Bullies for you

uch was made of the recent Tesco poll comparing the gender divide in movie tastes, especially when the ladies emerged looking rather less than triumphant with Dirty Dancing, Bridget Jones’ Diary and Thelma And Louise as their all-time favourite three films respectively. (To be fair, From Here To Eternity and True Romance also made the cut for the top twenty.) As well as providing a stern rebuke against soliciting anything at supermarkets, this gave the boys a good laugh with their infinitely more canonical choices including Star Wars (yawn), The Great Escape and The Godfather. But while they guffawed merrily at an atrocity exhibit that included Steel Magnolias and Ghost – to which I would point to Dumb And Dumber occupying the number fourteen spot on their all-time favourites – few noticed that the quality (or lack thereof) of the female list merely reflected the quality of what’s on offer. Simply put, movies for girls suck.

It’s not just that cinema offers nothing edgy to occupy the spot that PJ Harvey or Courtney or Karen O do in music (though Welcome To The Dollhouse is pretty close). It’s much worse. Most of the time, films aimed at women are so insipid, that us kittens are doing well to get the equivalent of Norah Jones. Hell, it’s gotten so we’ll celebrate a Dido standard movie.
There’s no great mystery here. It’s a conspiracy to rid the multiplexes of skirts. Well, kind of. Film has always aspired to being something of a gentlemen-only club, so girls don’t exactly have a strong authorial presence in the medium. Figures for the UK, for example, show that of the 350 movies made in 2002, only eight were directed by women.
Ironically, this imbalance is replicated in uber-liberal Hollywood, which seems to produce fewer name female directors than Iran. Earlier this year, Sofia Coppola followed Lena Wertmuller and Jane Campion to become only the third female nominee for the Best Director Oscar.
Shockingly, the Academy’s belated token gesture doesn’t mean that things are improving. Truth be known, there were more female screenwriters working in the Hollywood of the 1930s – including such formidable femmes as Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos and Lillian Hellman – than there are today. More disturbingly, recent reports on the so-called ‘celluloid ceiling’ illustrate that the numbers of women working as directors, cinematographers and writers and editors are actually falling (from 19% to 17% in the USA last year apparently). Whose idea of equality is this? Phil Spector’s maybe.
The inevitable result is that chick-flicks are generally written and directed by men. Now, it’s not that girl films are entirely out of their range (just think of Douglas Sirk, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, or more recently John Hughes), but as anyone who’s ever received lingerie from their boyfriend can tell you, boys are not always the best judges of what women want. Needless to say, their best efforts to please us cinematically very often miss the spot. The box-office figures certainly suggests as much. Only two of the current all-time top fifty grossing movies – Ghost and My Big Fat Greek Wedding – are what might be traditionally designated feminine genre films (weddings, romance, dead boyfriends), while traditional male fare (action, breasts, shiny things, more breasts) is amply represented.
And that’s why Mean Girls is so damned cool it hurts. This delicious comedy has conquered the US, sailing past the $60 million mark at the box-office and inspiring deservedly favourable comparisons with Fast Times At Ridgemont High. It’s one of those rarities that get through the system despite displaying wit and bite. Based (somewhat implausibly) on the Oprah-lauded bestseller ‘Queen Bees And Wannabes’ by Rosalind Wiseman, Mean Girls cannily captures the hilariously (and painfully) hellish world of teenage girl hierarchy.
The film stars the sensational Lindsay Lohan as Cady, the ultimate fish-out-of-water parachuted in to an American school setting. Raised in Africa by zoologist parents, Cady imagines she can survive any jungle. Her awkward first day proves otherwise. Luckily, she’s quickly befriended by a sassy goth ‘lesbian’ (Lizzy Caplan – sure to be a hit with the Evanescence brigade) and a ‘too-gay-to-function’ queen (the wonderfully catty Daniel Franzese) who act as tour-guides through the Byzantine corridors of a school society ruthlessly divided by notions of popularity. But the fact that our ingénue heroine looks like an even prettier Drew Barrymore gets her noticed by the resident Queen Bees aka the ‘Plastics’. These trop belles pour vous mademoiselles rule all they survey through ruthless beauty and merciless intimidation. For the goof, Cady consents to hanging out with the evil princesses on a reconnaissance mission for her mates. But she finds herself seduced by the preening narcissism of being popular.
In no time she’s swanning around in more kohl eyeliner than Cleopatra awaiting a special delivery from Rome, sniping about her less upwardly mobile friends and (hands up what girl hasn’t been this soldier) dumbing down to impress a boy. She’s a Mean Girl now, but can she stay on top? Can her new friends be trusted? And can she be saved?
Saturday Night Live star Tina Fey (who appears in the film as a slinky maths teacher) wrote the screenplay, and her smart, sassy and distinctly feminine script invests Mean Girls with the foxiest wicked humour since Heathers, plus the goofy heart of Clueless. Deft comedic direction is provided by Mark Waters. He may be a guy, but goodness knows, he’s uniquely qualified for the material. His brother John (no, not the Irish Times columnist, obviously) wrote Heathers, based on the life of their sister (Which bits were strictly autobiographical, I wonder - the lawn croquet or the darkly comic murder spree?) and he’s previously directed Lohan with great success in Freaky Friday.
But while Mean Girls is unquestionably a sparky crowd-pleaser, an upbeat anti-Thirteen, it’s the central theme concerning the insidious world of non-physical girl-on-girl bullying which has made it a phenomenon in America, particularly among young women.
