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Mean Girls 2023 compared to Mean Girls 2004

This isn't a big write-up, because I'm tired, but since I finally watched the musical movie on a plane, it keeps creeping back into my head.

There are three main things about it that keep poking at me to remind me that they're remarkable.

I'm speaking as somebody who was 13 in 2004 and the peak age for Mean Girls to be fascinating, horrifying, and aspirational (aesthetically if not morally lol). Now, I am a teacher who has spent a couple years teaching in American middle and high schools.

The Set

I keep staring at the school set when I look at clips of this movie. I've only sat through watching it once on the plane, but I am just absolutely transfixed with how much more realistic the school looks. Back in 2004, movies looked like movies. The fourth wall was stronger. People didn't have cameras on their phones and make content out of their lives.

I don't know as much as I'd like about filmmaking and the technical terms, but I just am surprised about how a movie released in 2004 has such broader angles, when some films weren't even embracing 16:9 ratio yet, than a movie released in 2023. Again, I think this goes back to the way that, in order for a "teen movie" to have any hope of reaching the teen audience of today and not just nostalgic millennials, they needed to try and frame it in a way that felt genuine to the late Gen Z kids in high school, the Gen Alpha kids who are coming up, and the Gen Z kids who recently finished high school. All of those kids grew up in a world where they were making tiktoks and knew what ring lights were before they were literate.

And it's just surprising and novel to me that, as a side effect of the higher tech reality of "teens today," the set they use in the new Mean Girls movie is so much more lived-in and real than something plastic and larger than life -- a little better and shinier -- that would have always been used in the teen movies of my era. By and large, I feel like I don't hear of that many "teen movies" being made these days. The market has shifted such that unless they're caught in the demographic of one of the big franchises, there's no point making a movie like Mean Girls or Drive Me Crazy or Never Been Kissed or 10 Things I Hate About You or any of the others I can think of. They watch stuff on their phones or on streaming services. They don't need to go anywhere for algorithms that cater to their tastes or push whatever cultural moment is going viral at the moment. And so, because of this, the school set seems to be an actual school that was being used in real life just seconds ago.

I purposefully didn't spend a lot of time googling about the actual production before writing this, so feel free to shout of any trivia you know about it, because I wanted to express my wonderment and presumptions about it before going back and googling around since this is a random background thought that's been in my head.

In the above clip, I am struck by how the cafeteria is so narrow compared to the one in the original movie. It is a functional reality of whatever building they're in. I also feel like I could just step into it, having occasionally cut into the lunch line as a teacher in the past few years because I was starved for something warm and not wet. The way the line is set up to double back on itself and stuff. The tables. The fact that the posters on the walls look sometimes on glossy paper but, at other times, printed straight from a standard printer on matte paper. There's even a random truck that drives by in the background in such a way that it makes me wonder if it was intentional or if there was just normal suburban traffic happening around the school or if something else was going on other than filming in another part of the school that was being used as a set.

When it moves to Ms. Norbury's class, the classroom itself just looks so much more lived in. I find it difficult to believe that it's even entirely set dressing.

I would be surprised to find out that this wasn't a school they requested be left as-is to use for shooting with a handful of posters altered or added for the aesthetic (such as the Vote for Pedro joke poster).

I feel like this is an artistic choice that makes the world feel more real and "smaller" because it feels more authentic to the teen experience of today. They know what a high school looks like more intimately and concretely than people of my generation did, because they've taken pictures and filmed in every part of one -- likely especially the cafeteria areas.

The Scope of Teen Life

The fact that teenagers document their entire lives with easy-access picture and video to share it online and that their social town squares are, as I understand it, tiktok and snapchat and such, changes a lot in terms of what the movie can suggest is a desirable or frightening or even realistically imitated teen experience. In 2004, every young teenager in the mainstream at least went through a phase of daydreaming about when they would be old enough to "go to the club." Now, most teenagers could not care less if they ever get to go into that kind of loud, packed social atmosphere.

