“Not every girl is miserable. There are actually genuinely happy girls. I don’t come across them very often, but they do exist.”
—Rosalind Wiseman, in her best-selling nonfiction book, Queen Bees & Wannabes, 2002
Mean Girls, released in 2004, is the first teen movie of the 21st century to earn an indisputable spot in the canon. For one thing, Tina Fey’s tart, smart screenplay is as witty and quotable as Clueless’s—to my taste the teen comedy gold standard—but with a genuinely nasty bite all its own. For another thing, its titular trio, known as the Plastics, are as iconic as any screen predecessors in their coordinated, almost weaponized outfits: tight pink tops, short tight pink skirts, stripper heels, Breck Girl hair. Any movie can dress villains in black, but it takes skill and imagination to intimidate with pink.
Moreover, the movie has had a substantial afterlife, generating a TV remake in the guise of a nominal sequel (2011’s Mean Girls 2), an okay Broadway musical adaptation (which arrived in New York in 2018 with a book by Fey and music by her husband, Jeff Richmond, and ran for two years, shuttered prematurely because of the Covid pandemic), and, in 2024, a meh movie adaptation of the okay musical—meaning that Mean Girls has ascended beyond the merely canonical to the hallowed realm of franchisedom.
These accomplishments are all the more remarkable given that the original Mean Girls debuted in an unprecedentedly crowded marketplace, released on the tail end of a several-year stretch when teens were enjoying one of their periodic moments in the sun, their cultural and economic swagger at a zenith not seen since the early ’60s “youthquake.”
One reason for this was that there were simply more of them: from a post baby–boom nadir in 1990, the population of American teenagers had begun steadily rising, and by 2002 the total number of 12- to 17-year-olds had hit 25 million, matching the mid-1970s peak, give or take a few hundred thousand kids.
And Hollywood had taken notice. The late 1980s and early 1990s had not been the healthiest era for teen movies and teen moviegoing, certainly not compared to the John Hughes-led golden age of the earlier eighties. But the surprise success in 1995 of Clueless (adapted by Amy Heckerling from Jane Austen’s Emma) had inspired several film festivals’ worth of teen comedies and dramas inspired by classic literature, and by the turn of the century kids had returned to movie theaters. In 1999, according to the MPAA, 31 percent of all movie tickets sold in the U.S. were bought by 12- to 20-year-olds, roughly double their percentage of the population.
It surely helped boost attendance that they had so many teen movies to choose from—and not just works inspired by Shakespeare, Austen, or Shaw, or even Philip Roth. (The 1999 teen sex comedy American Pie, in which Jason Biggs’s character violates the titular dessert, owed an obvious debt to Portnoy’s Complaint). There were dramas for jocks (Varsity Blues, Friday Night Lights) as well as cheerleaders (Bring It On, Bring It On Again, Bring It On: All or Nothing); modern fairy tales starring Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries, Ella Enchanted); more sex comedies (The Girl Next Door, American Pie 2); and even an unlikely historical satire in which Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams inadvertently insert themselves into the Watergate scandal (Dick).
Beyond MTV, there was an ever more evolved and elaborate media universe catering to teens, as well as to their younger “tween” siblings (generally defined as 8- to 12-year-olds, a demographic that researchers had begun slicing and dicing in the 1990s). Two newish kid-centric cable channels, Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, were minting promising young stars and then plugging them into awful show after awful show with the industrial efficiency of the old studio system. Included in these roll calls were the Disney Channel alumni Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Hilary Duff, and Shia LaBeouf, and the Nickelodeon alumni Kenan Thompson, Melissa Joan Hart, Nick Cannon, and Amanda Bynes.
Aiming at a slightly older audience was the WB, a broadcast network that launched in 1995. (It later rebranded as the CW after a sort-of merger with its rival upstart network, UPN). The network soon had a full schedule of series aimed at teens (7th Heaven, Charmed, Felicity, Smallville, and Gilmore Girls) and can claim to have launched, or helped launch, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Seth Green, Michelle Williams, Katie Holmes, James Van Der Beek, Keri Russell (also a Disney Channel vet), Chris Pratt, and Rose McGowan.
