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| WHERE THE WILD
THINGS ARE
TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE
Lindsay Lohan on the left as
newcomer Cady Heron. Right,
the Queen Bee (Rachel McAdams, centre), with her acolytes Karen (Amanda Seyfried) and Gretchen (Lacey Chabert).
mean girls
WHERE ARE THE REALLY WILD PLACES IN MODERN AMERICA? THE INNER CITIES? THE LOUISIANA BAYOUS? THE BADLANDS OF NORTH DAKOTA? NO, SAYS ELEANOR SINGER AFTER SEEING MEAN GIRLS: IF YOU’RE A TEENAGE GIRL WHO IS JUST A TINY BIT OUT OF THE ORDINARY, THE WILDEST PLACE HAS TO BE YOUR AVERAGE MIDWESTERN HIGH SCHOOL.
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Seems like things rarely go smoothly for the characters that Lindsay Lohan plays. In the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, the young actress’ breakthrough film (and feature debut), she headed off to summer camp only to find she had an identical twin with whom she shared a dad and who was British to boot. In last year’s hit, Freaky Friday (another remake), she swapped bodies with her mother and found the world looked quite different from there. This summer, however, the odds have been raised even further. In Mean Girls, Lohan’s character faces the greatest challenge of all: other teenagers.
Her character, Cady Heron, has grown up in the bush with her zoologists parents. The experience has given her survival skills that would be the envy of any combat soldier. But such skills are next to useless at North Shore High, into whose hothouse atmosphere she suddenly finds herself parachuted at the age of 15. At North Shore, just outside Chicago, it’s not so much survival of the fittest as survival of the nastiest.
“Cady gets caught between the Mathlete World, where being a good student is what it’s all about, and the Plastic World, where being liked is the most important thing,” says the actress, who will turn 18 this summer. “I think every girl going to high school now, who will go or who already went, can relate to this. I know I certainly do.”
“Having been brought up in isolated circumstances abroad, Cady has no conception of what it means to live in modern-day culture,” says Mark Waters, here directing Lohan for the second time in less than a year (he was also behind the camera for Freaky Friday). “Then she gets plunked down in the middle of this crazy petri dish of a Midwestern public high school and is ‘adopted’ by various groups who try to make her their own. It’s hard on her, and she ends up finding a real ‘dark side’ of herself that she never knew existed.”
Anyone who thinks the situation in Mean Girls is exaggerated has never had a teenage daughter. Girls today are subjected to peer group and other pressures which make school life even as recently as 10 years ago seem benign. Fashion, conformism, power struggles and constantly changing tastes and trends make a teenager’s life murder. If you don’t know the rules, you’re an outsider. And, if you’re an outsider, you’d better be strong.
It was this development in American school life that prompted Rosalind Wiseman to write the book on which Tina Fey’s script is based: Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence. Wiseman’s study was a serious one (Time described it as “chilling”): as co-founder of the Empower Program, a non-profit organisation targeting vulnerable adolescents, she was not about to treat such threats lightly. But Tina Fey, writer and performer on US TV mainstay Saturday Night Live (who also appears in the film as Cady’s maths teacher, Mrs Norbury), was quick to see the comic potential of the book.
“I think that girls are ingenious in how they find ways to sabotage one another in these invisible, unseen, hurtful ways,” she says. “What struck me most were the anecdotes of the girls that were interviewed for the book. Rosalind, rightfully, takes them very seriously. But, in my opinion, they’re also very funny. I mean, the way girls mess with each other is so clever and intricate - and probably very instinctive.”
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