Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) has acquired a cult status in the years since I first saw it. Came the news, now, that the movie was being produced as a stage musical. It's set to premiere at the end of this month, and features book by the movie's original screenwriter, Tina Fey. Time for another look at the film, maybe?
II.
The first impression is that I quickly recalled liking Mean Girls back then, too. Here again is Lindsay Lohan the teen, playing the teen Cady Heron. Cady has been away in Africa with her parents, her education having been homeschooled. The Heron return to America means that Cady will now be attending a public high school in Evanston, Illinois.At the school, Cady meets Regina George (Rachel McAdams) of the clique The Plastics. Regina is Queen Plastic of the group, which also includes Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried). The Plastics' activities include marching about snootily, spreading petty and malicious gossip about other (mostly female) students, all to maintain the image of being the prettiest, the most popular and envied, at their high school.
Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese) are not of the popular crowd. They earlier made a point of warning Cady about the Plastics. But when Janis notices Regina being friendly with Cady, she sees an opportunity to use Cady as a willing mole, in carrying out mischief against the Queen.
Will the operation to topple Regina be successful? Can Cady pretend to be cosy with the Plastics without becoming as superficial and mean as Regina? Just how does a particular "Burn Book" of assorted gossip and insults figure in all this?
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Tina Fey's screenplay is attentive to the sights and sounds of a period high school. Parents and teachers are shown amused and bemused, or plain made amusing, by teenhood. The emerging detail will have developed a nostalgic patina for some viewers. Others - not.
When there are lapses in the comedy, Mark Waters' direction suggests a natural pause, just before the delivery of another deft punchline. The cast acting is sharp and agile. Certainly in the case of Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls remains among their best performances.
The premise of the story is thin. On the day of his thirteenth birthday in late summer, a boy dares himself to jump from a high-dive tower, at a public pool in Tucson, Arizona. David Foster Wallace brilliantly turns that lean scenario into something of a meditation, in "Forever Overhead". A meditation on, well, let's have a look at the story.
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The public pool has a "strong clear blue smell...a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals", Wallace tells us, that "connects with a chemical haze inside you, an interior dimness that bends light to its own ends, softens the difference between what leaves off and what begins." <1> We are being directed to measure connection and disconnection, passing and becoming: leaving off and beginning.
Indeed, to the near distance are mountains, "darkening into definition against a deep red tired light...their sharp connected tops form a spiked line", a line strikingly evoked by Wallace as an "EKG of the dying day." The boy makes his way over to the diving tower. "Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears."
At the top of the tower, the boy is now second in line to dive. He observes the progress of the woman in front of him. "In no time she's at the end of the board, up, down on it, it bends low like it doesn't want her." But gravity does, as earlier with the boy, climbing the tower. "You have real weight on the ladder. The ground wants you back."
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Up above, over the pool, will the boy jump into the water below? Wallace remarks in the story that the "lie is that it's one or the other." Both, and neither.__________<1>Wallace, David Foster. "Forever Overhead". Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Back Bay Books, 2000.
