Does The New Mean Girls Get High School Right?

Watching tv and movie teachers at work is always a fraught exercise, because so many movies and tv shows get so much so very wrong. So how'd the new Mean Girls do?

The Chief Marital Officer and I went to see the film last weekend. I have never seen the original. I was already familiar with the score of the Broadway version (courtesy of the CMO--we were among the fifteen people who knew it was a musical going in). So I'm going to skip over questions about the quality of the film itself (weirdly uncomfortable with just being a musical) or the performances (all quite fine) or comparisons to the original (no idea). 

We'll just deal with one question--how much effort will actual high school teachers have to muster in order to suspend disbelief while watching this? And there may be spoilers, though how one spoils a twenty year old story, I don't know.

The film captures much of the tense anger of intra-teen battling. If anything, these mean girls are not as brutal as many mean girls I've seen in action. And this is where the musical helps (and could have helped more), by elevating the drama as it seems to the characters themselves. It's all the kind of low-stakes stuff-- potential boyfriends, alliances, seats at cafeteria tables--that looms large to the teens themselves. 

There's a through-the-day montage that introduces the teachers, most of whom are cartoons, but their time is mercifully brief. However, Tina Fey as the math teacher and especially Tim Meadows as the principal do a good job of capturing the resigned exasperation of adults dealing with This Stuff. They aren't clueless, and they aren't as heavily invested in the drama as the students, but they recognize that it's their job to deal with all this.

The film also gets some things right that I'm not sure it means to get right. Janis, one of main character Cady's first friends, is an angry outsider who is just as judgy and mean. She reminds me of a conversation I had with an arts-oriented student that stuck with me for years ("All of those jocks treat us like we're all big wimps. They can't even tell us apart." All of them? "All of them. They're all the same." Never teach high school if you are allergic to irony). She does some awful stuff, and the movie doesn't hold her accountable for any of it. 

There are some odd notes. Are we following Cady on the first day of the year? Is she the only new student in the building? That seems... unlikely.

And for a story focused on the social ins and outs of high school, the film has little or nothing to say about grades. In high school, the distinctions between grade levels matter socially. Seniors and freshmen are a lifetime apart (In any high school, you can find seniors complaining that Freshmen these days are so disrespectful and do things "we never would have done back in my day," just like a bunch of old guys getting the morning coffee at McDonalds and complaining about Kids These Days). And after decades of teaching juniors, I became familiar with the Great Friend Shift, that thing that happens around 10 or 11 grade when folks look around and decide that the people they've been hanging out with since sixth grade actually kind of annoy them.

Cady is definitely a junior (so why is she on the Spring Fling court), but the rest are a bit fuzzy. But if she were hanging out with seniors, that would be noticed. And where are the seniors who are freaking out over next year. Is Regina a junior who somehow dominates seniors? 

The film had me reflecting on how cliques work in a small school (which the school in the film apparently is). Very often, the rulers of the school are not the leaders of a particular clique, but the students who are floaters, who move between several different groups. Most of my students were multitaskers, because in a small school, people running sports and activities are all drawing from the same tiny pool. Confidence is the currency of power in the teen social economy, and the best way to build confidence is to be good at something. Maybe Fey wrote the story in a way that deliberately avoided making Regina a particular type (cheerleader, athlete, etc), but it's hard to believe she could be a queen bee if she doesn't actually do anything at the school. 

These are all quibbles, not noticeable to people whose picture of high school is memory based.

The real missed opportunity of the film is social media. In a story all about social ups and downs and infighting and drama, there is no greater factor in 2024 than social media. These days, teens are cast out and torn down not with snarky comments in the cafeteria, but by brutal social media campaigns. I'm betting every school in this country has regularly dealt with a physical fight in school that started on line. 

I don't want to give the impression that the movie gets more wrong than it gets right. Held up against some other movies set in high schools (looking at you, Twilight), it's practically a damned documentary. And it's a comedy (though it can't decide exactly how cartoonish it is). And it probably won't give a teacher a Nobody Understands My World headache.