About three minutes into MEAN GIRLS, in which it is established that up until now, sixteen-year-old Cady was homeschooled by her zoologist parents in wildest Africa, and is about to set foot in an American high school for the first time, I turned to the friend who dragged me to the movie and whispered, "This is the story of my life."

Though Cady knows nothing about American teenage culture, she's a sweet and bright person who gets taken under the wing of a pair of likable outcasts, a Goth girl named Janis Ian (yep) and Damian, a hulking, one-toe-in-the-closet boy. But she's also strikingly pretty, and that catches the attention of a monstrous trio of popular girls, the Plastics, who devote themselves to obsessive-compulsive rituals that are a ghastly parody of America's self-hating consumerist culture of feminity, and to torturing other kids and each other.

Janis and Damian persuade Cady to join the Plastics in order to infiltrate them from within. But as is often the fate of moles, Cady plays her role so well that it starts to become her reality. When she deliberately fails a math test to impress a boy, the movie starts feeling like horror without losing any of its comic edge. It's a candy-colored vision of the death of the soul.

MEAN GIRLS is based on a non-fiction book called QUEEN BEES AND WANNABES, about the sadistic methods middle-school girls use to jockey for and maintain power. I recall a couple people who read this journal saying that they can't stand to see characters being humiliated. They should avoid this movie, because it accurately reproduces the high school experience I remember, which was all about being humiliated, watching other people be humiliated, and making desperate attempts to avoid humiliation, which inevitably led to more of it. (Like the time I tried to wax my legs and pluck my eyebrows, and only made myself look much, much weirder than I would have if I'd stayed hairy.)

I loved it. It's funny, smart, and has a terrific ensemble cast, many of them lesser-known veterans of "Saturday Night Live." It's also the first thing that ever made me think that maybe it was just as well that I had no friends and no clique when I was in high school. Sure, the popular girls mocked me in the halls, but MEAN GIRLS demonstrates that sometimes it's better to have the enemy be an enemy, rather than a friend who crushes your personality, stabs you in the back, and makes you hate yourself for hanging around her and begging for more.

Just for the record, in my high school they were named Brenda Milton and Brandy Bogle: the blonde and red-headed faces of evil. Do you remember the names of yours?
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From: [identity profile] copperwise.livejournal.com


Marcy Samples (known also, to the boys, as "Free" Samples) -- Adrienne McCann stands out -- the Crowell sisters.

Scary that we can remember them. But I'm glad they stayed enemies and that I never tried to infiltrate. Not that I could have; I'm glad that I never tried though.

If there is a Hell, it's set up as a high school.

M
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