“To suggest that Mean Girls lack any depth is not truly the case, though.”
Brace yourselves, this time we’re going ‘shopping’ with the movie Mean Girls.
I’ve sat unchronologically down with Cady & The Plastics for a time and have excavated a few key ideas. However, they are yet to be officiated or inscribed to etch an enough immortality.
Indeed, do they come & go.
Well, this is also due thanks to the divided time I’ve got to share with my University.
The university itself has been the catapult for me to look critically closer at this work in the first place. Where they have been tinged with quite a degree of reluctance to be in any way associated with this supposedly ‘girly’, thus worthy-of-avoidance-kind-of-text, I have been challenged to meet it face to face, shedding my own prejudice from the ‘too real’ of a personal high school experience bearing common themes, pulling, touching, teasing nerves all in the ‘right’ (or in this case, sensitive/wrong places).
Indeed, then, that Mean Girls struck all the chords that is ‘too real’ that reward it its deserved timeless and universal appeal.
It speaks to the anxieties and realities of teenage girls.
The way it is depicted with over-the-top & very loud of an in-your-face type comedic voice, one’s bound to feel ridiculed and criticised. One’s been warned to be the Cady to Regina George, or the more neutral, natural & mostly unpretentious, unspoiled girl, and at any cost do not adopt the associated color it is designated for: pink.
I got my tongue a little twisted momentarily trying to sound like I can impart a metaphorical, clever tone in that idea of reluctance being a sign of its ‘greatness’. So this, I will maintain to be as not that as possible.
So begins my unit that semester, of which the idea teenagers build their identity according to pop culture media.
And Mean Girls being the Queen bee of the teenage genre, the movie was brought to our attention for some investigative critical analysis that, as I’ve proven, required a prerequisite of swallowing my own fears and ego at acknowledging its salient and relevant truth in depicting the competitive and hierarchical social race so often features our school landscape.
There is an expectation that one glorifies more serious, darker text like The Breakfast Club for example. Perhaps because of its more intellect-associated implications, an extension of self, a depth in an often surface level, shallow, archetypal teen characters.
To suggest that Mean Girls lack any depth is not truly the case, though.
The question, of course, remains, why didn’t our university look at The Breakfast Club instead? Perhaps the reason is because Mean Girls proves an excellent point that the stuff we needed to learn in the class came to the forefront most, sure. But also likely, that the layers and complexity exhibited by Mean Girls mean that it isn’t as shallow as you might initially think or be impressed upon as it is.
So often, maybe the source of comedy is real and probably difficult to deal with through mediums like movies. We cannot neglect that even in a popular text like Mean Girls, we, as teens (or the teenage I, at least) close our eyes and shut our ears from any more be associated with it.
It’s evidenced by Wiseman who says ‘teachable’ moments were refrained from by Tina’s writing. That the book itself does this is excellent, but it is targeted towards parents who may possibly pass it down to the child to read as guidance. What Mean Girls (the movie version) exemplifies is, then, its reach directly to the very heart, concern & subject of the material itself: the teens!
Having reached them, a particular skill set or toolbox to analyse how the texts/ movie further complicates the messages sent to them is crucial.
I think one of the virtues of this class in particular is its breakdown of the often impenetrable, crowded and elusive text. It is what Rosalind herself says is the key to one of her curriculum/ words of advice/ topic: media literacy.
That brings us, really, to the unit that asks and encourages us to nestle in the details that itself together contribute to a cohesive machine or artwork trying to tell you a million different ideas in the span of a temporal few hours. Let’s not forget or ignore that Mean Girls is a commercial movie made to dazzle, entertain and leave the audience feeling comforted and full after the movie ends. But this apparently does not exclude it from further thought.
It is deceiving to think perhaps commercial big-studio, popular movies are exceptions to our collective think tank more so than more straightforwardly serious teen, or otherwise ‘adult’, dramas.
The character work in this is also superb, moving past the easy way to deem the concerns of everyday teenage girls as futile or foolish.
In some ways, it does highlight that. But Regina George is more often humanised.
Certainly the case when I do go see ‘Freaky Friday’, a beloved childhood Disney feature that director Mark Waters and 2000s it girl Lindsay Lohan worked on.
The ‘pink’-clad character is depicted as unwilling to move past ‘communication’ to restore peace, with Lohan’s protagonist, accusing her of cheating despite the attempt to solve conflict.
The possibility of there ever be a change in the characterisation of someone like Regina in Freaky Friday hits a wall and seems hopeless of change in that movie, whereas Regina in Mean Girls is capable of change, and exhibits multi-layered reasons such as her environment, the home life she’s dealing with, and dealing with what Rosalind calls the ‘cool parent’ that a child never respects. Or the ever-present presence of TV. And the ‘anger’ she’s feeling which gets its own subplot/conclusion/ending; to be channelled into sports.
The solution or ending to the girls’ more talent-oriented/ career-concerned success is hopeful, however again in line w/ the comedic tone that Karen weather casts in her ‘ditzy’ characteristics.
