“Mean Girls”: A Time Capsule of Casual Bigotry
Mean Girls needs no introduction. Since its premiere in 2004, the teen comedy directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey permeated the public consciousness in a way no other teen movie has done since.
Its online presence alone has transformed in the 17 years since its premiere, evolving from grainy YouTube videos of young men doing the Jingle Bell Rock dance at a school talent show, to an infinite amount of Buzzfeed listicles, to Tiktoks of girls styling outfits inspired by the main characters. Before y’all start your “Regina George being iconic for 3 minutes’’ video marathon, I think fans should stop to consider something crucial: this movie is, like, really mean.
As a millennial, something I noticed as I got older was how casually cruel American society was back in the 2000s. Of course there were the obvious reasons such as post-9/11 Islamophobia, the Iraq War, and the lack of a sufficient response to Hurricane Katrina, but most everyday interactions were usually filled with casual racism, sexism, homophobia, or some other form of casual bigotry that would be considered less appropriate today. Not that this completely went away in the following decade, but back then it was something we didn’t question as much as we do now, let alone speak out about. If you did, you’d be seen as overly sensitive or are looking to just spoil the fun. Either way, calling out problematic behavior was social suicide.
This especially becomes evident when rewatching mainstream films and TV from the era, where someone of a marginalized identity (whether they were a person of color, part of the LGBTQ community, or were deemed overweight) was more likely to be the target of ridicule, contempt, or disgust than a fully fleshed out character. Mean Girls, a movie praised for its clever writing, is no exception to this.
One of the glaring flaws of Mean Girls is that it framed marginalized people as accessories to the “default” group, straight, able-bodied white people.. While Fey allows The Plastics (Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, and Rachel McAdams), Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), and Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) to be relatively complex and charismatic, the more diverse characters decorate the set like homemade posters for the spring fling dance and are rarely given any personality beyond their respective stereotypes.
The Black students are deemed unfriendly despite not being uniquely callous to their classmates with the exception of Cady (and even then it was reasonable considering that she spoke to them in Swahili solely because of their race). The Cool Asians are hypersexualised, as two of its members being in a relationship with a grown man is mostly played off for laughs. The Desperate Wannabes clique is made up almost exclusively of fat (by Hollywood standards) and disabled girls, as if to say that them being that way makes them inherently uncool. Though the film has a fairly diverse cast of actors, the way these characters are depicted downplays this seemingly noble effort by confirming the internal biases that impressionable audiences already hold towards people from marginalized groups.
Yes, the point of the film is that every single one of the girls (along with the rest of the teens) in Mean Girls are just that- mean. The homeschooled Cady Heron is shoved into a cruel world inhabited by American teenagers who isolate themselves into exclusive cliques and laugh at each others’ misfortune, and she eventually learned to survive by adopting their cruelty. While the film resolves by having Heron lead her female peers into a more peaceful coexistence, the casual bigotry of the student body goes unmentioned. It’s simply not the story that Fey and co. were interested in telling. Given Fey’s history of writing nonwhite characters in her later work, it should be no surprise that there are weird racial jokes such as inserting a mistranslation as an excuse to have one of the Cool Asians use the n-word.
It’s important to note that Cady, the audience surrogate, learns about the population of North Shore High from Janis Ian, the street-smart outcast and former best friend of Queen Bee Regina George. Janis Ian is framed as more rebellious due to her grungy appearance and her scheme to ruin Regina’s reputation, though she arguably doesn’t care as much about ending an evil system as much as she wants to exact her eighth grade revenge against her. Basically, she’s just as mean as the others, she just isn’t socially rewarded for it (at first).
One thing that personally bothered me about the film is that Janis never gets the comeuppance that Regina nor Cady endure despite being just as cruel as they were. Even though she manipulated Cady, constantly made homophobic jokes against her best friend, and instigated the scheme that catalyzed the film, Janis’s brashness allows the writers to frame her as more “authentic” and “real” in her meanness than her counterparts, and is thus more sympathetic. Given Fey’s history of bullying in high school despite being unpopular, I can’t help but think of Janis as her self-insert character.
The film frames the homophobic jokes Janis throws at her gay best friend Damian (Daniel Franzese) as acceptable due to her proximity to him and apparent acceptance of his homosexuality (after all, it’s only okay when she does it). Sure Damian laughs it off but I can’t count how many times high school me laughed off the racist jokes my white friends made at my expense.
To me, Janis and Tina Fey represent how the average, non-outwardly bigoted person in the 2000s saw themselves. Despite her not being as outwardly homophobic as someone like Regina George, they still exercise the cruelty of the society they hail from and don’t question their behavior. To them, it’s okay to say casually homophobic, racist, or otherwise bigoted things and to not be respectful to those with marginalized identities, just as long as you’re mostly tolerant of their existence. This is literally the bare minimum.
All of this isn’t to say that Mean Girls should be “cancelled”, but it is still important to look at the media we consume critically as we get older and wiser. It’s tempting to say that this movie didn’t age well, but I don’t think that’s true. This isn’t like a perfectly good carton of milk that went bad after leaving it out of the fridge for too long, reductive depictions of marginalized people and the free use of slurs were always harmful. Even though a few of these labels have been reclaimed (Unfriendly Black Hottie and Cool Asian are popular usernames on Twitter and Instagram), but these inherently problematic labels shouldn’t have to be reclaimed in the first place. They are the products of a system that was not built for them, this leaves the impressionable complacent if their problematic nature isn’t called out for what it is. In other words, it is, like, so not fetch.
