Fey clearly hopes though, that as well as getting a lot of laughs, the film will help some of her audience, especially the girls, exorcize the false desire for 'popularity' and make it through the jungle of high school with a modicum of compassion. Ms Norbury (Fey's character in the film) has been through high school, has been through marriage, has been through teaching, but she still believes in pushing other people to achieve. The unusual name of the protagonist, Cady, is an allusion to the nineteenth century suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose example stands as a historical model for Fey (who also shares a forename with Stanton), Norbury, Cady and her professor mother. Ms Norbury stands up and leads an empowerment session with all the junior girls in the school that has its tongue-in-cheek moments, but which the character means sincerely and which, it seems, so does the film.
In the end though, there are some problems with the film, not least of
which is the fading of the differences between the different groups. As
Damian fades asexually into the background (like the emasculated Jack on
TV's "Will & Grace"), Janis is cured of her lesbian slur and ends up with
the captain of the mathletes. Regina George (Rachel McAdams), the queen of
the plastics, becomes a highly successful jock and even the vacant Karen
Smith (Amanda Seyfried) finds an outlet for her weather forecasting
breasts (they can't always tell when it will rain, but they can tell when it is raining). The outsider is the one who can cross boundaries, but in the film, it's not just the characters who are blurred, but also their errors. The misdemeanours and hurts that Cady commits are never fully repented. Although I'm not in favour of moralizing Hollywood, when Hollywood begins to preach it should at least be consistent.
The predominant rhetoric of the USA's conservative culture is one of competition and victory - a recent article in Harper's acutely observed the similarities between the ethos of reality shows like Survivor and the moral/amoral hypocrisy of the Bush administration. Both, the article maintained, are about winning at all costs, and using the rhetoric of morality as a means to convince, not as a true guide for one's inner behavior. As girls and women are likely to become the next major victims of the Bush war on nonconformity - assuming Bush wins or fixes the upcoming election, there will almost certainly be a majority of Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade - and as some feminists, at least, maintain that women have cooperative skills that are an important counterpoint to the phallocentric hypercompetitiveness of the reality-show Republicans, the gender politics of Mean Girls merit attention.
Becoming
Jewish-ish
Jeff Leavell
How I Finally Learned to Accept Christ in my Heart
Jay Michaelson
Playing Eve
Hila Ratzabi
Hyatt Regency Dead Sea Resort
Rowena Silver
Josh Breaks his Finger
Josh Ring
Mean to Girls
Dan Friedman
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From previous issues:
Harvard Death Fugue:
The Exploitation of Bruno Schultz
Prof. James Russell
The Truth about the Rosenbergs
Joel Stanley
Far from Heaven: Excavating Paradise
Peter Conklin and Dan Friedman