Tina Fey continues to corrupt the culture.
What’s going on with the Mean Girls movie-musical is a perfect example of cultural distortion. Start with the fact that the 2004 film Mean Girls (directed by Mark Waters) was never good, although fans endorsed its inane satire about guileful and insecure young girls going through life with bad manners. The script by Saturday Night Live veteran Tina Fey stole from the John Hughes ’80s comedies and later indie hits Clueless and Heathers, pilfering their exposé of high-school cliques and adolescent style. Fey’s superficial approach appealed to such banal taste — some reviewers erroneously refer to it as a “classic.”
That means that contemporary Mean Girls lore is rooted in inauthenticity — now exacerbated by ridiculous movie-musical abstraction (based on Fey’s previously reprocessed material for a 2017 Broadway musical). Fey recycles her adolescent-rivalry formula again to exploit what it means to be a teenager in the age of social-media isolation, a dishonest polity, and moral deficiency: Newcomer Cady (Angourie Rice) is so attracted to the girly high-school clique The Plastics, headed by Regina (Renée Rapp, the oldest teen since Dawson’s Creek) that she soon betrays her first friends, the gay outsiders Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damien (Jacquel Spivey).
Fey reveals her own disingenuousness, making a travesty of Cady and Regina’s insincerity regarding, respectively, allyship and jealousy. Naïve teenagers sold on “diversity-inclusion-equity” (DIE) may not realize they’re being cheated. And craven reviewers go along with the deceit, pretending that the assemblage of broad performances and mash-up of Britney–Taylor Smith–Olivia Rodrigo musical videos by directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. is not cringe but fresh and expert.
Fact is, the very idea of repackaging Mean Girls is insulting. It perpetuates the degradation that has overtaken pop culture since 2004, the year the culture broke. I did not include Mean Girls in my original assessment because it was one of the least interesting films of that pivotal moment. Although I found it phony and forgettable, Mean Girls, with all its moral confusion, seems to have had real influence on people who follow corporate media and buy into its ideology, especially Fey’s twisted justifications of feminism.
Now the return of Mean Girls as a movie-musical — a decision as misguided as Oprah Winfrey’s movie-musical version of The Color Purple — steers us in the same dreadful direction: normalizing the most divisive aspects of Millennial gender politics.
Fey’s cutesy meanness — specifically vitriolic female competition, spoofed in a school intervention scene — is the product of a woman who has made it big in the boys’ club (Fey’s glib, grating TV series 30 Rock). It’s a joke from a woman who achieved her profession’s ultimate status through promoting gender stereotypes — her unfunny, left-favored caricature of Sarah Palin.
Fey’s choice of villainy — the Plastics — fits the idiotic Barbie craze, now being praised as a women’s-lib statement. Fey’s failed attempt at creating new slang through the term “fetch” was picked up only by media types whereas the vernacular in Bring It On and Amy Heckerling’s “as if” in Clueless rang true.
Fey’s calculating heroine Cady (doubly ridiculed by her home-schooling in Africa) and her rival Regina are unconvincing types who represent feminism’s downturn — the excess of privilege that is a debased means to success. (The cameo appearance of Mean Girls’ original heroine, the tabloided Lindsay Lohan, offers failed redemption.)
Mean Girls is a hoax in which TV culture demeans cinema — the same way that HBO’s The Sopranos overtook The Godfather trilogy and GoodFellas. Never a social satirist you could take seriously, Fey trivializes the moral lessons of the John Hughes movies to push her own brand of bossypants feminism (inspiration for the wretched Pitch Perfect movies). Every iteration of Mean Girls ignores what Tom Wolfe called “the esoteric working of social status that one would not ordinarily think of as social at all.” Instead, Fey rewards misbehavior, possibly setting the stage for the next generation of Hillary Clintons, Nancy Pelosis, Liz Cheneys, Lori Lightfoots, Letitia Jameses, Nimarata Haleys, and Taylor Swifts.
Something goes wrong when that happens; our culture gets trivialized.
