Plastic Dawn

It should not come as a surprise that I hadn’t watched Mean Girls before today. I am not a teenage girl. Even in 2004 I was not a teenage girl. I feel like, for certain films, there is a prerequisite to be part of an expected audience to be interested in a film. Horror movies require that you like scary things. Comedies require that you not find people doing dumb shit on screen awkward for you to be able to enjoy them. Anime requires you to be a weeaboo. And for certain films crafted for the teenage girl mindset, it helps your enjoyment if you are, in fact, a teenage girl.

This isn’t a slight against the film. Mean Girls is absolutely a movie designed to tap into the feeling of being a teenage girl and your experiences in high school from that perspective. If you are of that age range, of that moment, then I’m sure the film speaks to you in a way that, as a man older than that, the film fails to speak to me. This was never going to be a movie that spoke to me in a way it could teenage women around 2004 (and beyond, as the film has had a strong, steady life since its release). If you were a teenager and female when this film came out and you grew up with this movie, or you were female and teenaged in the time since the film came out, I’m sure it has a way of speaking to you that it can’t for me. That is how the film works.

All of that is to say that I finally watched this film, twenty years after it came out, and I thought it was okay. Nothing super special. Funny at times. Maybe a little too pink in places. Just, you know, okay. It’s no Bottoms, a film that has a stronger message and a lot more humor in it, but it is perfectly fine for what it is. I can kind of see why people love it, and why it’s spoken to an entire generation (and beyond) but I think you have to be female, and you have to at least be able to relate to the experiences of a teenager in high school, to be able to get this movie. It does not cross generational or gender divides. At least, it didn’t for me.

Mean Girls follows Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), a 16-year-old girl who is finally going to high school. She’s been homeschooled her whole life as her mother and father were both anthropologists working in Africa. After her mother takes a job in the States, though, they move back home and decide it’s time to send Cady to normal school. This whole concept is foreign to Cady, and while she can understand classes and homework and all of that, the whole idea of making friends, and high school cliques, and popularity, is completely foreign to her. She doesn’t fit in.

She initially is able to make friends to a couple of outcasts, artist Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and fashionable gay Damian Leigh (Daniel Franzese), but a chance encounter with the popular girls, the “Plastics” – queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams), her toady second Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), and airhead Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried) – leads to the ladies inviting Cady to be part of their group. As Cady quickly learns, she’s hot, and the Plasti.cs want another hot girl in their group. Although initially hesitant, Janis convinces Cady to be part of the group so they can conduct a little bit of an investigation… and maybe even get some petty revenge on the popular girls who drive everyone else crazy. Still, going undercover like this could lead Cady down a path she may not like in the end…

In some ways, Mean Girls feels like Heathers without all the murder. The basic message of the films seem to be the same: it’s better to accept who you are, and not worry about popularity, than it is to try and be someone (or something) you’re not. It’s not a bad message, and certainly the fact that Mean Girls doesn’t encourage homicide or blowing up schools is a plus. It even tries to tackle school bullying late in the film, which is admirable, and I appreciate that the film acknowledges consequences for popular girls who treat everyone else like shit. That may not may not be realistic (the popular people generally can get away with a lot if you contribute something to the school, like cheerleading, or football) but it works in the context of the film.

I think that’s one area where the film is lacking, though: it’s hard to say just what the Plastics provide to the rest of the school, and why everyone would bend over backwards to let them be the queens of the high. They aren’t cheerleaders, they don’t run any groups, they don’t work on yearbook or participate in student government. Essentially their entire life is being pretty, popular, and rich, and they spend every waking hour talking about all of that. What exactly does being pretty and rich allow-

Oh, right. They’re rich. That explains some of it. Rich people can get away with murder.

Still, it would be nice if the Plastics did something more for the school. This wouldn’t just cement their place in the hierarchy of the high school, which would help the storytelling, but it would also provide better context for the characters. As it stands, the three founding members of the Plastics are as shallow as can be. Regina is pretty but a total bitch. Gretchen is pretty and kisses up to Regina. Karen is pretty and dumb (and pretty dumb). That’s the whole of their characters and while the actresses work the characters for all they’re worth, it’s hard to care about any of them because they’re all vapid and empty.

You do need to care about the plastics so that you appreciate when they get their comeuppance. I’ve said this more than once, but a good villain is one you care about. I’m not saying that Regina has to be a JokerOne of Batman's first villains, and certainly his more famous (and most popular), the Joker is the mirror of the Bat, all the insanity and darkness unleashed that the hero keeps bottled up and controlled. level villain, but it would be nice if she had anything more to her that a desire to “lose three pounds” and a need to be a bitch to everyone around her. She should have flaws, and desires, and a character arc. There’s nothing to her to make you invest in her, for good or ill, so that when the movie reaches its climax, the events that unfold feel earned and justified. They don’t.

I think, for Regina (as well as the other Plastics) you’re expected to put on them the traits and faces of girls that were mean to you in high school. You’re supposed to see your own bitchy bullies in them, and any lack of backstory or fleshing out is filled in by your own life experiences. “I know someone just like Regina,” you’d say, and then you can understand this girl, and want to see her get destroyed, because you’ve dealt with a raging cunt-muffin like her in your own life. Regina works only if you can see something in her that the movie doesn’t provide.

From that context, then, it also makes sense why Cady feels bland in this film. She gets a good intro, played innocently and well by Lohan (in one of the early films for that actress before she went off the deep end in her personal life), but at a certain point the film stops developing her character or investing in who she is. She becomes another Plastic and that bothered me. I wanted to know more about her, to feel something for her as a character, but she becomes as vapid and empty as the rest of them. Part of that is the construction of the story, because she becomes one of the Plastics.

And yet, I think you’re also supposed to put yourself into Cady, to experience her story through your experiences. If we’re supposed to view Regina as every bitchy girl the audience knew back in high school, then Cady is supposed to be every brainy girl, every wallflower that wishes, deep down, she could be one of the popular kids. Her early backstory gives context for how this girl could arrive in high school knowing nothing about high school, but then, when those traits fall away, you can use Cady as an audience surrogate so you can experience life through her eyes.

That at least is my reading for why Cady becomes so bland and empty at a certain point. She stops being a character with personality and becomes a vessel for actions to move the story along. I want more from Cady, and for Cady, than the film gets, and that makes it hard for me to invest in the story because, again, there just isn’t much to it outside of the basic construction. The film moves along at an expected pace, without much in the way of surprises or deviations of form. It’s fine. It’s amusing. But it’s not great, not for someone looking for something more.

And that gets me back to my original thought on the film. I can’t get into this movie because I don’t have the experiences (or the place in my life) where I can relate to it. It doesn’t speak to me the way it should, and I can’t put my own experiences into the characters to be able to fill in the gaps the film leaves in its storytelling. There’s a “cultural competency” I feel like I’m missing, not being a teenage girl, that would help me care more about this story. I could read that as a failure of the film, its inability to make me care about this movie, but in this instance I’m going to chalk it up to it simply being a fact that this film is not for me. I don’t care about the movie but that doesn’t make it bad. It just makes it a bad fit for me.