Standing outside this teen-tainment complex with their own shop were Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the identical twins who had begun their show-business careers when they were nine months old sharing the role of an infant on the ABC sitcom Full House; by the time they turned 18, they had built (or had built for them) what is frequently described as “a billion-dollar empire” based on direct-to-video movie, fashion, beauty, and fragrance lines, and even bedding.
And, naturally, there was a parallel resurgence of teen pop. Billboard’s Hot 100 was now top-heavy with acts like Spears, Aguilera, Brandy, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson, Avril Lavigne, and the boy bands NSYNC and Backstreet Boys, performers machine-tooled with a precision that had rarely been seen since Disney’s Jurassic-era teen star, Annette Funicello, was coerced into warbling “Tall Paul,” the wan 1959 ditty cited (aspirationally) as the first top ten rock and roll single by a female solo artist.
Vanity Fair celebrated the youth renaissance on its May 2003 cover, a fold-out that featured, in order, Amanda Bynes (then 17), Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (16), Mandy Moore (19), Hilary Duff (15), Alexis Bledel (21—oops, but she played a high schooler on Gilmore Girls), Evan Rachel Wood (15), Raven-Symoné (17), and Lindsay Lohan (16). On the evidence of latter-day TikTok homages, the issue was a cultural landmark for millennials—not quite their Woodstock, but maybe their Woodstock ‘94?—despite a cringe-inducing cover line that read: “It’s Totally Raining Teens! And It’s, Like, So a Major Moment in Pop Culture.”
(Confession: I bear some responsibility for this, as I was then an editor at the magazine, where my duties included co-writing and editing cover lines. I can’t recall if I myself came up with “It’s Totally Raining Teens!,” but I was undeniably in the room where it happened.)
In an accompanying essay, James Wolcott wrote, “To some prunes and professional mourners, Vanity Fair’s salute to the talent, potential, good looks, mass appeal, and bankable power of Hollywood youth will be seen as another sign of the end of civilization, like Paramount’s decision to make Grease 3 … dying bubbles from a society drowning in the kiddie pool.” That was Wolcott going after a strawman with tongue-in-cheek hyperbole; in the decades since parents and cultural authorities had laughed off the Beatles as long-haired, adenoidal fruitcakes, the vast majority of American adults now trembled in fear at being caught on the wrong side of any youthquake, or even youth tremors.
But Wolcott cited an even better reason for Vanity Fair’s interest: the estimate that teens had a collective $155 billion burning holes in their pockets and handbags. Even a magazine that routinely featured long-dead members of the Kennedy family on its cover couldn’t ignore that.
What was genuinely new, Wolcott observed, was that boys were now taking a back seat to girls on screens and on the charts. As Wolcott flatly stated, “Girl power propels tween-teen culture,” in contrast to an earlier generation’s run of movies “fueled by the marriage of testosterone and gasoline,” which had reigned from Rebel Without a Cause to American Graffiti.“Girls now seem to have more poise, daily agon, and purchasing power.”
Mean Girls, in production while Wolcott was at his keyboard, would prove to be the moment’s apotheosis and, while maybe not its defining work—that would probably be Britney Spears’s “Oops!… I Did It Again”—surely its most enduring.
Girls Just Wanna … Be Mean?
In its original incarnation, the movie builds on the anthropological eye that George Lucas brought to American Graffiti (1973) and Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling to Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Making Tina Fey’s achievement all the more impressive, Mean Girls is also, I am nearly 100 percent certain, the first teen movie adapted from a bestselling nonfiction advice book for parents—a feat of true alchemy.
That work was Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman—a “thought leader on leadership, culture, conflict, and young people,” according to her Web site.
In the book, published in 2002 (and updated in 2009 and again in 2016), Wiseman paints what she calls “girl world” as a snub-or-be-snubbed doomscape where it takes military discipline and ruthlessness to survive: “The common definition of a clique is an exclusive group of girls who are close friends. I see it a little differently … I see them as a platoon of soldiers who have banded together to navigate the perils and insecurities of adolescence. There’s a chain of command and they operate as one in their interactions with their environment. Group cohesion is based on unquestioned loyalty to the leaders and an us-versus-the-world mentality.”
