Watched Mean Girls with the housemates, Ali, and the Pittsburgh kids. I didn’t know anything about this movie, but I figured, hey, I watched The Lizzie McGuire Movie with Bz and the rest of the Pottery Barn house, so this couldn’t be much worse. It was actually real rad. It was one of the first movies that I’ve seen that seemed to be a really foreign representation of high school to me but also seemed very realistic. The message was overwhelmingly positive and it used humor that made me a little uncomfortable, but that I think made the movie much more accessible and maybe the message more considered by the average high-schooler. It’s frustrating because it’s one of those movies that makes you mad because it comes so close to being something with which I can totally identify. The hero is still both attractive and capable and because of this can straddle the fence between admirable geekiness and popularity. There are no real consequences for people being shitty to each other, and ultimately, I’m tired of having protagonists with which the akward kids of the world are supposed to identify with who have it pretty easy compared with a lot of experiences in real high school. Still, what this movie does, and does with pin-point accuracy, is depict the qualities and behaviors that make people jerks in high school, be it duplicity, dumbing down, or disregarding intelligent advice from the more experienced. And, it does it in such a way that there might be a chance that the viewer could think, “hey, that’s me,” and think twice before slipping into a life as a total asshole. I liked the depiction of adults in the movie as both wise and fallible in a way that defies the typical teen movie stereotypes. The movie is conscious of race, gender, and sexual identity in a way that is more sophisticated than most, even if it isn’t exactly PC or respectful all the time.
I’ve said this before, and I reiterated it last night as we Zak, Leanne, and I were driving back from Chicago and singing along to a mix of 90s alternative radio rock songs that Leanne had compiled based on a sixth-grade boredome induced narrative that consisted mostly of 90s alternative radio rock band names. Here it is: I’ve been out of high school for longer than I was in it. Why does it still seem so formative?