How ‘Mean Girls’ Went From a Teen Movie to a Pop Culture Mainstay
16.01.2024 - 20:01
/ glamour.com
.Sitting in that movie theater, watching my childhood hero, The Parent Trap’s , navigating through the twisted and complex world of high school friendships was a revelation.
Sure the movie, written by a not-yet-super-famous Tina Fey, was hilarious, the outfits were amazing, and the plot entertaining, but what struck me the most in my 14-year-old mind was how real the movie felt, how it seemed to have been made just for me.Obviously, I was far from alone.
In the nearly 20 (gulp) years since the film was released in April 2004, it has become a behemoth, a now-classic ode to Millennial girlhood.
It inspired a musical, , released earlier this month, and many, many memes.To celebrate the anniversary of the film’s release, author and entertainment journalist Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, whose book about was a New York Times bestseller, has turned her expertise to Mean Girls.
Armstrong spoke to many key players behind the film, including producers, cast, and crew, and sifted through the annals of pop culture history to examine how the film continues to resonate.
Her resulting , So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We're Still So Obsessed with It) is a fitting tribute to a film that has become so iconic to now multiple generations of young women.Armstrong chatted with Glamour about how Mean Girls went from movie to meme machine, how teen movies have evolved over time, and why the film has become such a mainstay in pop culture.Glamour: In the book, you track the evolution from Mean Girls the movie to Mean Girls the cultural touchstone.
You, rightly I believe, credit much of its transcendence as a pop culture phenomenon to its popularity among millennials on the internet.
Why do you think we gravitated towards this movie so
.