I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.
Mean Girls confuses me greatly.
It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.
A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.
I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.
Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?
(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)
What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality? Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible? Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.
The first five minutes were a brutally realistic depiction of high school instead of the more tropey version I’m used to. Sort of like the opening of Saving Private Ryan vs a more conventional war movie.
I went to a heavily academically-focused private high school so maybe the dynamics were different from a public school. But I mostly took the movie to be about cliques of people that weren’t mine, and really mostly about things girls did that boys didn’t do. So yeah, I pretty much didn’t think I counted, as far as the movie being about people like me. I also didn’t really like or identify with the movie, although I didn’t think it was terrible either.
You know what bugged me about mean girls? They never said where specifically in Africa they were from. Even though they make jokes about this themselves.
(I tried to fit all of my responses to this thread in the last post, but I saw another branch I wanted to respond to.)
It’s been a while since the last time I saw it, so maybe this doesn’t fit in with the canon, but I thought they weren’t from anywhere specific in Africa. Rather, they travelled around a lot within the continent. Wasn’t that why she was homeschooled, because they never settled down anywhere long enough for her to attend a school?
(I don’t know, maybe I just filled in the blanks from having occasionally met people who were homeschooled because their family was too nomadic to do otherwise.)
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