So You Agree? You Think You’re Really Pretty?

“The limit is negative one.”

Oh, crap. I lost. The red-haired girl looks down at her feet.

“That answer is incorrect.” Audience gasps. “Now we are in a sudden death. If Miss Heron can answer this problem correctly, we have a winner.”

Limits. Why can’t I remember anything about limits? She thinks back to class. Sees Aaron Samuels smiling at her. Oh God, he looks so cute.

Ok focus, Cady! What was on the board behind Aaron’s head? Tina Fey, pointing to a chalkboard. It clicks. The limit does not exist.

“The limit does not exist!”

Victory.

—

Blogs call quoting Mean Girls a “national pastime.” If you want a list, Google it. Yesterday I saw someone with a t-shirt that read, “You Go Glen Coco!”.

Cultural observers have a lot to say about the impeccable timing of Mean Girls’ release in 2004 with respect to the launch of Facebook and the dawn of Tumblr, Twitter and the Remix Culture generation. They say that Mean Girls has lasted because its timing and quotability transferred perfectly into the gif and meme ecosystem that has kept it in play on social media for over a decade now.

But there is something beyond the Internet keeps this “classic” film in our everyday conversation more than any other movie. Moreover, why does the whole movie pivot on “the limit does not exist,” and how does that resonate, maybe unconsciously, with some of us?

The beauty of Mean Girls is that it doesn’t speak truth to pop culture’s high school reality in hilarious-but-depressing fashion, like its contemporary Superbad. It is a live-action, full color drama that plays out all of the crazy “what-ifs” that we daydream about in high school. It’s not relatable because we’ve all lived it — it’s relatable because we’ve all imagined it.

The most shocking fourth-wall-break into our math-class daydreams is when Regina George, queen of “The Plastics,” is hit by a bus. It’s the moment we realize that this isn’t high school — this is a ridiculous version of high school that has played out in our heads a million times, but it can never be real. Everything that happens in Mean Girls makes perfect sense as we watch it, because it’s consistent with our fantastical versions of reality. We accept it as completely plausible, until that bus hits Regina, and then everything falls apart.

Cady Heron’s junior year is every suburban high schooler’s secret fantasy. We all want to be cool — by accident. We want to believe we are pretty and “interesting” enough to roll with the popular girls who run the show, and then take the moral high road to save face. We don’t really want to be one of the Plastics — we just want to know we could be if we wanted to.

Watching Mean Girls, we are convinced that Cady Heron is one of us. It’s true, she is — but what happened to Cady Heron would never happen to us, because we don’t look like Lindsay Lohan. Isn’t that the reason Aaron Samuels talks to her in math class? Isn’t Cady’s subtle beauty (“You’re like, really pretty,”) the reason that the Plastics invite her to sit with them at lunch?

The end of the movie allows us to be content as unpopular kids. Together, with Cady, we realize that we were never cut out to be a Plastic, and we excel where we truly belong, in the math championships.

“Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter, and ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.”

This is what Cady tells herself as she solves that unsolvable problem and finds, to all of our surprise and especially her own, that the answer is that there is no answer. This is how the central metaphor of Mean Girls plays out.

High schoolers will always be tortured with the feeling of not knowing who they are, and most importantly, never feeling like they are enough. There’s no solution to that problem. We will always have doubts. It’s not lifting yourself up on the insecurity of others. The answer doesn’t exist because none of it’s real. High school isn’t real. Focus on what exists.

Maybe in this game, the only winning move is not to play.