‘Mean Girls’ Retrospective: 20 Years Later and It’s Still Fresh and Oh So Fetch

With its 2004-perfect styles and needle drops (not to mention cultural references), Mark Waters’s Mean Girls should feel like a relic of the George W. Bush era. Although its stars are now far past the age where audiences could suspend their disbelief enough to envision them as high school students, the film remains as fresh twenty years later as it was in its original release. A truly special confluence of events has to take place in order for a teen comedy like this to stand the test of time so well, and Mean Girls managed to get just about everything right, starting in the most unlikely place: Its unconventional source material. Rosalind Wiseman’s book Queen Bees & Wannabes, published in 2002 with the subtitle “Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence,” was an instant hit with mothers of teen girls. Although Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey hadn’t yet had children of her own, she immediately saw the potential in adapting the book to film, getting SNL producer Lorne Michaels to convince Paramount Pictures to buy the rights.

Adapting a sociological non-fiction text to a fictional narrative feature was new ground, not just for Fey but for cinema in general. Instead of adapting the book directly, centering the parent’s role, Fey went a step further, crafting a screenplay focused on the teenage girls the book studied, not just as characters but as an audience. Smartly drawing from her own experience to create a frame for the material in Wiseman’s book, Fey’s narrative tracks the socialization of Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) to American teen girlhood. Cady’s parents (Ana Gasteyer and Neil Flynn) homeschooled her for years in Africa due to their careers as zoologists, but now that she’s a teenager, they decided that it’s time for her to be educated alongside her peers. North Shore High in Evanston, IL, is like a minefield for Cady, every step bringing with it some new unwritten rule she must learn and apply if she wants to survive. The only students who treat her with something like kindness are Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), who help on her first day by telling her where not to sit in class and on her second day by telling her where to sit in the cafeteria. They introduce her to the social structure at North Shore by reducing every lunch table to stereotypes – “Asian nerds, cool Asians, unfriendly black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don’t eat anything…” – calling the school’s most popular girls “The Plastics”: Dumb blonde Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), gossip monger/ultimate follower Gretchen Weiners (Lacey Chabert), and Queen Bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams). If North Shore is a minefield, then Regina is a briar patch all her own, every barbed question full of traps for the unsuspecting Cady to stumble into. But Janis encourages Cady to spy on Regina and later to destroy Regina after she gets back together with her ex, Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), under the guise of setting up Cady with him.

The high school setting perfectly caters to Fey’s strengths as a writer, as no one is more vicious with their put-downs than teenage girls. Cady sees her own socialization process through the lens of her parents’ zoological work, which allows Fey to indulge in her more surrealist tendencies, likening the fountain at the local mall to a watering hole and the school’s students to jungle animals. She writes parents for Cady and Regina who represent very different parenting styles, a sly way for Fey to demonstrate the effects of parenting styles mentioned in the source material. Fey’s screenplay consists of one perfectly written scene after another, chock full of quotable lines and untoppable line readings, and Waters assembles each scene for maximum impact, exhibiting a strong sense of blocking and camera movement. Waters’s assured direction allows the film to have its satirical cake and eat it, too, as in the moment when Cady has her coming-out as one of The Plastics in a slow-motion hallway walk set to Missy Elliott’s “Pass That Dutch,” that ends with her falling head-first into a garbage can. The parody in the scene is obvious, and the fact that no one even notices Cady’s fall is at once surreal, silly, and a fun bit of foreshadowing. Waters manages a similar trick later in the film, as Regina surveys the destruction she’s sewn by disseminating the Burn Book all over the school: After establishing Regina standing, untouchable, above everyone, the camera tracks backward, showing students crying, chasing each other, and fighting in a way that recalls Cady’s vision of the students as jungle animals while staying noticeably human. Waters even understands what makes The Plastics such teen dreams, having costumer Mary Jane Fort dress them in clothes that trade forward-thinking fashion for luxe chicness; they look like they shop at Bloomingdale’s while everyone else shops at Kohl’s.

A large part of what made Mean Girls so beloved is how it spoke to universal themes of teenage life – how young girls in particular are socialized to become hyper-aware of their flaws; how separation into cliques creates invisible, uncrossable barriers between them; how the rumor mill can run with a story that can unfairly ruin or raise someone’s social standing; how intoxicating popularity can be – no matter how dated some of the situations might have become. The vicious three- and four-way calls are perfect examples – the practice might have become a thing of the past in the age of social media, but everyone can relate to the sniping, backstabby behavior that can happen within a friend group, and the scenes have a sharpness in both the writing (“I can’t go out [obviously fake cough]. I’m sick.” “Boo! You whore!”) and direction that brings the message home. It’s for this reason that the film’s subsequent iterations as a Broadway musical and film adaptation of such are especially disappointing.