Elsewhere, she describes a girl-world dynamic where its denizens serve as a kind of Stasi, “conducting surveillance on who’s breaking the laws of appearance, clothes, interest in boys, and personality.” To be sure, those laws “are based on what our culture tells us about what constitutes ideal femininity.” But Wiseman then lets the beauty-industrial complex off the hook: “Who is the prime enforcer of these standards? The movies? The teen magazines? Nope, it’s the girls themselves.”
At the time her book was published, Wiseman led a nonprofit called the Empower Program, through which she taught classes in schools around the country, from middle schools to colleges, with a curriculum that encouraged girls to be nice, or at least nicer, to one another. Queen Bees & Wannabes was an extension of that work, addressed to parents, and its view of girlhood can feel bleak to the point of hopelessness. She quotes one “anonymous queen bee” who asserts, “I’m never mean to people without a reason.” This interviewee was 12.
We all know from lived experience that middle school and high school girls can be mean to one another for many, many “reasons”—some if not most of which barely merit the designation, at least as adults not named Caligula understand it. (P.S.: boys can be mean to one another, too.) But the familiar scent of moral panic was in the air (cf. the spasms of concern overjuvenile delinquency in the 1950s) given that Queen Bees & Wannabes was only one of five books devoted wholly or in part to female bullying that came out during the first four months of 2002—roughly, a new book on female bullying every three weeks.
The New York Times Magazine took note on its cover, with an image of a miserable-looking teenage girl stuck with pins like a voodoo doll. In the accompanying story, “Girls Just Want to Be Mean,” the journalist Margaret Talbot wrote that it was “time to pull up the rock and really look at this seething underside of American girlhood.”
Fairly or not—Heathers and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, to cite two very different cultural milestones, had previously touched on these same issues, and Laura Ingalls tussled plenty with frontier mean girl Nellie Oleson in the Little House books—female bullying was the young century’s “Teenage Crisis of the Moment,” or so the Washington Post declared.
Wiseman brought to the problem an “it takes one to know one” insight. Attending private middle school in Washington, D.C., she herself had run with “a very powerful, very scary group of girls who were fun to be with but who could turn on you like a dime.” So could she, confessing to Talbot, “When I was in eighth grade, I spread around a lie about my best friend, Melissa … something that made her sound slutty. She confronted me about it, and I totally denied it.” Wiseman added, “I was really a piece of work.”
Perhaps that was why she seemed to take a perverse relish in Queen Bee cruelties. In one passage from the Times Magazine piece, Talbot expresses doubt to Wiseman that girls actually engage in three-way phone calls, a trick Wiseman describes where one girl calls a friend and gets the friend to dish about a third girl, who, unknown to the friend, is secretly listening in. But after some girls in one of her Empower classes admitted that they did indeed make three-way calls, Wiseman laughed and said to Talbot, “Haven’t I told you girls are crafty? Haven’t I told you girls are evil?”
You may remember that there is three-way phone calling in Mean Girls, as well as nasty-message leaving, scurrilous rumor mongering, slut-shaming. Tina Fey had happened to read Talbot’s Times Magazine article while casting about for a screenplay idea, and it is a credit to her comic imagination that, by her account, she “immediately” saw the potential: “This was something I [felt] that I could write about … It was about girls. And it was nasty and violent. And that appealed to me.”
It struck a personal chord, too. As she told Cosmo Girl two years later, while publicizing the finished movie:
I admit it: I was a mean girl. I had a gift for coming up with the meanest possible thing to say in any situation. I ate weaker girls for breakfast. I could sniff out who would take my insults and not fight back. And I was a big behind-the-back girl: I’d spend hours analyzing what some girl did or wore and why it was so jackass.
