Philip K. Dick High: Mean Girls

Tina Fey, as a first-time screenwriter working from Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction book on teenage sociology, Queen Bees and Wannabes, has accomplished something even more remarkable than the many critics who praised Mean Girls have even realized. Scanning RottenTomatoes.com, one finds accolades to Fey for bringing to the teen comedy genre a darker-than-usual tone, credible sociological underpinnings, and a generally more mature sensibility. A minority of the favorable reviews don't paint it as remarkable at all, just a reasonably enjoyable example of a fairly low-rent genre. One would assume from many of these analyses that the teen movies of note have always been cheery comedies celebrating the classless utopia of high school. But anyone who has actually paid attention to these films over the years knows them to be often-challenging examinations of social inequality. In positing that high school can be an impossibly complex social landscape rife with scheming, emotional abuse, and identity upheaval, Fey and director Mark S. Waters have only continued the tradition of smartly observed comedies of adolescence like Say Anything, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. What surprised me was not the wry humor or mature themes, but the rather brilliant application of a plot design familiar to anyone who has ever read a book by the venerated science fiction writer Philip K. Dick: the danger of fully becoming the thing that you're only pretending to be.

While it might not be the most original concept in narrative history, it is an altogether different phenomenon than the one we have seen quite a few times before in teen movies. Titles such as Clueless, She's All That, and Can't Buy Me Love uncover the corrupting temptations of popularity and the quickness of teens to jettison their values for a shot in the spotlight. Mean Girls is likely to inspire a similar interpretation among less rigorous critics, but its depiction of behavior and intention is more nuanced; it's not a simple deglamorization of popularity. Protagonist Cady never consciously aspires to the ethos of power, superficiality, and meanness represented by the popular clique, the Plastics. She infiltrates their group hoping to corrupt it from within and cause its implosion. But in acting like a plastic she becomes indistinguishable from those she is self-righteously trying to destroy. And it's not a gradual process, though she certainly gets better at the game over time. She affects the mean girl behavior as soon as she is invited into the group, adding sensitive information about her friends to the Plastics' cruelty encyclopedia, the "Burn Book." She may even be better at it than any of the other girls, and indeed she eventually becomes the "Queen Bee," because she's able to suspend her values completely, believing that the ends will justify the means.

Similarities abound in Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly. The main character, Fred, is an undercover drug agent assigned to infiltrate a small community of users to find information about the pushers. For protection against dirty cops, his superiors are not allowed to know his secret identity, Bob Arctor (one of Dick's more obvious suggestive character names), or even see him. Through the course of his investigation, his handler begins to suspect that Arctor is the ringleader, and assigns Fred, unwittingly, to investigate himself. Because the drug that Fred takes to fit in with the other addicts causes brain damage, and he's forced to treat his alter-ego like a different person, he becomes so confused about where Fred ends and Bob begins that he suffers a complete psychotic break (think Tyler Durden in Fight Club). The distinction between acting like a drug addict and actually being one, existing, as it does, in the mind, ultimately can't save him from the effects of a mind-altering drug.

In the hands of a lesser artist, this kind of sci-fi twist can come off gimmicky and facile (again, think Fight Club), but Dick used his characteristic and much-imitated mind-benders only to serve the narrative and characters. The surprising reveal in A Scanner Darkly is completely germane to the story and essential to its themes because the book is not about the Big Twist, but about drug addiction; it's about how the addict literally loses control of his own life even as he believes he's making his own decisions. Cady, and, it is eventually revealed, every other girl in the school, share a similar delusion. They think that by mastering the system of gossip, back-stabbing, and deception they can subvert it, that they can act mean but stay pure of heart. But Fey shows that any participation in this system will perpetuate it. The Plastics and the girls who hate and scheme against them create mutually assured misery for the entire school.

Movies that show characters obviously degrading themselves privledge their audiences. They diagram with objective clarity a character's weaknesses and poor choices. These cautionary tales are rarely tractable beyond the confines of the artificial narrative world, their lessons difficult to apply without the benefit of ironic distance. Mean Girls pulls the audience down with its ambiguous heroine, and not just through the easy technicque of identification. Cady is as sympathetic as any protagonist, certainly, but the filmmakers also refrain from offering moralistic commentary on her actions. At first, Cady's scheming appears to subvert a corrupt social order. We only realize the magnitude of her errors when she does (or maybe a little before), which makes her subsequent reluctance to come clean all the more emotionally believable. The voice-over technique employed during the last scenes perfectly capture the pain of her self-awareness. Cady's internal monologue admits to everything but she verbally denies any wrongdoing. She's shocked to have become the villain in her own story and believes herself beyond forgiveness, but she desperately clings to the possibility of somehow mastering the situation and making everything better.
Cady's eventual solution, in contrast to the climaxes in most mainstream narratives, is not to master and subdue the other participants in the conflict, but to submit herself to fate and take responsibility for the whole mess. She admits to creating the Burn Book, even though she only wrote a few of its passages, and makes the ultimate teenage atonement by participating in the wildly uncool Math Olympiad. If the resulting social utopia seems farfetched, it could be because the social satire of late has been so reluctant to do anything but observe. Here's a film that dares to suggest solutions to the injustices it catalogues, a film unashamed of its power to persuade. I found it a refreshing salve to the viral cynicism of teen films like Heathers, not to mention the prevailing ethos of egoism.