May

No matter what you think about the troubles of actors in real life, their troubles in films mirror current social issues, too. One film, for instance, is Mean Girls, which grossed over $129,000,000, and was well reviewed.

But that’s not the only reason people still rent the movie. It struck a collective nerve with its representation of what its high school age characters call “plastics”—girls who are cold, shiny, and hard—and what they can do to other girls. As the characters themselves say in the film, everyone is required to support the queen bee. So they pretend things are true that they know aren’t, and they keep or tell secrets, depending on what will work best for them.

Strategy is key, and tactics are crucial. The self-explanatory “Burn Book” in the film, where the plastics write nasty comments about other girls, may not exist in real life, but the representation of it mirrors what happens. “Get her” is real-- for instance, the “three-way phone attack” in the movie.

Here’s how it works. One plastic calls the prey while she has another plastic already on the line. She gets the prey to say something against the second plastic by making a leading comment herself. The prey will agree with it, and then expand on it. Why? Partly because the prey wants to please the first plastic in order to find a place in that group. But she is ambushed instead. It happened to the Lindsay Lohan character named Cady. It happens in life outside the theater, too. It is nonfiction, just like the book that the movie was based on.

Mean Girls fictionalizes the facts in QUEEN BEES AND WANNABES: Helping your daughter survive cliques, gossip, boyfriends, and the new realities of girl world. When author Rosalind Wiseman revised her 2002 edition, the new version was released in 2009, when the technological capabilities of queen bees and their wannabes had changed exponentially.

Texting and sexting were replacing cell phone conversations as ordinary, the way that cell phone conversations had already replaced email. Technology isn’t just easier/ quicker/faster. It changes the way we think about ourselves. Rosalind Wiseman quotes a 13-year old girl in her book as saying “If you don’t text, you don’t exist.”

It also changes the way we think about other people. Communication via technology fools us, because it seems private and cool. Except that it isn’t always—and that’s one key issue when it comes to queen bees and plastics. Their work is amped up in the technology generation, and the benefits last for a while. But privacy is an illusion. The desire to tell secrets or pass unfounded rumors along is strong, because knowing something others don’t and being the source for others to hear it both contribute to feeling “cool.”

And yes, technology is quick, and so it is also smears quickly. In the film, high school style smearing is hard for the characters to take, but it also leads to real-world troubles for the grownups. In the film, the character played by Tina Fey, who also wrote the screenplay, is rumored falsely to be dealing drugs. Another line has been crossed.

Because Mean Girls is a comedy, all’s well that ends well, but cynically so. Queen Bee Regina, who shows up at the prom wearing a neck brace after being hit by a bus, is like the cartoon rabbit who runs headlong off a roof and then reappears in the next scene as if nothing had happened. Everyone knows real life can’t be all that lightheartedly true, but there is an artistic convention that it is. Otherwise how would cartoons function the way we want them to? Or movies? Or mean girl scenarios played against real people? Isn’t another line crossed when factual hurt is also thought to have the same non-effect as fictional?

Non-cartoon, non-fictional people participating in real life feel the difference early. A quote from QUEEN BEES AND WANNABES from the section for and about girls aged 7 to 11: “If I was a bystander and the bully told me not to tell or else I would get beat up, what should I do?”

From an 18-year old quoted in the book: “The limit of how mean and vicious a girl can be is beginning to disappear. If girls are pretty certain that other girls won’t be confrontational face to face, they have the freedom to be super nasty and never have to own up to it.”

And for the grownups in the family, Rosalind Wiseman tell us that recovery is “a messy process.” Our daughters, she says, don’t always tell us what is going on with them because it doesn’t feel safe to do so. What we say or do in response to their confidences may make them feel worse. They may feel they have disappointed us. They may be in over their heads, or feel that if they have been victimized, it will change their image in our minds.

But she is also optimistic about bringing the game-playing to the conscious level and empowering at least those in the same sphere of influence to stop playing it. Make a list of several qualities of teenage girls. Ask your teenager: Which of these would you like to do or be more of? Which would you like to do or be less? Which ones do you want to become?

Ask yourself, too.

Linda Chalmer Zemel is the Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner for Examiner.com/buffalo. This commentary was originally published there

on July 10, 2010. The author maintains copyright of her publications there.