I wrote in my class essay that the way the girls were able to embrace their selves, however silly it looked, is also representative of the freedom in the identity construction, the topic we’re asked to link with this text. (Think Gretchen’s return to cliques after all that mania!)
However, of course, things get more complicated and open-ended with the introduction of ideas regarding what are called surface and passive ideologies.
What the creators’ intents are versus then the underlying if peculiarly contradictive messages contrary to those aforementioned intents.
This complication too exists in Rosalind’s work. In an interview, she says of a girl dressing up for Halloween as the plastics (Insert Ariana Grande MV!) and t-shirts that promote ideas of glamorising Queen bees; Of which she expects that after you’ve read the book, the outcome, involving yourself/ your child, would be to demand those be taken off the shelves themselves.
“For better and for worse, our awareness of Queen Bees and Mean Girls is now commonplace.”
— quote from Queenbees and Wannabes p. 7
But she notes that there will always be counterintuitive, ‘antithetical’ ways teens/people be able to ‘subvert’ more overtly positive & constructive messages of her work, or what is at the surface may be depicted in the movie Mean Girls.
It is an assumption that teens are rebellious, and I know in class that we’re taught to move past assumptions to better look at the reality and potential of children & teens.
Ideally, encouraged by children’s literature scholars, to view the specificity of someone’s foundational background and move past the limiting ideas that children or teens are safe from the world that we as older people also live in, which we know is not all rainbows and sunshine.
In other words, many fruitful, thought-provoking ideas embed themselves in regards to this discussion that support the more celebratory tone in seeing teens as they are past, for example, their more rebellious tendencies or characteristics.
While some go against the message to be, say, kind, there are a few that take that and turn it into something else, true. But equally true is the possibility of the teens who, like myself, therefore make it an unconscious detachment of the iconic pink that in childhood, brought from that time was the bombardment of pink as the defining marketable ‘girl ’-oriented products.
Now we’re at a crossroads, torn between the conflicting, multilayered and confusing media landscape.
As we take into account that much of what the Mean Girls franchise (all its material and world semantics) has already been further saturated complexified, and made louder and closer to the teens, and adults alike, that is.
In Rosalind’s book, there is a moment where the accumulation of her words and voice strikes me as very packed & driven by ‘care’. It reminds me at the beginning of the unit that when asked ‘what makes children’s texts bad’, I came to the best answer I could get: that the ‘lack of care’ factor often results in condescending, overly-simplistic and vanity-project equivalent of the creators of children’s media.
So, taking [cue] from this answer, does that make her book the answer to what [makes] teen media so good?
Of course, in the beginning, I was very much in the state of an airhead in regards to children, but having been freshly spit out of my teen years, questions or images/events that were born out of those years made everything/most in Mean Girls & the book extremely relevant & real to me.
I can imagine the freshly young adult segment/ group like myself too getting much out of the movie and the book itself.
Many events taking place only what feels like yesterday brought itself to my attention by many of Rosalind’s ideas. They have received their due attention & solution, a figurative toolbox to fix what was wrong so that next it happens we’ll be better equipped to deal with/handle ourselves & the situation well.
But, of course, many of our own solutions do not present themselves right away. But with time, guidance (from the likes of Rosalind’s book) and critical deliberation encouraged throughout my studies, academically, there is progress.
That is why, I think, the idea of growth, development and self-improvement are strong themes in my reflection; the challenges not, at the core, too different from the ones raised in Mean Girls and its source material. Potently and generously we acquaint ourselves with the old bad blood ‘frenemy’, or, indeed, the ‘Mean Girls’, to finally make amends, however cheesy that may be.
For what it’s worth, we know that self-help books are usually encouraging & nurturing in tone. While it’s the same tone used in the book, it is also balanced or sometimes replaced by truth serums, matter-of-fact accounts of how things actually went down; recounts collected from Rosalind’s encounters over years working with students all over the country.
Taking into account the specificity of one’s own background, the sequential similarity of events may differ, but the core may bristle with your own version of events still, which might help contextualise or explain why certain so and so might’ve happened back in our years as developing adolescents.
In this dynamic of truth and fiction, the book has provided many of the movie's iconic scenes. Although some were originally written by Tina Fey.
If you want to look further into details of how Tina has adapted Rosalind’s book, go to James Woodall's YouTube video that talks thoroughly through the resonances and overlap of ideas echoed by Tina from the book.
But if I were to expand on his points, one scene I noticed that was not part of the book is surprisingly one of the most repeated, referenced to and ‘revered? ;)’ scenes of all time: Jingle Bell Rock!
I don’t recall any single line that mentions talent shows as a showoff of popularity. But this one is true. A display of perfection/ power is showcased through these events at school. They’re aligned with worldly success… just maybe. (On that note: I’ll leave the song ‘Mean’ by Taylor Swift to see how she creates her own version responding to the culture and instances courtesy of Mean Girls. Enjoy!)
Thank you so much for reading! Let me know your thoughts on Mean Girls or this article in the comments — I’d love to hear from you! Until next time!!
