I watched 2004's Mean Girls last night, the first time in fifteen or so years. Looks like it'll be twenty next year. Who'd have thought it would have had such a long life? Wikipedia has a list of ways it's influenced culture, including this surprising tidbit:
In June 2018, the official Twitter account of the Israeli Embassy in the U.S. made headlines when it responded to a tweet by Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, calling Israel "a malignant cancerous tumor", with an animated GIF of the "Why are you so obsessed with me?" quote from Mean Girls.
It's not like it's the first movie to show teens being catty or people being vain or manipulative. But it is very rare for a film to acknowledge this stuff as a normal part of high school life. Or adult life. I especially like the part where Cady, Lohan's character, talked about how she was desperate to please Regina (Rachel McAdams) at the same time she was bitterly focused on destroying her. The movie does a really good job showing a cycle of resentment coexistent with genuine human affection.
Even more than backstabbing behaviour, the peculiar mixture of love and hate is rarely portrayed in fiction these days. The greatest flaw in Mean Girls is that it has a happy ending, where it's suggested Cady somehow solves the whole psychological problem for the entire school. The movie would've been just about perfect if it ended with things still festering, the girls being driven further apart even as they learned to smile more easily as they kill. And maybe, in one tiny positive note, Cady would have matured enough to know just to opt out of it as long as she could. God knows people are forced to play these games in the workplace. This is why I recommend watching movies.
Mean Girls is available on Netflix in Japan.
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