands-free though they may be)?  Vicious gossip being spread around school via paper?  Technology tends to creep up on us, but it’s downright bizarre how different the human high school experience has become a mere two decades later.  None of this is to mention how, yes, it also engages in arguable racial cheap shots (its Asian representation remains a point of contention both then and now) and words that would absolutely not be used now, Regina George’s liberal use of…uh, the r-word being the most obvious candidate.  Obviously, it’s not used in order for anyone behind the movie to actually put down the disabled (it’s actually one of the most clarifying things about Regina’s true character), and it doesn’t personally offend me.  Yet, one imagines this would be an easy rewrite in the here and now; I highly suspect the 2024 remake has worked around this.

And yet, for all of this, MEAN GIRLS remains one of the relatively few stone-cold classics that the 2000’s ended up producing.  To watch it now is to marvel at how much of it still works.  The casting is essentially perfect all the way up and down the call sheet.  Every line is seemingly a perfectly quotable nugget.  And its story of a formerly home-schooled girl infiltrating the Plastics, the nastiest most insular clique in school before losing herself in the facade and becoming a Plastic through and through herself is a surprisingly astute one all these years later.  No, the movie never gets quite as dark as it clearly wants to be; one of its biggest shock-laughs (Regina getting suddenly hit by a school bus) gets immediately softened, and it generally has to abide by its PG-13 rating.  On the other hand, it’s played for laughs that the sex-ed coach gets busted for sleeping with several students, so I’d argue it finds its darkness all the same.

Even the elements I worried would age the film turned out to be some of its strongest.  I mentioned above how the fall of Lindsay Lohan felt tragic in a way that other public celebrity meltdowns in the 2000’s didn’t, and that’s because it represented a very real loss of talent.  It’s very, very easy to forget how good she used to be; in fact, MEAN GIRLS might represent the last high-quality project she was (or may ever be) a part of.  To play the role of Cady Heron requires two things: the ability to play wide-eyed sheltered, almost child-like, wonder and insecurity towards almost everything around you, as well as the capacity for embodying full unbridled bitchiness.  Lohan does both with seemingly no effort at all.  There are showier performances surrounding her in pretty much every scene, yet MEAN GIRLS likely wouldn’t work at all without her.

And man, are there some showy performances going on here.  Just as an example, our three central Plastics are also all wonderful in their own ways, and I’ve always admired how precisely drawn their personalities are, as well as how they work in relation to each other.  Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried) and Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) are both vapid suck-ups in their own ways to Regina, but there’s also crucial differences in how they go about it.  Karen is famously rock-stupid, but also possibly the only truly kind person in the group?  Gretchen, on the other hand, sometimes seems actually wounded when she gets her hands metaphorically slapped.  There’s a genuine insecurity when, say, she gets told her try-hand slang invention “fetch” is “never going to happen”.  As for Regina, she was a star-making role for Rachel McAdams* and I’m not kidding when I say you could feel it in the theater as you were watching it.  

*Although I suppose THE NOTEBOOK coming out the same year didn’t hurt.

Then, of course, are the SNL, TV vets and future stars that litter the supporting cast.  Amy Poehler (whose “cool mom” of Regina might be my favorite side character of them all).  Ana Gasteyer.  Neil Flynn.  Diego Klattenhoff.  Rajiv Surendra.  Dwayne Hill.  Tina Fey herself.  Special shoutout to Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese for taking two roles that could have been stuck in expository dialogue hell and imbuing them with personality.

But then again, even if nobody else in the supporting cast shone, as long as Tim Meadows was there, MEAN GIRLS would likely retain its legendary status.  His Principal Ron obviously gets the number one best line of the entire movie (“I will keep you here until four”), but Meadows manages to lift every other one of his lines with this active blank face that makes everything 15% funnier.  I don’t mean to be the guy who says a man in a movie with GIRLS in the title is the MVP and, frankly, he’s not.  But he’s absolutely the sixth man of MEAN GIRLS.

Of course, it’s kind of difficult to pick the true number one best line.  There are the obvious zeitgeisty ones: “I have ESPN”.  “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen”.  “She doesn’t even go here!”  “You go, Glen Coco!”  However, I might pitch the dark horse “what are marijuana pills?”.  But picking the true number one is difficult because, well, there are a lot of goddamn great lines in MEAN GIRLS.  And this leads me to ending this section by defending Tina Fey’s comedic sensibility after acknowledging why maybe not everything about it has aged all that well.  Yeah, not everything about her sensibility is great; looking back, she was probably too obsessed with the Hilton sisters in her time as Weekend Update anchor.  The content of her humor may not have survived, but the loopy cadence and witty spirit of it lives on, if the lasting endurance of this and 30 Rock is any indication.  She was a major reason I fell in love with comedy in the first place, so I’ll never fully write her off.  

Nostalgia is a funny drug.

III. THE LIMIT EXISTS

So, I have something to confess.