Fey announced the plans for a Mean Girls musical in 2013, almost a decade after the film’s original release, and the show finally arrived on Broadway five years later. While all involved stated that their intent was to reinvent the property for a new generation, the results indicate that if that was the case, then Fey (and husband Jeff Richmond, who composed the show’s music) completely misunderstood her own project’s appeal. While Fey’s book did make some updates to the material to fit more in line with current social mores (the strange running gag involving two Asian girls and the school’s gym teacher is thankfully gone, for starters), even the most charitable reading of the musical has to admit that the show feels like it was adapted using the film as a piece of intellectual property instead of as a story. Instead of Cady’s first meeting with Regina showing how Regina uses backhanded compliments and private jokes to insult Cady without her noticing, it has her sing the lyrics, “My name is Regina George / And I am a massive deal / Fear me, love me / Stand and stare at me,” loudly proclaiming Regina as the antagonist everyone loves to hate instead of allowing the audience to be seduced by her just as Cady is. Instead of the wolf in sheep’s clothing she presented as in the film, musical Regina is a wolf in the clothing of a hotter wolf. The show’s generic music and occasionally groan-worthy lyrics (by Nell Benjamin, who did only a slightly better job in her previous musical adaptation of Legally Blonde) don’t help the show’s bid for modern relevance, but it managed to find an audience through clever social media marketing and canny casting: Before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down Broadway, the show starred future pop sensations Sabrina Carpenter as Cady and Reneé Rapp as Regina.

The show’s success was enough for a film adaptation to be greenlit in January 2020, and Rapp signed to star as Regina. And that phrasing right there explains just one part of why Mean Girls (The Musical: The Movie) doesn’t work: In this version, Regina has become the star role, leaving Cady as a complete blank. Whereas Lohan’s everyday girl appeal was in part due to her chipperly grounded energy, movie musical Cady Angourie Rice fades into the background, a wan, boy-crazy girl who it’s hard to root for. Leaning into Rapp’s star power may have pushed the film to over $100 million at the global box office, but first-time directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. make an even bigger mess of things than the Broadway show did. The film looks cheap from top to bottom, nowhere more so than the justly ridiculed wardrobe choices. Trendy teens may indeed be shopping on TikTok and wearing the latest $5 barely-there sheath from Shein, but The Plastics aren’t your average teens: They’re wealthy teens. The nondescript clothing for Karen and Gretchen is bad enough, but the original film understood that Regina’s popularity specifically came from her not having to worry about chasing trends because she always looked good. The outfits in the original Mean Girls weren’t fashion-forward or trendy, they embodied a certain classic, youthful look with details that fit in with the current fashion. The outfits in the 2024 Mean Girls, on the other hand, are garish examples of microtrends that instantly date the film, reducing its replay value.

Perhaps the one decision that most encapsulates the poor, if well-meaning, choices made by the creative team for the movie musical, is the treatment of Janis. In the original film, Janis was ostracized by her peers in middle school after Regina started a rumor about her being a lesbian, because Janis was hurt by Regina spending more time with her boyfriend. The whole point of this is that Janis’s life was ruined by Regina’s petty lie, but in 2024, we need gay representation, so Janis (played by Auli’i Cravalho) is now an actual lesbian who brings a girl to prom. 2024 is also a more accepting time than 2004, though, so Janis’s motivation to get revenge on Regina for outing her lacks the bite it had in the original film. Representation is always a good thing, but in her rush to be inclusive, Fey flattened Janis’s character and the film’s plot by extension. It’s almost as though, aware of Mean Girls’s place in the pop culture canon, Fey set out to address some of the decade-later social media critiques of the film, without a care for how it affected the story. A fine motivation, but the reactionary nature of it makes the changes feel half-assed in a way that is about as far from fetch as you can get.

If its subsequent musical iterations have suffered in part because of the original’s place in pop culture having largely eclipsed its strengths as a piece of storytelling, at least the film itself still holds up. The cast makes Fey’s dialogue sing more melodiously than the songs in the musical. It’s an all-timer of a cast, from the smallest roles (Amy Poehler’s loopy, Juicy Couture-styled “cool mom” Mrs. George steals every scene she’s in) all the way up the line. From Caplan’s feisty pettiness that turns into deep hurt when Cady goes too far into Plastic territory to Seyfried’s increasingly ingenious ways of playing dumb; from Chabert’s masterful unraveling of Gretchen’s tightly-wound psyche to McAdams’s pinpoint-accurate comic timing, it’s easy to see why nearly everyone in this has become a major star in the years since. No one received more of a career boost than Lohan, though, and even though she didn’t handle megastardom in the best way, her performance here stands as a stark reminder of just how talented of an actress she can be, deftly navigating Cady’s arc from “home-schooled jungle freak” to replacement Queen Bee with the skill of actors three times her age. In perhaps the most striking parallel with the film, Lohan used to be too cool to sit with us, and the gossip cycle had to take her down a peg. Now that we’ve all grown and matured, including her, a measure of peace has fallen over our world, and Lohan is more free to follow her bliss without fear. Twenty years later, “Mean Girls” is still teaching us and still making us laugh. It’s more fetch than ever.

Paramount Pictures released Mean Girls on April 30, 2004. It is currently available to stream on Paramount+, Tubi and AppleTV+ as well as rent or buy on Prime Video.