Jeremy’s Tophunder №68: Mean Girls

6 min readMay 2, 2020

If you could talk to the 2004 version of yourself, and tell them that 16 years after the release of Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan would be, at best, the sixth-most bankable actor from the movie, you would have punched your older self in the face and say things like “yeah, and I bet the Red Sox will come back from down 3–0 to beat the Yankees and then sweep the World Series!” and “yeah, and some reality TV star will run for President as a joke and then actually win!”

It really is an amazing fall from grace that Lohan has had. Like, she’s still absurdly famous, and is still a name huge enough to cover tabloid magazines whenever she does anything remotely noteworthy. But as an actor, she’s appeared in one movie since 2013, and even prior to that, her career had tumbled to the point of being the 9th-billed actor in Machete and starring in Lifetime TV movies.

Given what she did at age 12 (The Parent Trap) and age 18 (Mean Girls), with some inconsequential (but still watchable) movies in between, young Lindsay Lohan was like LeBron James — just an absolutely can’t-miss young talent. But in the end, I guess she was less like LeBron and more like Greg Oden.

In 2020, it’s hard to imagine Lohan being taken more seriously as an actor than Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, or Lizzy Caplan, which is absolutely bizarre. After Mean Girls, she seemed to make a transition into more serious work, working with a few well-respected directors (like Robert Altman on A Prairie Home Companion and Garry Marshall on Georgia Rule), and then was suddenly out of Hollywood within five years. The craziness of her personal life just totally engulfed her acting career, and it’s truly disappointing, because she was absolutely incredible at a young age.

Mean Girls was unquestionably the highlight of her career, and arguably the highlight of the careers of any of the major players, up to and including Tina Fey, who has won a staggering NINE Emmy Awards and three Golden Globes, oh, and also The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Sure, she was better on 30 Rock, and is better known for her work on Saturday Night Live, but the degree to which Mean Girls has been absorbed into the popular culture might supersede both. When a movie that grossed just $130 million at the box office becomes a pop culture phenomenon to the point that in 2013, the White House posts a photo of Obama’s dog captioned “stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen,” then yeah, I think that counts as your most culturally pervasive work.

It also launched the careers of McAdams, Seyfried, and Caplan, who have each gone on to lasting and successful careers. McAdams is obviously the most successful, with an Academy Award nomination for Spotlight, but Seyfried has consistently turned out good work in well received (or at least profitable) movies, and Caplan was critically acclaimed for her work on Showtime’s Master of Sex (receiving an Emmy nomination in 2014) and has since shown up in movies like The Interview and Now You See Me 2.

For me, though, the most lasting impact it’s had is simply the degree to which it still matters to my life on a day-to-day basis. I’m a teacher and a camp counselor. The kids I work with are middle school-age, not high school, but middle school is when the mean girls start to become Mean Girls. By the time they get to high school, they’re already there. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve been in meetings where we discuss social dynamics that we find troubling, and the number of times that the ringleader of the clique inevitably gets compared to Regina George, and not as a joke. Or the number of times that the girl(s) just trying to latch themselves onto the popular girl get compared to Gretchen Wieners. I’ve worked in schools and camps for going on seven years now, and Mean Girls is probably the movie that gets referenced the most often in the course of us doing our actual work. It’s kind of incredible. It’s provided a shorthand to talk about these social cliques that seem concerning at age 12, and we can easily tell that either (a) everything will blow up in an ugly and painful way within the next year or two, or (b) this group of girls will go on to terrorize students and teachers alike in high school.

And beyond what Mean Girls represents to the popular culture, it’s just an incredibly funny movie. Tina Fey is one of my favorite comedy writers, and she wrote one of the funniest movies of a decade that was absolutely loaded with great comedies. My favorite scene is Tim Meadows (one of the most underrated parts of the movie, for my money) coming out of his office with a baseball bat and into the middle of a full-scale brawl in the hallways. “Oh hell no, I did not leave the South Side for this” is one of my favorite lines of the decade.

Every single character has a legitimate laugh-out-loud moment, from Kevin G’s rap, to Karen trying to fit her whole fist in her mouth, to Gretchen’s speech about Brutus and Caesar, to Damien’s hoodie and sunglasses disguise, to Tina Fey’s random run-in at Janis’ after-school job. Amy Poehler is hysterical in every scene she’s in, as is Coach Carr and Ana Gasteyer as Lindsay Lohan’s mom. Ironically, the least funny character in the movie is probably Lohan, but that plays into her being the straight man as the fish out of water while the social friction sends everyone around her off the deep end.

Among the movies on my list, Mean Girls is one of those where I find it most difficult to put myself in the shoes of one of the main characters. It’s a movie that tells a story that is so wildly different from my own, or one that I might aspire to. It feels relatable to me, because I’ve known groups of girls (and groups of guys) that might secretly not like each other and constantly fight among themselves, but I’ve never been in the middle of it. I’ve only observed it, never lived it. I don’t quite know what it’s like to suddenly feel like everyone who used to be your friend now hates you.

This type of movie, one that tells a story of someone decidedly not like me, is one that I’ve been trying to force myself to watch more often. The movies on my list are overwhelmingly stories made up of straight white men having experiences that are either (a) similar to things that I have experienced, or (b) similar to things that I wish I could experience. Mean Girls is really the only movie on my list that I would describe as “about women.” Sure, there are a handful of movies on my list that feature several female characters, some of which are even the lead protagonist, but Mean Girls is different. Just about every relevant character is female. I wasn’t really conscious of representation among the movies on my list, and now, about halfway through the project, I kind of regret that. I wish I had more movies that were telling more diverse stories. But that’s a project for another time, I guess. For now, Mean Girls will have to hold the torch for more movies to come later.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One