Waters: Mean Girls (2004)

Mean Girls is a kind of update of Clueless, released roughly a decade after Amy Hecklerling’s makeover masterpiece. In this case, though, the story is told from the point of view of the person getting the makeover – Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who finds herself adopted by “Queen Bee” Regina George (Rachel McAdams) – which is perhaps why the film itself is less confidently or emphatically of its time than Clueless. Where Cher’s narration made for a film that was inviolable in its sense of hip, its ability to make over even the most uncool viewer with a new canon of taste, Cady’s narration makes it feel a bit more like Mean Girls is trying to articulate a period of transition. In part, that’s a matter of hindsight, since one of the odd things about the film is that it is almost entirely about gossip, but also set on the very cusp of the social media revolution. While it might be a bit of a stretch to describe it as Gossip Girl in filigree, it’s driven by odd, contorted scenes in which everyone at Cady’s new school seems to be present in the same room, or in the same space, even when it seems physically impossible or narratively implausible – especially to Cady, who’s spent her whole childhood on African zoological reserves, rarely surrounded by more than a couple of humans at a time. Every conversation feels at least four-way, semi-networked, while the whole drama is driven by the “Burn Book,” an insult catalogue for staff and students that the Queen Bees compose in Regina George’s bedroom, and which comes back to bite them in the final act. To say that it’s about online bullying is perhaps to ignore the mild comic palette of it all, but there’s certainly something prescient – and original – about the sheer scale with which this collection of utterances made outside of school manages to find its way back into the school population, trolling and trawling every classroom and corridor when it finally goes viral. Like Cady herself, it makes the film feel a little uncertain about what it means to be a teenager, let alone a funny teenager, perhaps explaining why Tiny Fey is so much more hesitant than Heckerling to craft an idiolect all of its own. Certainly, there are new catchphrases, but they’re often about dissing other catchphrases (“stop trying to make fetch happen”), rather than building a language on the scope and scale of Cher's. In years to come, people might look back on it at the last wave of teenspeak that wasn’t entirely colonised by social media – you can just see the incipient wilt, like an exotic, hothouse bloom that’s been exposed to its first few seconds of fresh air - but for now it’s strangely familiar and unfamiliar, closer and more distant than Clueless.