Written by Andreas Babiolakis

It’s October third.

Nearly twenty years later, Mean Girls feels not just like a hit comedy like it once was. Nay, it is a celebrated excursion; for teenagers to see their reality lampooned (yet acknowledged, for all of the shit we’ve all had to deal with during such a time), and for adults to revisit and remark on how serious everything felt (oh, how little we knew back then). Mark Waters — who worked with star Lindsay Lohan on that Freaky Friday remake — would never make a better film than this one, and part of it was his fixation on presenting life as strangely as it should be (this would be the best example, and he wouldn’t come close to pulling this off afterward). He had tons of help from Tina Fey, who was a Saturday Night Live regular (particularly as a writer) by 2004, whose screenplay did all of the heavy lifting for him. Before 30 Rock existed, Fey pooled her unique brand of humour (full of references, absurdist, and as kooky as anything else at the turn of the century, but with enough self awareness to let you know that she, too, was in on the joke) into this teen flick about the quest for acceptance from those that, well, didn’t really deserve it themselves for their awful behaviours.

Cady is completely removed from the ways of American youth culture because of her twelve year residency in Africa with her family, and she is the new kid at North Shore High School. She is target, as all of us have been when we are fishes-out-of-water in the classroom, and she gets into survival mode, adjusting to clique culture. She quickly is informed about the “Plastics” (a group of girls that are rendered untouchable in the school, and lead by Regina George), but she is as fixated as she is threatened by them; wouldn’t it be great if she was a part of them? There are some allusions to more mature themes here, including the nonsense of hierarchy within society, and the addictions for validation that we face (this film came out right at the start of the social media boom), but its brand of comedy was quite forward thinking in a similar light. Fey’s finger was right on the pulse of the internet, and she either knew exactly how off-the-cuff and direct that online silliness and meta humour was going to be, or she paved the way. Either way, Mean Girls continues to feel right at home online, with quotes and moments being shared to this day.

Even so, Mean Girls — despite all of its silliness — is still a sympathetic feature, that made youths feel heard more than most high school films of its time. I feel like part of this success is due to how much stupidity Mean Girls recognized within that of which made us insecure. Cliques are a big deal in high school, but that doesn’t make them any less pathetic. It feels great to laugh off the nonsense that we have deemed the norm for our most impressionable years (and it’s no wonder why we remain anxious about never being good enough and desperate for approval), because other works feed into the awful impression that these are the years that matter the most. Fey is both a teacher and an ally here, spotlighting how unimportant most of these mentalities during these times of our lives are, and yet what portions do matter (particularly how we treat ourselves, and what toxicities we align with and should stop associating with). The end result is a film that’s as neat and magnetic as it is valid.

Valid to the point that every news channel was talking about the youth of America post Mean Girls (I’ll never forget that Dr. Phil even had an episode about real “mean girls”, and I have nothing more to even say about this). Mean Girls was taking off more than any old comedy (even the good ones). It was assessed via personal attachments across the globe. It’s now 2022. Fetch will still never happen. People are making their own tables to sit at. Society’s habit of pitting successful women against each other has been called out, and we are en route to making sure this stops. Bullying has moved to online. Many things have changed since Mean Girls, but the core of what the film gets at with society’s perplexing ways are exactly the same. We get obsessed over the wrong things, because we are sold on fear. Once we remark on how poorly run everything is, we feel better about ourselves. We are not worthless within a pristine environment: we are a part of a whole infrastructure that sucks, and we just have to try being as good as we can be to make sure it sucks just a little less. Perfection is a front. We’re all trying to figure it out. The Mean Girls screenplay was how Tina Fey tried to figure herself out, but she wound up making all of us feel seen in the mean time.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.