The fashions have also changed as a result. Of course, if a Gen Z person goes to a club, what they want to wear is different for a multitude of reasons, but in the original Mean Girls movie, the girls were always wrapped in these tiny mini dresses or even straight up lingerie in their social encounters. Being honest, I cannot actually imagine a world in which anyone was frequently and as a matter of course* letting their teen daughters out of the house in only fancy lingerie, but it was an exaggeration upon the truth of what could be expected in high school.

(*In my hometown, there absolutely was a parent-endorsed scene of teenage party debauchery, but that's neither here nor there. I'm just saying I know these things did happen, but they weren't normal.)

But a teenager of 2004 would daydream about ape a reality in which some form of that aesthetic might make it into their lives, within the constraints of what actual reality would let them have. They couldn't be in the MTV version of things, but they could do their best to cobble it together with their real mall finds.

On the other hand, there's far less separation now between the reality the new movie tries to present, though it certainly has its heightened and exaggerated reality of being a musical. But it feels more like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend where there is a conceit that the musical sequences are happening in someone's (usually Cady's) imagination or they are an expression of a mood which then snaps back to much more realistic acting.

In particular, the performance by Renee Rapp as Regina George is what made this movie anything more than a fleeting in the fever dream of 14 hour flight to me. I love her singing voice, but more than that, when she switches to her 'normal acting' mode, she actually acts like some of the teenagers I've observed from the perspective of a 20 to 30-something teacher. There is one student in particular I had a couple of years ago who behaved in much the same way to the point that it's a bit haunting.

The actresses are still in their 20s, as were the original Mean Girls cast, but the way they are dressed and the lack of an obsession with thinness among all the characters really contributes to them feeling more believably like teenagers and not just dolls playing the parts of teenagers.

I think this realism being stronger in a musical than the original film feels like a product of the times.

 

Which leads me to the final thing I already touched upon above. At the Halloween party, most of the students relatively body-covering costumes, even where they're supposed to be sexy for a teenager.

It's probably a good thing in the zeitgeist overall, but it's just really interesting to me when one considers the frequent observations that even while many Gen Z people are more socially progressive in their attitudes, they are more conservative in their dress.

While these are adults playing teenagers for the most part, there is a sense I notice among the students I've taught in the last 4 years or so that they value being minors and having certain parts of them that shouldn't be seen by others or adults. There have been plenty of times I've had to tell a girl that, unfortunately, she is not allowed to wear a crop-top at school without an opaque layer covering her abdomen entirely, defeating the purpose, but overall the aesthetic is a lot less "please think I'm sexy on adult terms."

I had a conversation with a friend earlier about how the starlets of the early 2000s being aged-out Disney-made stars, coupled with the degree of separation that existed between the average person and commercial media product that has been eroded over the past couple of decades, made it so that teen girls of my generation sought the end of their childhoods to be accelerated. However, the teens of today often find that they have to carve this out for themselves.

I've also seen discussions about how there used to be entire stores dedicated to the preteen girl stage of life. The Claire's of the world have shrunk, if not disappeared, and Limited Too went from being an expensive, flashy mall experience I only had once around age 11 to being a plastic jewelry brand at Walmart.

I've seen this framed as the adults and market forces in the world trying to hypersexualize minors, and while I think there is a point in that argument to be had, my observations about what this version of Mean Girls tried to do aesthetically makes me feel like there's an extent to which that wave has crested. The cultural real estate that teenagers have to be a separate category (which has only really existed since the 1950s as a marketing tactic but which is valuable for slower development in the present age) is much smaller scale now. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just exists largely online. However, the internet is not like it was when I was a teenager, where it largely felt like a different "place" altogether with different rules. Rather, it's like an augmented reality overlay to the real lives that teenagers are living. And even if big business doesn't find that it's very useful to have separate teen and preteen categories anymore, they are still consuming and buying and making in their own ways, insisting that they don't want to be seen except on their terms, even if they are in some ways trapped by other forces than those that tended to lure the girls of my age to wish that they would no longer be perceived as "other" and "younger." Instead, this generation seems to want to be perceived as "other" more often, rather than just being lumped in with everything around them.