The original 2004 film, “Mean Girls,” contained something unusual, then as now: a main character who was homeschooled. But not that a kind of home education.
“I know what you're thinking,” Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells us in voiceover. “Homeschooled children are monsters.” The film shows a little girl with glasses spelling “xylocarpio” at the National Spelling Bee. “Or that we're weirdly religious or something,” Cady continues. A family of boys with suspenders appears; Behind them are sandbags displaying paper targets with human silhouettes. “And on the third day,” says one of the children, “God created the Remington bolt-action rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs. And homosexuals.”
“Amen,” his brothers intervene.
It was a fun time, no matter who you were in 2004, depending on Bush-era perceptions of homeschoolers as, well, weirdly religious fanatics and survivalists who insisted that God made the world in six days about 6,000 years ago. . Like everything in “Mean Girls” (and, in fact, all of Tina Fey's work), it was an exaggerated caricature based on a grain of truth. Homeschooling in the 1990s, at least in America, was largely insular and largely the province of conservative evangelical Christians with views that could seem extreme even to others in the same pew.
I was a junior in college when “Mean Girls” first hit theaters, and the joke was funny because I had spent the last few years trying to figure out hierarchies for myself: I had been homeschooled, just as that Cady.
Well, not just like Cady. I left my private school after fifth grade to be homeschooled, and several of the communities my family immersed themselves in along the way were similar to the gun-toting, dinosaur-loving kids in the movie. (The first time I really felt like my youth was represented on screen was in last year's docuseries “Shiny Happy People.”) I attended seminars where we were taught that dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the same time as humans, that the fossil record was designed by God to bother scientists, and many other things.
However, I was lucky. I met homeschoolers who had been abandoned academically or, worse yet, abused and abandoned by their parents. But others, like me, had a very positive experience. My family was never as extreme as the cartoons, and I received a good education that stood me in good stead when I finally started taking the SAT and applying to colleges.
But as many homeschoolers of my generation will tell you, if you grow up and spend your life in a more conventional society, there is always a part of you that feels different, much like Cady. A song comes on at a party or at a ball game, everyone is singing it and you have no idea what song it is. You see that long button-down denim skirts are back in style and you know, deep in your heart, that you can't wear one again. (Search “stylish homeschool” on social media to find out why.)
And most importantly, everything you know about the American high school comes from Hollywood. High school movies educated me about what my peers were going through, movies like “10 Things I Hate About You” and “Clueless” and “Never Been Kissed” and “Bring It On.” I later expanded into John Hughes movies or TV shows like “Freaks and Geeks.” I learned some valuable lessons from them. Cafes and gyms are dangerous places. Teachers and parents are mostly embarrassingly irrelevant. Dances form the peak or nadir of your year. And everyone is forced to band together in cliques to survive.
The moral of all high school movies is basically the same: don't judge a person by their appearance and don't be a stuck-up snob or something terrible could happen to you. “Mean Girls” was the genre's greatest student: funny, jokey, endlessly quotable, larger than life and yet authentic. When I later became a college professor, the only movie I could guarantee that students from a generation younger than me had seen was “Mean Girls.” It had that kind of staying power.
In its most recent incarnation, a 2024 film adaptation of the Broadway musical “Mean Girls,” itself based on the 2004 film “Mean Girls,” not much has changed. There are now songs and videos recorded in portrait mode. There are more queer kids and more non-white kids and Damian now drives his grandmother's mobility scooter instead of a car. But Tina Fey is still teaching math (and writing the script), Tim Meadows is still the director, feminism is still a little shaky, and the search still isn't happening.
Homeschooling, on the other hand, has changed dramatically in recent decades, going from a marginal option to a widespread option. That's reflected in this new “Mean Girls”: The dinosaur kids are gone, replaced by a joke from Fey's math teacher about homeschooling representing an innovative way to take money from the teachers union. There are still many of my types of students who homeschool, but many more come from other identities and subcultures and have other reasons for making the decision. However, homeschoolers rarely appear on screen as anything more than a punchline or a small role.
That's why it was so fun when the new “Mean Girls” reminded me that Cady is a homeschooled girl until she returns to the U.S. When I saw the original, I almost forgot about that part. The fact that she had grown up in Africa, where her parents did field work, seemed much more important to the story and to Cady's clumsy attempts to fit into the American high school hierarchy. Lohan, who was wonderful, never projected what can only be described as home-school energy. She had the look and affect of someone who felt quite comfortable in a classroom, from the get-go.
The new Cady, played by Angourie Rice, is much more familiar. She's dressed in the same flannel and jeans that Lohan wore at the beginning of the original, but Rice embodies a certain mousy awkwardness that I recognized as my own: a desperation to look, learn, and avoid embarrassment at all costs. It's possible that, like me, she's missed the more mundane children's jokes and double entenders, and she's definitely cautious in her approach to her new surroundings.
That's how I learned why “Mean Girls” as a story works so well. Almost all high school movies function as fish-out-of-water scenarios, the better to show the hierarchies and ranking mechanisms that govern our lives, even as we graduate and move on.
But a homeschooled protagonist is the best way to get into this type of story, because when you're homeschooled, those structures simply don't exist. And without them, you're a free agent. Naturally, you don't belong anywhere. That can lead to a strange kind of confusion when you do the work, so clearly presented in high school movies, of figuring out who you are; It makes more sense to assume other people's identities than to find your own. Lacking a lifetime of being pushed into one group or another by your peers, you're a bit untethered. That's a good thing in the end, but it's confusing and chaotic right now. “Mean Girls” excellently evokes that feeling, with a protagonist who is co-opted by two different groups for her own purposes.
Of course, Cady finds her way. We all do it…eventually.
