Pre-Columbine Art
MEAN GIRLS
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
It's coming to be something of a cultural cliché to say this but the only difference between Columbine and non-Columbine high schools is the guns.
High schools are artificial constructions, recent institutions whose sole function is to keep kids off the street and out of the work place for as long as possible. High schools have a secondary function (indoctrinating people into society at large in matters of public humiliation, frustration, and societal injustice), and occasionally even a tertiary use (the passing of the hard-won knowledge of civilization on to younger generations.
My high school years were so horrible I have blocked out most of it, the way you don't remember an abscess. Unfortunately, there are so many high school and teen movies released that I can't help but having some horrid agony flashback to this or that incident that reminds my what I prefer to be an adult. With only few exceptions, the teachers, the athletes, the hoods, and the administrators were all bullies — bullying being what high schools teach most — but the worst practitioners of this black art were the girls, mainly the upper echelon girls who for no sociological reason that I could perceive were deemed the cultural and spiritual leaders of the tribe. They were ghastly, but big fish in a little pond, destined to spurt rug rats through ever widening hips for their increasingly narcotized husbands. I wonder, for example, what the dread Terry Hobbs from my own high school might think of the film MEAN GIRLS, and if she is then reminded of or feels remorseful about being so mean to people such as me when I was forced to sit next to her in an English class or on the bus (I've never been to a high school reunion so I have no idea what this monster is up to these days: interviewing Afghani prisoners at Guantanamo, I imagine).
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MEAN GIRLS finds teen star Lindsay Lohan in a similar circumstance, but in the cast of this film she is more like an alien from another planet dropped into the muck and horror of an isolated and backward community with its own bizarre and rigid rules. Her character, Cady Heron, is the child of scientists who have spent her first 14 years in Africa, where she was home schooled. A potential female dork, she is good at math, doesn't seem to care about how she looks, and has a very good relationship with her parents as equals. Well, high school will beat the spirit out of her.
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After a harrowing first few minutes during which she is almost hit by a bus (there are no such things in the African bush, apparently), and sees randomly malicious students setting fire to something, Cady makes "friends" with the obligatory Goth, Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) and the obligatory excluded overweight gay with the catty wit, Damian (Daniel Franzese). But soon the leader of what Janis calls The Plastics, the obligatory threesome who rule the school by their manner, style, and supposed popularity, discovers Cady. The prime Plastic is Regina George (Rachel McAdams) can't believe that there is someone in the world who has never heard of high school and decides to take her in hand and train her in Plasticity. Meanwhile, Janis encourages this, so that she can gain intel on Regina, who had a falling out with Janis when they were in second grade.
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That's the premise, and basically the plot. But there doesn't need to be much more. As Joe Bob says, too much plot gets in the way of the story. What the viewer is really interested in is the schadenfreude of watching the poor victims on the screen experience what he had to endure.
MEAN GIRLS is really a succession of tiny set pieces driven by this overriding premise. The set up takes about 20 minutes, the development of it takes another 40, the climax about 15, and then we're out of there. Those middle 40 minutes are the heart of the enterprise because there we are enveloped in the minutia of horrible school life — crushes, proms, drives, sardonic teachers with quietly unhappy lives.
The only problem is that MEAN GIRLS seems to like high school just a teeny bit better than anyone who has ever endured it. It lacks cat claws. The natural comparison that everyone will make is with HEATHERS, a not-great movie that a lot of critics wax sentimental over (despite the fact that it had a terrible ending). To me, MEAN GIRLS doesn't reach the heights of opprobrium found in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (with is just as critical of the adults as of the teens) and CARRIE (which is still the definitive revenge fantasy of the high school outcast — before Columbine, anyway).
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The script is credited to Tina Fey of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE's weekly comic news segment, and apparently based in turn on Rosalind Wiseman's non-fiction book QUEEN BEES AND WANNABES: HELPING YOUR DAUGHTER SURVIVE CLIQUES, GOSSIP, BOYFRIENDS AND OTHER REALITIES OF ADOLESCENCE. But in fact, the movie is more along the lines of CLUELESS (itself based on Austen's EMMA), only told from outside the closed triad of high school trendsetters rather then the inside. The film is structured well, has enough jokes, has a real felt sense of teens as actual teens, Of the recent teen oriented films I've seen, including EUROTRIP, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, 13 GOING ON 30, this one is probably the "best" if only because it has the most realistic grounding, despite the fact that more outrageous things happen here then in those films (a girl getting flattened by a bus, for example, or a prudish sex ed teacher having an affair with all the exclusive Asian girls). EUROTRIP is just trash that even bungles its obligatory dominatrix scene with Lucy Lawless. THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (which I like quite a bit) takes the RISKY BUSINESS template, updates it, and explores the urge to rescue that motivates a lot of teen romance, on and off the screen. 13 is a vehicle to celebrate Jennifer Garner's considerable charms. One improvement in these films over teen films past is that the teenagers seemed to be played by people the actual age.
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It's kind of sad that Tina Fey got herself cast as the bitter divorcee. She's putting herself forward as the modern Eve Arden, the wisecracking sidekick with the straight-ahead, realistic view of sex. This is in complete conflict with the view of her among my male friends, who tune into SNL only from 12:01 to 12:07 every Saturday night, who snip out pictures of her from magazines, and who practically creamed their jeans when they saw her on the cover of a feminists 'zine recently dolled up in secretarial drag. I don't know anything about her, but Fey seems to think of herself as a dork while the rest of the world viewers her as a sex goddess.
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But speaking of sex goddesses, the time has come in this review for the traditional love letter to the star of the week. I don't know if you have seen any of Lohan's previous films (PARENT TRAP, FREAKY FRIDAY, I WAS A TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN), but she is really, really good. She does what all great stars have to do, blend animal sex appeal with quantifiable acting skills. She has the most incredible eyes, the most luscious mouth, she's not a rail-thin flinty thing where one's heart can find no purchase (i.e., she's got a little meat on her bones that makes her legs look great), and she is obviously a pretty sharp customer.
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Graham Greene once got into a bit of trouble back in the '30s by acknowledging the unsayable in the course of a review of a Shirley Temple movie — that there was something shockingly sexual about the tyke's affect. It's interesting that Lohan has been most associated with Disney movies up until now because there is an animal sexuality in her, too. Except that the times have changed and in such a sexualized culture it's a deficit to be asexual. Still, Lohan has a natural allure, a spontaneous propensity for the come hither look. I offer up as proof the scene where she dances in a talent show with the other Plastics garbed in faux holiday garb of Santa suit and fashion knee boots. If you watch her, and compare Lohan to the other three, there is something almost shockingly — yet delightfully — aggressive and accomplished about her bump and grind as opposed to the others. I could be wrong, but I think we have another Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth on our hands.
NEXT TIME: VAN HELSING
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