Mean Girls (2004)
Director: Mark Waters
Had I seen this before: No
Some reasons I know I'm not a Millennial, no matter how much I teeter on that cusp: I don't like rose gold, I find taking pictures of myself humiliating, I have never really understood how Tumblr works, I don't believe I deserve to have high self-esteem, I've never seen Space Jam, and until this week, I had no relationship to the films of Lindsay Lohan. The Parent Trap, you say? Hayley Mills. Freaky Friday? Jodie Foster, baby! (Counterpoint: I love avocado toast and would rather make my way through the most Byzantine of online ordering mazes than talk to one human person on the phone.) So I missed this one on the first round and then just never bothered catching up with it and at some point its absence in my film-watching history sort of became a part of me.
Finally getting around to watching a movie like Mean Girls as a citizen of the internet is odd because it's less like experiencing a narrative work of fiction and more like recognizing a string of memes set against a backdrop of serviceable connective scenes. How can I tell if a movie is good or bad if pop culture has rendered it unrecognizable as a film, having repeatedly laid before me all of its component parts in random order? Before I watched it this week, I can't count the number of times I had already been called a loser by a picture of a weirdly blonde Rachel McAdams in a car and been told to get in because we're going (gerund-participling). I knew that on Wednesdays we wore pink. I knew that Lacey Chabert wouldn't let me sit with them. I knew that Amy Poehler was not a regular mom, she was a cool mom. I knew that a gym full of girls had been personally victimized by Regina George. I knew not to agree that I think I'm really pretty. I knew that fetch was not going to happen. I knew that she doesn't even go here. I even knew that it was October 3rd! If I'd had more energy while watching it, I would have just been Leo pointing every 38 seconds or so.
And maybe not even that, because there isn't really the zing of finally seeing something familiar put into context in this case--none of the stand-alone references really require context. Maybe the girl who doesn't even go here? It's mostly just a collection of self-contained jokes that I no longer register as jokes, exactly, more as the shorthand commentary they have become online. Are they still funny or are they just familiar? Or are they funnier because so many other funny people have added heft to them by applying them to various situations? If you search "get in loser" and scroll down the images page, you'll see it crossed with aliens, Golden Girls, Eminem, the Wet Bandits from Home Alone, Joe Biden, RBG, Harry Potter, Friends, Baby Yoda, Rich Uncle Pennybags, and Karl Marx ("Get in loser, we're seizing the means of production"). And that's just the first dozen rows or so. I think there's something kind of amazing about creating a moment that is in itself just a mildly amusing character beat that then branches out to become thousands of other people's jokes. But in its natural habitat it just reverts back to a mildly amusing character beat.
So a subjective overall assessment is tough, because I'm having trouble getting my arms around it, but some facts are objective, such as: how adult are the teens here? Lindsay Lohan-18; Rachel McAdams-26; Jonathan Bennet-23; Lacey Chabert-22; Amanda Seyfried-19; Lizzy Caplan-22; Daniel Franzese-26. I didn't bump especially hard on any of these, I think it probably just matters less in comedy than drama. McAdams, secret Gen Xer, does look like an adult to me but I am more distracted by the strangely unflattering dye job and 2004 eyebrows than the fact that she should be a grad student at least.
Anyway, I should probably take a moment here to note that after two and a half years of avoiding it, Covid has finally weaseled its stupid virus way into my home, and while my capacity for analysis is slightly diminished due to lack of sleep, my motivation for analysis is absolutely obliterated. So Tina Fey will not be getting the full John Hughes treatment today because I do not have it in me, but, quickly: I think she is one of the most talented joke-writers of the past fifty years and has probably made me laugh as much as any other single human, and also that she has an issue with punching down and a tendency to slide into blinkered white feminism. Plus I am still holding a grudge about a 30 Rock joke that hurt my feelings like twelve years ago because my only superpower stems from being a Taurus with a lot of Scottish ancestry, which curses me graciously allows me to stay mad forever. So when I say that as a whole, the sections of this movie propping up all the memes are fine but not great, remember: grains of salt, grains of salt.
Since I don't really want to talk about any of that, let's just talk about the things I enjoyed the most, such as Tim Meadows. How can I, a hot-blooded American woman, be expected to resist The Ladies Man in a tank top? Yes, I know his character spends the whole movie unprofessionally hitting on a subordinate, but at least she's age-appropriate? I don't know, I always feel relieved when Tim Meadows is on the screen. He projects a comedic control of the situation, no matter how ludicrous the situation might be. Before watching this, I confided to my brother that I had been putting it off for so long because I was afraid of discovering that I did not like it and causing everyone to be mad at me, and he said "Don't worry, you'll at least like the Tim Meadows parts" because he knows me very well.
And then there is Amanda Seyfried, whom I most recently saw being absolutely magnificent in The Dropout, being absolutely magnificent here as well! She's so funny in this! The fact that I felt drawn to basically every non-Cady character indicates to me that "staunch inability to care about Lindsay Lohan" might not be something I can overcome at my advanced age. For me, this movie needed at least twice as much Karen. No, eight times as much. Karen should be the main character. This whole thing should be a two-hander miniseries about Karen and Mr. Duvall solving inconsequential mysteries at the school. They have a raccoon frenemy that sometimes gives them trouble but sometimes points them in the right direction. We gotta rebuild this whole thing from the ground up. I just wish someone had consulted me in the first place.
(But it is funny when fictional characters get non-fatally hit by buses, so I will be keeping that gag in my Karen-heavy reboot.)
Line I repeated quietly to myself: "No...I just have a lot of feelings."
Is it under two hours: Yes
In conclusion: Somehow I feel like I currently know exactly as much about this movie as I did before I watched it, like all the non-meme bits have already leaked out my ears. Wednesday = pink. Fetch = no. October = 3rd.
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Up next: A tribute to an Aussie legend and a bad movie that I love