Full disclosure time: the plan for this month’s article was to not just wax on about the original MEAN GIRLS, but to also compare it to the remake/musical adaptation that came out this month.  If nothing else, I find the very concept of the new movie fascinating: it’s a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical adaptation (also penned by Fey!) of a twenty-year old original that also appears to double as kind of a straight-up remake.  What is one to think when many of the joke structures of the original seem preserved, and a pair of original cast members return in their old roles?  MEAN GIRLS 2024 seems like an attempt to bridge two generations in one two-hour musical.

My vision for this month’s article was to enter into the 2024 MEAN GIRLS remake with full eyes and a clear heart, and assess what the Gen Z version of a millennial favorite might look like.  Hell, it might have even allowed me to go on a good old-fashioned screed about the relative creative bankruptcy of the current Broadway practice of taking well-known intellectual properties, adding fifteen bullshit songs and an additional forty minutes, then waiting for the cash to roll in.  It probably would have been a really interesting article.

The thing is…I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t bring myself to see the new MEAN GIRLS.

It’s not out of some sort of confusion as to its general existence.  The musical is popular!  The movie stars well-known people!  It’s fucking January, a month that could use a little sugary pop at the box office!  And I am a recent convert to the Church of Renee Rapp, just like everybody else who have found her scorched-earth style of handling press junkets to be delightful.  This is not me making a big show of Refusing to See Something.  It’s not even out of a pearl-clutching “how dare they” moral outrage as to how they could possibly touch a nostalgic classic.  Again, the 2000’s fucking sucked.  Touch away, you monsters.

But I just couldn’t get myself to hop in the car, take out my wallet and cough up twelve bucks on a weekend day to see a copy of a movie that means more to me than I guess I thought.  And I will remind you I blew a free afternoon to watch THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER.  So, instead, the remainder of this article is going to be about breaking down exactly why I decided to abandon its actual crux.

To be clear, there are a couple of things about MEAN GIRLS 2024 I find concerning.  As I had never heard it before, I did work my way through the original cast recording of the Broadway score and was dismayed to find that none of the songs were particularly catchy in melody or memorable in lyric, a red flag in an adaptation of one of the most quotable movies of its generation.  Although I disliked very little of what I heard, it also provided little of the loopy joy practically every other line of the original movie did.  I took a break from the soundtrack and ultimately never came back to it.  

More disheartening are the clips I’ve seen where it looks like the screenplay for the 2024 version is mostly going for doing the same jokes from 2004, only a little worse?  It’s one thing to recast most of the adults, one of those things that just has to happen if you’re remaking a twenty-year old movie (although my brain is also refusing to adjust to Busy Phillips replacing Amy Poehler as Regina’s mother).  But then Tina Fey and Tim Meadows are returning as the same characters, presumably as some sort of nod to continuity?  I’m not sure why that would matter, but I suppose it’s possible.  I imagine it might also be that they were the two cast members that didn’t necessarily age out of their characters, or maybe it’s just Tina putting her thumb on the scale a bit, bringing her friend along with her.  Whatever the reason, there they are, confusing the intent of the entire endeavor just a bit.

The point is, it appears MEAN GIRLS 2024 is largely just doing the original again, only with alternate takes.  Coach Carr, now played by Jon Hamm, is misspelling the word “hormones” on the whiteboard this time, a major step down from the misspelling of “chlamydia” the first time around.  Meadows’ “I did not leave the south side for this!” has been downgraded to “I did not go to graduate school for this!”  I dunno, I’m already not a fan of movie remakes/reboots trying to court fans of the original by pointing at something and going “remember this?”.  However, it turns out what I hate even more is someone waving something in my face and asking “remember this?” and the thing in their hand is only vaguely recognizable.

I would imagine the best path forward for a project like MEAN GIRLS 2024 is just to rebuild it from the ground up.  An updated MEAN GIRLS is not the worst idea in the world; technology changes, but kids remain the same throughout generations.  I don’t begrudge the idea of replacing three-way phone calls for FaceTiming and TikToks.  Sunrise, sunset and all that.  But that means you have to let the old jokes go, too.  And replacing them with new ones.  New ones without any of the old cadences and setups.  And that’s difficult when the whole point of the endeavor is to present yourself in the shadow of an original.

I should make it clear: this is not me declaring MEAN GIRLS 2024 as bad!  How could I?  I didn’t see it, and I’m not in the habit of making a definitive evaluation of something I haven’t seen or read or listened to.  But I highly suspect it would be a waste of my time, speaking as someone who is both a humongous fan of the original and as someone outside the very targeted demographic the new one is seeking.  Maybe there’s value in realizing these things at a certain point and just letting it go.

As it stands, I couldn’t put the key into the ignition to hear music I didn’t really like paired with old lines I’ve come to love, but rewritten to be just a little worse.  Not when I have the original easily accessible at essentially any time.  So I didn’t.  I’m happy to just kind of live in a world where the original MEAN GIRLS is a singular entity.  I’m happy to pretend Tim Meadows didn’t come back to the role, either in the 2024 musical or in the 2011 TV sequel.  I guess I just didn’t want the spell broken.

Nostalgia is a funny drug.