Why 'Mean Girls' will never stop being relevant

I still remember the very first time I watched Mean Girls. I was 16-years-old and I was babysitting a seven-year-old. I had rented it from Blockbuster (RIP) and, the minute it was over, I went back to the beginning and watched it all over again. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. The inner workings of my fraught, embattled teenage brain had been made manifest in baby pink magnificence.

Tragically, the seven-year-old I was caring for totally missed its appeal.

"I don’t get it," she said.

"You will," I responded, with sage foreboding.

And now, of course, she will. Because Mean Girls has been repackaged for her generation: the reboot (written by Tina Fey, who also wrote the original) has a musical, Gen Z spin, with a whole new vibe and a whole new tribe. It courts Y2K nostalgia while openly, playfully baiting its original audience. In a move that will trigger most women my age, the tagline of one particularly brutal trailer had the audacity to announce this is "not your mother’s Mean Girls".

Besides my simmering millennial rage at this pointed call to arms, I do not believe there is a generation for whom Mean Girls is not relevant. It is not the sum of its gadgets, fashion, and pop-culture references, but of its enduring message about the psychological warfare of being a teenage girl.

The fact is, the seven-year-old I was babysitting doesn't need a new version. She would have "got" Mean Girls the second she became a teenager. Because the central, universal tenet has, sadly, not changed. Girls can be mean. To other girls. Tina Fey got the premise of the original film from a book called Queen Bees and Wannabees, a 2002 parenting guide about how to help your child navigate this battlefield. Fey found the funny side and Mean Girls was born. It arguably did more to help parents and teens alike face up to the nuanced cruelty of this time than any staid guidebook.

The original Mean Girls is surgically sharp in its insightfulness. It gets right to the heart of toxic friendships, power struggles, alienation, the push and pull of female friendships, the heartbreaks and joys, and absurdities of all of it. As a teenage girl watching it, I had never seen the daily nightmares I lived through be recognised in this way. Normally when female dynamics of high school appear in cinema, they are either the butt of the joke or exaggerated to horrific proportions (see Carrie). But while Mean Girls is broadly comedy, it actually treats these issues with enormous sensitivity and nuance.

The beauty lies in the way it satirises this experience without ever openly condemning it. It shrewdly says, you’ve been here, you get this, you’ve probably done this too. Even as it vilifies Regina George (one of the most iconic villains of all time), it never wholly judges her. In fact, it humanises her. It goes a long way to explain "mean" as a tool for power among people who are, ultimately, afraid. It flirts with the idea of this as a direct consequence of the patriarchy; women fighting women for male approval happens throughout, men are even characterised as baying monkeys cheering on a girl fight. 

"Mean" is shown as the most essential tool at woman’s disposal. Perhaps the most nuanced line of all is "the meaner Regina was to her, the more Gretchen tried to win her back". Everything is right there: the need for inclusion trumping self-preservation, the equation of power with cruelty and dominance. The psychology of teenage girls and the twisted power dynamics of female friendship have never been so thoughtfully excavated.

By the film’s denouement, the klaxon for female solidarity sounds, and Tina Fey’s own on-screen duty is to bring these women together with a rallying call to build each other up, not tear each other down. Yet, much like in the way the film covers sexuality, body image and bullying, it does this without being an 'issues' movie, but rather by being a knowing look at some home truths. It is made with so much empathy you know that it had to be an inside job, someone who had been a teenage girl themselves. It is a superb example of the female gaze expertly depicting the female experience. Tina Fey’s genius is that she made a cult film out of the unique pain of being a young woman. Beyond the witty one liners and unforgettable set pieces, that is the superpower of this film.

So, whatever fresh lick of paint Mean Girls 2.0 receives, I hope that a sixteen-year-old girl watching it today will feel as seen and understood as I did, watching it all those years ago. For that is the enduring power of Mean Girls. Get in, loser.

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar UK