Thank You, Mean Girls

I’ve watched Mean Girls more than any other film—more than anything else, really. The 2004 one with Lohan and McAdams and Caplan, Lizzy Caplan especially. I was into her. That’s probably when you first understand that girls aren’t just other people but something you actually notice, something your body has an opinion about. The movie works because it nails high school exactly. The casual cruelty, the hierarchies that feel cosmically important when you’re sixteen, the way one comment can destroy someone, and then those small moments of kindness that don’t undo anything but somehow matter anyway.

Cady Heron spent her whole childhood homeschooled in Africa and then her family moves to the States, dumps her at North Shore High with no idea how to survive. The Plastics—Regina George’s crew, beautiful and sharp and purely calculating—take her in. She’s into it until she realizes what she actually traded for the invitation. Then it goes bad and funny and honest, the way things do when the facade cracks.

Ariana Grande made her Thank You, Next video using Mean Girls, recreating scenes from the film. It feels right. You go back to the movies and songs that understood you when you were young, the ones that felt true about being that age. Mean Girls is like that for a lot of people—not because it’s profound or important, just because it actually works.