Get in Loser, We're Reading a Book
A conversation with Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, the author of the new book "So Fetch"
I was lucky enough to get to read an early version of Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s So Fetch, her history of the movie Mean Girls. I tinkered at the margins, offering some minuscule bits of advice, but my primary takeaway as I read it was simple: “Oh man, people are going to absolutely love this book.”
It should come as no surprise that the author of Seinfeldia, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, and When Women Invented Television has written another gem, but what I loved most about So Fetch was its abiding interest in the impact of Mean Girls on popular culture, and on the people who made it. I loved reading about everything from the rise of meme culture and its impact on Mean Girls to the previously unknown performers immortalized by the internet for their lines in the film.
I got to speak to Jennifer the other week about her book. Here are some excerpts from our interview.
One of my favorite parts of your book was reading about the unknown performers who have been unexpectedly cast into a seemingly eternal internet-driven fame for their lines in the movie, like the saleswoman who tells Rachel McAdams’ Regina George “you could try Sears.” How do you think it impacted these performers to be memorialized forever in Mean Girls?
I always like people who were nearby when these things happened. But they’ve had a very specific trajectory that’s unique. No one has had this, except all of them together. They became fairly famous because of one line that they said 20 years ago. Someone invented the GIF and the meme, and these people were suddenly being recognized.
As you know from the book, there are these stories of the internet tracking them down, and kind of freaking out about them in a way no one ever expects. You know, Coach Carr getting on a dating site, thinking his life would be normal, and then this gets coverage everywhere. It’s just a strange thing that they all experienced.
My favorite was when Ivanka Trump’s shoe line got kicked out of Nordstrom, and the Sears lady, the lady who says, “you could try Sears,” is skiing across a slope somewhere halfway across the world, and her phone starts going off to the extent that she thinks something bad has happened to someone in her family. A lot of them are either working actors, that are not necessarily hugely famous otherwise, or stopped acting altogether. And yet, they still have this one thing that follows them around.
You devote some time later in the book to hanging out with tweens and watching Mean Girls together with them to understand their ongoing devotion to the movie. What do you think it is that attracts wave after wave of 11-year-olds to Mean Girls?
Unfortunately, we have not solved the problem at the center of Mean Girls over the last 20 years. “Relational aggression,” as Rosalind Wiseman called it in Queen Bees and Wannabes. When I talked to them, that was what they were most interested in. They were very fixated on the burn book. One of them was like, “Maybe we should have one.” And the mom was like, “No! That is not the point.” They were like, “Well, we can put nice things in it.”
[The movie] looks great, it’s incredibly funny, it has these lines we can learn and recite to each other. It’s in this fun package, but it does have this message. I don’t know that humanity is ever going to outgrow this message. It’s just a basic fact that power dynamics are real in any group. And we all want to be the in group. That’s always going to be there, and we just have to figure out how to deal with that. That’s what keeps catching on with new generations.
You got to speak with Rosalind Wiseman, whose nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes served as the source material for Mean Girls. Can you tell us about Wiseman’s complex relationship with the Mean Girls phenomenon?
I don’t have kids, so I hadn’t read the book, I just knew a lot about it. I was actually very surprised by how much from Queen Bees made it into Mean Girls. I thought it was just going to be the concept, and maybe the use of the word “queen bee.” But she talks about drawing a map of the cafeteria, and having your kid show you where all the different cliques hang out, and they literally do that in Mean Girls. One of my biggest surprises was that the fashion rules that are so clearly delineated in Mean Girls, which I thought was just complete fantasy, are in Queen Bees. This is Tina Fey’s interpretation, but she does have hilarious sections of girls talking about their fashion rules. You can only wear sweats on Friday, because that’s when we have our sleepover parties, and that’s when you can relax, but the rest of the week you have to dress up. Or here’s when you can wear jeans, here’s when you can wear your hair up. So it really is source material.
Rosalind is so smart and interesting to talk to, and she had this complicated relationship. She was consulted quite a bit on the OG Mean Girls script. After that, things got more and more complicated. It became this sensation. It did really well in the box office, but it was huge on DVD, it was on ABC Family every time you turned around in the 2000s. And everyone would say, isn’t it so cool that Mean Girls is based on your book, and she’d say yes, but feel like she wished she was known more for the great work she continues to do with kids. And that was all she wanted to do. She was offered talk shows, she didn’t take them.
But I think the real breaking point was when the Broadway musical happened. This isn’t until the 2010s, and she’s thinking now, “I didn’t really realize this was going to keep printing money for a lot of people who aren’t me.” She tried to do an educational program with the play. It was going at first, but then got iced out. She wanted to do her own completely different educational stage play based on Queen Bees and found out she couldn’t, because of the contract she signed for Mean Girls. They had basically taken away her stage rights. But she was hoping that the Hollywood people would compromise anyway, and that does not seem to have happened, and she seems to have been cut out from everything now. It’s only worse now that it’s a movie musical as well. I think it’s got to be really hard to see it keep coming up with new iterations. It’s in schools now, schools can perform it. One can imagine that would be a great opportunity for her, educationally, and she is not a part of it now.
How did Tina Fey’s original script evolve over the course of pre-production?
She took a while. We have to remember she was doing this while she was head writer at SNL and on “Weekend Update,” which I think is so crazy. I just can’t imagine that schedule, period, much less writing your first script during it and adapting a parenting manual into your first movie.
