Continuing our series in which writers revisit childhood movie passions, we revisit Tina Fey’s endlessly quotable teen
comedy – or was it really a horror?
• The best arts and entertainment during self-isolation
The thing about being a teenage girl and having a favourite film that’s also about teenage girls is that even if you’re very pretentious (I was) and know that it’s supposed to be pretty ironic (I think I did?), you are, of course, far too close to the subject for it not to be slightly instructional. Mean Girls came out when I was 12, and like Clueless and Heathers had done respectively in the two decades prior, became the knowing, endlessly quotable teen film of the moment, to be watched, rewatched and parroted among young girls across the world for the entirety of high school.
Most of it went swiftly whooshing over our heads: we knew it was a story about a naive young girl who moved from Africa to the US (Lindsay Lohan), and somehow ended up in a group of terrible bullies called the Plastics (helmed by Rachel McAdams’s Regina George), but I think its central girl clique was somehow still aspirational. Which may explain why I ended up the Cady to someone else’s Regina aged 16, assigned to make a list of the least popular people in the year to make sure they didn’t get invited to the next oh-so-exclusive (not) suburban house party. (I declined, and was abruptly dropped.) In fact, a lot of the bullying and hazing that my friends and I endured seemed to have directly plucked out of that world – there was even a “burn book” of rumours doing the rounds for a bit.