Mean Girls sees vixen victimisation go mainstream. It may be an easily palatable confection, sugar-coated with breezy pop (Missy Elliot, Kelis and a post-Pink cover of Blondie’s ‘Rip Her To Shreds’) and familiar teen staples – the cheerleaders, the jocks, the geeks, the outsiders and an obsession with popularity – all set in a high-school where nothing seems to happen except talent-shows and proms.
But the texture added by giving the low-down on Girl’s World has inspired countless chat show debates, vast stretches of newsprint, and sent ‘Queen Bees and Wannabes’ rocketing back up the bestseller lists. Indeed, a slew of similarly themed publications including Emily White’s ‘Fast Girls; Teenage Tribes’, Rachel Simmons’ excellent ‘Odd Girl Out; The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls’ and – you’ll like this – Phyllis Chesler’s ‘Woman’s Inhumanity To Woman’ have benefited from the attendant coverage.
What these popular tomes essentially suggest is that while girls have always existed in ever-shifting hierarchies and cliques, controlling each other through bitching, gossiping and out-casting, these school-ground behaviours have become infinitely more sophisticated and cruel. There’s even a buzzy new psychological term for it – relational aggression.
According to Wiseman’s pop ethnology girls can be broken down into the following beastly archetypes – there’s the Queen Bee, a narcissistic creature who can control all she surveys with a flare of the nostril, or as the author puts it ‘a cross between the Queen of Hearts from Alice In Wonderland and Barbie’. The Sidekick is slightly less attractive and considerably less powerful; the Banker collects vital information from other girls only to disseminate same for malicious purposes; the Pleaser acts as official lapdog and the Floater is the Machiavellian minx who moves freely between cliques, rises above it all and is actually rather cool. And then there’s the Target, who definitely isn’t. She spends her days feeling mortified or petrified, or both.
This ghastly clique hierarchy is fluid, so even a Queen can be deposed, creating a perpetual state of paranoia. Group boundaries are policed through frenzied bitching, devastatingly snippy remarks, precise dress codes (‘Ponytails on Tuesdays only’ sort of thing) and exclusion. One seventeen-year-old girl I spoke to talked of being repeatedly abused by a group of cool girls. Occasionally they would turn on the charm, only to loudly mock and imitate her voice afterwards. And yet, with battered wife logic, she’d always go back. After all, your place in the pecking order determines everything about teen existence, and when you feel you ought to belong somewhere, it’s tough getting sneered out of Eden. So, for example, you can be a teen slut if you’re popular. If, however, you have the misfortune to be a slut and unpopular, well then, you’re fucked in every sense of the word.
As anyone who has ever been to school can testify, this isn’t merely Stateside hysteria and lazy labelling. If you have no clue about what’s been described here, then consider this fiendishly intricate set up – Jaime is a 17-year-old Dublin schoolgirl. Blonde and very good-looking, at school she was quickly head-hunted by the Queen Bee unit. Things were going swimmingly until – ah, cherchez le garçon – the Sidekick began dating a boy who Jaime had gone out with for two weeks aged twelve. Though this hardly represented a grand passion, the Sidekick became intensely resentful, and overnight the official group rules changed without Jaime’s knowledge. The girls just shut her out, and that’s when things got really bad.
“They started following me around saying things like – ‘only a slut would wear those trousers’ – even though they helped pick them out. I started getting porn sent to my phone and my computer. Every time I’d walk in a room, they’d laugh or whisper… But the worst thing was the lists. They circulated this letter that was supposed to be written by me that was a death-wish list. It had all the names of all the sort of tough girls on it, plus this other list of three of their boyfriends which was supposed to be my blow-job list. For the rest of the year, my life was a living hell. I was always hiding. Those bitches still laugh about it.”
As sadistic as this sounds, my own feeling is that girls probably aren’t any crueller than they used to be. After all, it’s only been a couple of years since pop psychologists (like Mary Pipher in the book Reviving Ophelia) were lamenting how weedy and inept girls have become. More plausibly, it’s merely that the methodology has changed. Well, that and being watched by far more psychologists. Just because the means didn’t exist ten years ago to bombard some unfortunate sister with twisted, pornographic MMS messages, doesn’t mean that there weren’t alternative, if less sophisticated ways of isolating and tormenting people psychologically.
Personally, I still freeze with fear anytime a gaggle of teenage girls approaches. Maybe that’s because as a former teenage girl myself, I’m poignantly aware that nobody – regardless of age, gender, race, pigmentation or attire – has ever got past such a gathering without earning some ‘Look at the state of them…’ murmur, if not an eruption of mocking laughter. More likely my dread arises from a disturbing Proustian rush of images recalling my younger bookish oddball self among 700 other girls at grammar school. It must be said, there are certain difficulties with being shut away for seven hours at a time with all the other hellcats in blazers and pop-socks just when you’re at your most hormonally maladjusted.
At any rate, you do get through it and get to be a bigger bookish oddball who no longer gives a toss what nasty girls say. And you can always cheer yourself up by laughing at their horrid on-screen Mean Girls equivalents – because ultimately, we get the movies we deserve, so when a good chick-flick comes along we should break out the sake. More importantly, when you’re out there in Girl’s World, don’t let the bitches drag you down.

Mean Girls is released June 18