Mean Girls (Regina's Version)

+ re-recordings, covers, and the merits of a thunderdome remake

I heard Quentin Tarantino’s declaration that he would only make ten movies when I was at too impressionable of a film-watching age. The notion that one could make art not as its own project, but as a self-conscious step in the arc of one’s yet-to-be-determined legacy, imprinted on my brain. At this point in my stupid young life, Reservoir Dogs was probably the most thrilling thing I’d ever seen, and thus the idea that a movie was somehow a uniquely special piece of craft, one that might only be doled out a few precious times as part of a celebrated filmmaking career, wormed its way into my mind.

Directors like Steven Soderbergh, who seems to make a movie every eight months, have disabused me of this preciousness, but I know it’s still deep inside my psyche because of the reaction I had while watching the recent trailer for Mean Girls (2024), which was: this is a movie? This counts? For American women born within five years of me, the original Mean Girls is basically the Big Bang: all encompassing, all creating, generally impossible to ignore. I’m not sure there’s a single frame, outfit, or line of dialogue that isn’t instantly recognizable. I still remember a high school classmate joining a Facebook group called “Mean Girls is the Most Quotable Movie,” and then her repeating that phrase, verbatim, to a group of our peers who nodded along as if we also weren’t all members of that Facebook group.

To this day I cannot see pink and lavender without thinking of Cady

But this is not your mother’s Mean Girls, the trailer tells us. This one has Don Draper from Mad Men and Pam from The Office! The sassy gay sidekick is Black! You could very easily miss that this movie is a musical, based on the popular stage musical, because it looks more like a remarkably high-budget fan recreation.

Except this one feels a lot sweatier and more desperate

Contrary to popular belief, the reboot is not a new phenomenon: let me be the first to let you know of the TWO television series based on Casablanca (1942) from 1955 and 1983 (this one featured a pre-famous Ray Liotta). There was a Bates Motel before our Bates Motel, and just because neither Redford nor Newman showed up for The Sting II doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. What is new is the devouring speed of these remakes, and the inescapability of their carefully calibrated content cycle.

On the surface, the trailer for Mean Girlies (what I’ll be calling the 2024 version to differentiate) doesn’t seem that different from the trailers for The Little Mermaid (2023) or various Star Wars projects. Mean Girlies’ nostalgia bait feels more personally calculated since it’s from my own adolescence but I’m mostly stuck on the useless question of why this “gets to be a movie.” Unlike these other reboots, Mean Girlies doesn’t even seem like an adaptation. It’s a cover version. A re-recording, this time with Renee Rapp as Regina poised for breakout stardom. On paper, Mean Girlies makes sense: the musical was a success and the film remains popular to the point of being memetically annoying (prepare for a new October 3 screencap). But it’s also an opportunity for writer Tina Fey to shore up her legacy, mollifying some of the original movie’s racism, much like her request to remove the multiple episodes of 30 Rock that include Blackface, and certifying her status as a great American comedienne.

I have come up in an Internet age defined by two central truths: the Internet is forever and no one is paying that close attention to you. Perhaps surprisingly, Mean Girlies made me reflect on my own career and the lack of curation that’s gone into it, probably to my detriment. This newsletter might be more successful if it were more singularly focused. But I have a tendency for over correction, and I’d rather be slapdash, if scattered, than focused, but static. 

And as we can see from these cover versions, creating in anticipation of legacy is an ouroboros. Melissa Febos's advice for her students who can't stop imagining future Internet hate applies universally: "Be conscientious of your reader, of your potential readers, of all of your past selves, but do not write for the bad faith reader. . . . Exile the thoughts of the person who is looking to invalidate the art that you’re making; you can’t make art that way.” Add the caveat that you also need to exile the thoughts of the studio who breathlessly looks to validate. Does it really matter if Mean Girlies is art, much less good art? Probably not. What matters is to make sure not a single hypothetical cent is left on the table. Once-ephemeral films are reanimated and properties are churned into cover versions that then languish on streaming services until they’re profitable to delete and write off. 

Never mind that art has been replaced by “second-screen” content one can consume while on their phone

I suppose I could be more forgiving of these movie covers if they felt even slightly artful. At least Mean Girlies is a (bad) musical and not an eight episode miniseries on Paramount Plus. But if every five weeks we’re going to get a depressingly cynical rehash of some old IP, I’d prefer at least some of them be moderately adventurous. As the nation’s leading Wokeist, I’d be at least semi-curious in a made-for-TV Black Mean Girls. But if Hollywood has any hope of rebooting the reboot, there’s an obvious inspiration. Take a lesson from the last bastion of true homespun creativity: American regional theater. Who, when confronted with the inevitability of having to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the third f*cking time in a decade, say “screw it” and set it in the Prohibition era or a Mad Max-style thunderdome. Muppets Mean Girls would be a dumb rehash of an old Twitter joke, but at least we wouldn’t be subjected to Jon Hamm’s comedy stylings.

The jokes write themselves