This is when she is just starting to get hot. And people are doing all these slobbery profiles, like “Oh my God, she’s smart, she has glasses and she’s funny.” By all accounts, this was an excellent script when she turned it in.
She wrote it more as a Fast Times at Ridgemont High-style R-rated teen comedy, and they said we want to tone it down because your audience is teen girls. They said from the outset, this has to be a different kind of movie, because it’s going to speak to a different audience that needs the PG-13. PG-13 was always the holy grail. They toned it down a little. Apparently, there was more sex in it. Regina said “fuck” a lot.
But then, in post, they submitted it to the ratings board and found out they were still going to get an R. They had to zhuzz a lot of the lines in post-production, which as you know is not so easy to do. It means re-recording some things and cutting away from people. That is how we got “Is your muffin buttered? Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” That had been a classic “cherry-popping “line before, and that was changed. They just had to brainstorm a bunch of ideas, and get one that worked for the ratings board, and get the kid to rerecord his line. And it’s so crazy to me, because I think that’s so much dirtier.
The other one that’s my favorite change, that’s so weird, and you could write a whole paper about American sexual values, the girl that they say she made out with a hot dog, was supposed to have masturbated with a frozen hot dog. The negotiations are hilarious. Where it's like, “OK, we’ll say she made out with a frozen hot dog.” And they’re like, “It can’t be frozen.” And they were like OK, she just made out with a hot dog.
They tried to get rid of the “wide-set vagina” line. That is the one that [director] Mark Waters and Tina Fey stood their ground on and won. They said, it’s sexist, she’s not talking about sex. She’s talking about female bodily functions and menstruation, and girls should be able to talk about that. They gave in on that one.
In what ways do you see the influence of Saturday Night Live on Mean Girls?
It’s not as obvious as some other SNL-derivative movies. Most of the adult cast is SNL or SNL-adjacent. So that’s the first part, is they brought in people who are such good improvisers they can be around kids. Mark Waters famously loved a million takes. Maybe the SNL people were so game, they could just give you a million different options with a million takes. I heard a lot of stories about Amy Poehler being such a good improv partner. The guy who plays her husband is totally silent, and he had to do a thousand takes of one reaction shot, and she was there with him. It wasn’t just him grimacing for take after take after take. She was egging him on and getting him to react, and he said that was a huge help.
Some of the kids reported it wasn’t an improv set at all, but it was improv-lite. If they had a suggestion for how to do something differently, in a scene, it would be accepted. One of my favorites was Daniel Franzese [Damian]—this is so 2000s—when he did “Beautiful” at the talent show, he wanted to do that dramatic thing that Christina Aguilera does on the recording, where at the beginning she whispers, “don’t look at me.” Tina Fey said, “go for it.”
I also think this is partly Tina Fey, but it’s her writing acumen as developed on SNL: the 7-jokes-per-minute type of writing that she did here. It’s what she always does. I doubt she even thought of it, but to me, it’s what makes this movie so special, and especially among movies for teen girls, which generally tended not to be this funny. She just can’t stop herself. It’s so endless with her, and she always has jokes, and she put them all in.
The high school comedy as a subgenre seems to be in terminal decline. Will we ever see a return to glory?
It’s heartbreaking to me, because it’s one of my favorite genres. I think you know this, but I briefly flirted with calling this something like The Last Great American Teen Movie. There have been other good ones since, but they haven’t had the same, #1 at the box office, monoculture kind of moment. Booksmart tried, and it failed, which was a huge problem. People were excited about it and then it didn’t do that great.
What’s really happened is Netflix took over this entire market. I love some of those Netflix ones, but not in the same way. They’re doing a specific thing, and it’s not making Mean Girls. They’re not putting the effort in. He’s All That, the She’s All That remake, which was directed by Mark Waters, went direct to Netflix. They’re not putting the same effort behind them that they used to.
By the way, just like with Mean Girls and a million other movies before it, a female-focused movie does really well at the box office, everybody swears they’re going to serve that audience better, and then they forget the whole thing. I don’t know how much stock they’re going to put into Mean Girls the musical being #1 two weeks in a row at the box office. Between that and this being a weird time at the box office, I don’t know if that’s going to have any impact. Maybe it’ll get us a Mean Girls proper sequel, given a little momentum behind that.
As our foremost scholar of all things Mean Girls, can you tell us what you thought of the Mean Girls film musical?
If you can go into it with lowered and specific expectations, it can be fun, especially as a Mean Girls scholar. It can be more of a spot the fun Easter-egg or previous reference. I actually think my book is a really good companion piece for it, because there’s some jokes where you’ll be like, “I get that because I read that book.”
The more you love the original or the musical, the more you’re going to play, “Oh shoot, why did they get rid of that? Oh, I wish that song was in there.” I liked the musical too, so I found, at times, the musical getting short shrift.
I do think it’s possibly inscrutable if you don’t know both of the other versions. I think if you came into it and this was the first version of the movie you saw, I think you’d kind of be like, what? [laughs] It’s a movie about having been a movie and a musical.
Not to get too deep, but I was like, well what universe is this, and is this canon? Ms. Norbury and the principal are played by the same people, but then you’ve got a bunch of new people playing the old characters in a new time, but they’re singing? So you’re like, “What is this? What’s happening?” It’s a very strange experience. It almost feels like you’re having a dream about Mean Girls.