US Edition Mean Girls was released in American cinemas a decade ago today. For the teenagers of the Noughties, its anniversary is a milestone far greater than a university graduation or a quarter-century birthday. Ten years of Mean Girls means 10 years since an adolescence on the brink of the internet, and everything it accompanied: to put it that in context, Facebook launched mere months before.
Tina Fey’s teen movie pays homage to the best of those that preceded it. Fey’s Plastics, the terrifyingly glossy clique at Mean Girls’ core, are rooted in Daniel Waters’ 1989 black comedy Heathers. Clueless, released in 1995 and starring Alicia Silverstone, sweetly showed what happened when the naive New Girl learned the powers of social mobility. Mean Girls’ Cady Heron (considered Lindsay Lohan’s best performance) followed suit - in a mini kilt to boot.
But Fey mainly based Mean Girls around her own experiences of cliques, and on Queen Bees and Wannabes, the high school self-help tome by Rosalind Wiseman. Mean Girls could only have been written by a woman, because trying to explain the intricacies of female friendship, like trying to explain why vajazzles exist, is something that can only be done properly by someone who has suffered the pain of it firsthand.
Of course, most teenagers don’t realise this: as Fey said at the time of its release: “Young people watch it like a reality show. It's much too close to their real experiences so they are not exactly guffawing.”
The female students of North Shore High are in the grip of a bitchiness epidemic, centered around The Plastics: Queen Bee Regina George (icily portrayed by Rachel McAdams) and her sidekicks Gretchen Weiners (Lacey Chabert) and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried’s debut film role). Former homeschool student Cady’s arrival is the spark in this oestrogen-fuelled tinderbox, which slowly explodes over the next 90 minutes.
Mean Girls was directed and produced by men: Mark Waters and Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels, but it was written by Fey, and its message has long been championed by women. Fey’s character, the newly-divorced teacher Ms Norbury, is even quoted in the forthcoming book from feminist blog The Vagenda (“you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.”)
Made in the early Noughties, the film also captured the final time young people grew up away from the glow of a smartphone. The vicious three-way calls that connect The Plastics are made on landline phones. Clueless, perfectly Nineties, may be so fashionably retro that Australian rapper Iggy Azealia has themed a music video around it, but its social-signifier mobile phones are absent in Mean Girls.
Fey’s script doesn’t include selfies, Instagram or even the internet, and as a result its characters exist in a more poignantly simple time. When a member of North Shore High’s football team comments: “That Cady girl is hot, she might even be hotter than Regina George”, you can be safe in the knowledge that he hasn’t watched porn on his yet-to-be-invented iPhone, or encouraged his classmates to Snapchat him a naked photo.
Mean Girls’ Burn Book, a scrapbook of crude insults and gossip about North Shore High pupils, emerged alongside the snarky surveillance of post-Millennial online gossip sites. Infamous celebrity blogger Perez Hilton launched his omniscient rumour mill PerezHilton.com in 2004 and he, along with a new breed of glossy magazines, went on to track the rise and almost inevitable fall of Lohan to this day. Seyfried has starred in blockbusters Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables and McAdams gained a Bafta Rising Star nomination and worked with Woody Allen, but Lohan made herself unemployable after a string of drink driving and drug abuse charges.
Ten years after the film's release, Lohan, now 27, is trying to piece her career back together, most recently with a guest appearance in the sitcom 2 Broke Girls, that pleasantly surprised critics. But it feels like her life imitated art: growing up in the glare of the celebrity-obsessed Noughties, Lohan became Hollywood’s Teen Queen Bee only for that world to reject her.
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