Looking back, I can see the mean-girl thing for what it is: a waste of energy. It’s like eating a huge bag of cheese curls. In the beginning, you’re like, “This is fun. Tasty!” Then the whole bag is gone, and you feel disgusting. Nothing good has come of it.
In the spring of 2002, Fey was the head writer at Saturday Night Live—the first woman to hold that position—and also the co-anchor of the show’s Weekend Update segment. She brought the notion of adapting Queen Bees & Wannabes to her boss, S.N.L. producer Lorne Michaels, who agreed it held promise, with one caveat: “Can they also still have cool cars and cool clothes?” With Fey’s assent, he took the project to Sherry Lansing, then running Paramount, who was also interested, and a deal was struck to option Wiseman’s book.
“It was kind of a bonehead thing to do on my part for my first screenplay—to try to adapt a nonfiction, nonnarrative book,” Fey admitted to the New York Times. “I had to make up the whole story. I mean, it’s not Chinatown. But just to keep a story moving forward was new to me.”
She initially intended that the central character be a teacher, a sort of Wiseman stand-in—not unlike the math teacher Fey eventually played in the film. You can imagine a version of that movie, a comic all-girl Blackboard Jungle. But Fey soon realized the richer material involved the girls themselves. The heroine instead became a student, Cady (pronounced “Katy”) Heron, the proverbial new kid at school. But Cady, played by Lindsay Lohan, is not only new to North Shore High, she’s new to high school, period, and teenage American mores in general, because she has previously been homeschooled by her zoologist parents in the African veldt.
This backstory was a terrific device, allowing the audience to see the usual lunchtime rituals and gym class humiliations through Cady’s eyes as if observing the curious behaviors of a new species at the watering hole, though it led to another boneheaded move on Fey’s part: she wanted to title the movie Home Schooled, but Lansing sagely insisted on Mean Girls.
The project came together quickly and was in theaters in just 26 months, a Hollywood split second, following Fey’s initial brainstorm. The director was Mark Waters, who had directed Lohan in the 2003 hit Freaky Friday, which launched her as a teen star with a gift for comedy—five years after Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap had launched her as a child star with a gift for comedy. On screen, she conveyed an instant likeability, even innocence, that was perfect for Cady and helped give Mean Girls emotional ballast even in its sillier and more contrived moments.
Viewers may be surprised to learn that, aside from the fact that Fey had to invent an hour and a half’s worth of plot out of whole cloth, the finished movie otherwise reflects its source material with surprising faithfulness. Take the scenes where Cady’s new friends, Goth Janis and “too gay to function” Damian (Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese), provide her with a map to help navigate the lunchroom, spatially and socially. As Janis explicates clique topography by table: “You got your freshmen … ROTC guys … preps … JV jocks … Asian nerds … cool Asians … varsity jocks … unfriendly Black hotties … girls who eat their feelings … girls who don’t eat anything … desperate wannabes … burnouts … sexually active band geeks … ”
Wiseman’s book features a map just like Janis’s, drawn from groups given to her by two anonymous 16-year-old girls from different parts of the country. The kids’ real-word typology is as snarky as anything Fey came up with: “model United Nations boys … unpopular party kids and ecstasy & acid users (mostly juniors) … hacky-sack-playing kids … football & ‘easy’ girls … attitude girls … sophomore girls that judge.” Whether in film or real life, tribal affinities had been ever more thinly sliced across the two decades since The Breakfast Club’s “brain, jock, princess, basket case, and criminal.”
At the center of the Mean Girls lunchroom, seated side by side as if surveying the scene from the head table at a banquet, are the Plastics. “They’re teen royalty,” Damian explains. “If North Shore was Us Weekly, they would always be on the cover.” The trio: anxious busybody Gretchen (Lacey Chabert), vacant Karen (Amanda Seyfried), and Queen Bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams).
After Regina invites Cady to join the Plastics at their lunchroom table on a trial basis, Gretchen gives a short speech explaining the clique’s strictly enforced code of conduct, which, aside from the often quoted opener—“On Wednesdays we wear pink”—is lifted almost verbatim from Queen Bees & Wannabes, where it is attributed to a 15-year-old girl identified as “Gabrielle”:
“We have rules about what we wear. You can only wear your hair up (like in a ponytail) once a week. You can’t wear a tank top two days in a row. You can only wear jeans on Friday and that’s also the only time you can wear sneakers. If you break any of these rules, you can’t sit with us at lunch.”
As Gretchen, Lacey Chabert probably gives a better line reading than Gabrielle did, but if there is such a thing as found comedy, this is it, though Fey left some money on the table. Gabrielle in the book continues: “Monday is the most important day because you want to look your best—it sets the tone for the rest of the week. So wearing something like sweats on a Monday is like going to church and screaming ‘I hate Jesus!’ when you walk in the door.”
(Twenty years later, Gabrielle, now in H.R., outed herself to Washington Monthly. Denying any intent to ostracize or punish, she described the dress code as a cute bonding exercise among pals who just “wanted to wear skirts on the same day. We made up all kinds of random songs and fake clubby things. We weren’t the mean girls by any means.”)
The not-Chinatown plot has Cady becoming the fourth Plastic, ostensibly undercover, at the behest of Janis and Damian. Cady eventually usurps Regina’s throne, Regina enacts revenge, and the picture climaxes in a melee that seems to involve the entire junior class of girls, followed by an encounter group session led by Fey’s math teacher and drawing from the classes Wiseman taught, with the girls apologizing for their cruelties to one another.
KAREN: Gretchen, I’m sorry I laughed at you that time you got diarrhea at Barnes & Noble … And I’m sorry for telling everyone about it … And I’m sorry for repeating it now.
Neither the movie’s weak life lessons nor its meandering plot are really the point: the social observations and the jokes are, and it’s a tribute to Fey, and to a lesser extent Wiseman, that the jokes and social observations are, at their best, one and the same.
Reviews were generally positive—The New York Times rated Mean Girls “tart and often charming,” while Seventeen enthused that “claws have never been sharper”—and the movie took in $86 million at the U.S. box office, great numbers for a cheap teen comedy with no big stars, and even more impressive given that the market for teen movies was now sagging amid the glut of titles.
Fey, having sat through the movie with numerous test audiences, had a nuanced perspective on audience reactions: “Adults find it funny. They are the ones who are laughing. Young girls watch it like a reality show. It’s much too close to their real experiences so they’re not exactly guffawing.”
A dissent came from Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker. While he conceded that the movie’s sharper lines and observations promised something with “truer and more piercing aim than most teen comedies,” much of the rest of it, he felt, comprised “just another teen movie … It is all very well to satirize perfect white females, but if you’re sick of their attitudes, why single them out as protagonists in the first place? What happened to the Asian nerds? Or the unfriendly Black hotties? Or the tired teachers? Why can’t we see a movie about them?”
It was a fair point, and one that Fey addressed in the 2024 remake by integrating the Plastics and others of the movie’s cliques, though Cady and Regina, the two central roles, remained white. The new movie also trimmed some homophobia and slut-shaming. What the update added, aside from so-so songs that don’t do much to advance the plot or inform the characters, are social media and an embarrassing viral video.
In that light, the 2004 film feels as distant as Sixteen Candles or Grease. Aside from some mild flip phone action, there’s virtually no technology in Mean Girls; in a pivotal scene, it’s almost touching to see Regina enacting her revenge by tossing incriminating photocopies—physical sheets of real paper!—all over the school’s hallways.
On April 30, 2004, the day Mean Girls debuted in theaters, the first iPhone was three years distant. But 12 weeks earlier, on February 4, Mark Zuckerberg had launched the website he designed to allow Harvard students to connect with one another—TheFacebook.com. By the end of April, it had expanded to several other colleges, including Stanford and Yale. By the end of the year, it had a million users, all over the country. In September 2005, it was opened to high school students.
Earlier, I claimed that Mean Girls is the first canonical teen film of the 21st century, but maybe it would have been more apt to call it the last great teen film of the 20th century.
Bruce Handy is a journalist and the author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult
