‘Is but­ter a carb?’ How Mean Girls became Meme Girls

“Not every­body falls in love with a super­hero, or gets stuck on a bus going 60 miles per hour, but every­body goes to high school.” Reflect­ing on Mean Girls 15 years on from its ini­tial release, direc­tor Mark Waters has a pret­ty good idea why the film became so deeply ingrained in the pub­lic con­scious­ness. For those of us who were at school when the film came out in 2004 – or in the years that fol­lowed, when social media was begin­ning to pen­e­trate our brain­stems – lines of dia­logue such as ​“she doesn’t even go here” and ​“that’s so fetch” are now part of our lexicon.

Waters came to Mean Girls off the back of Disney’s 2003 remake of Freaky Fri­day, which facil­i­tat­ed the final stage of Lind­say Lohan’s ascent to star­dom. Tina Fey, who wrote the screen­play, had been a Sat­ur­day Night Live main­stay since 1997, but like­wise it was Mean Girls that made her a house­hold name. It’s to Fey’s ​“gen­er­a­tional tal­ent” that Waters cred­its the film’s endur­ing quota­bil­i­ty. ​“Tina is prob­a­bly one of the great­est com­e­dy writ­ers of the 21^st cen­tu­ry,” he tells LWLies. Fey’s work on SNL was more like a ​“tread­mill” of com­e­dy, Waters notes, where­as Mean Girls allowed for jokes to be cut in and out through­out the pro­duc­tion process – with most of it ulti­mate­ly end­ing up on the cut­ting room floor.

Yet com­pared with oth­er high school come­dies of its ilk – think Heathers, Clue­less, Easy A – none is more ubiq­ui­tous than Mean Girls. (Hon­est­ly, when was the last time you shad­ed some­one on Twit­ter with a Clue­less gif?) As Matthew Schimkowitz from Know Your Memes argues, ​“The dif­fer­ence between Clue­less and Mean Girls real­ly comes down to tim­ing. In 2004 you’re just at the cusp of social media hap­pen­ing. You have a rel­a­tive prox­im­i­ty between that movies ini­tial release, its DVD release, and the explo­sion of social media, so it’s more fresh in the minds of users.”

So if this com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors plant­ed the seed, how did Mean Girls ulti­mate­ly blos­som into meme­hood? Schimkowitz believes that Fey’s writ­ing played a piv­otal role. ​“Part of the film’s pop­u­lar­i­ty could be due to the style of the writ­ing, which is very much asso­ci­at­ed with Tina Fey’s one-lin­er­dom: a lot of real­ly short, snap­py punch­lines. Ten years ago every­body just quot­ed Anchor­man,” Schimkowitz adds. ​“Now, with the advent of .gifs, you can just send a short pic­ture of that moment, as opposed to just say­ing it to your friend. In that way, you don’t have to con­tex­tu­alise it in your mind. It’s right there for you.”

Waters agrees. ​“That’s what memes are per­fect for – they’re gonna show you how I feel, or that I’m angry about some­thing, or I’m gonna sound off. Mean Girls is a series of the per­fect, deli­cious rejoin­ders that you wish you could come up with if you had the time. And some­body already wrote them for you!” It seems, then, that Mean Girls was always des­tined to become a sta­ple of meme cul­ture. If suc­cess­ful memes are built upon a plat­form of snap­py, quotable retorts, what could work bet­ter in our trib­al­is­tic online world than ​“she doesn’t even go here”? Waters, Fey and the cast fell upon the right for­mu­la at the right time.

Of course, you could say the same of any pop­u­lar move­ment: the inter­net is a tapes­try of trends that seem­ing­ly come from nowhere, stick around for a while, and dis­si­pate into data. The unique­ness of Mean Girls is that it’s stuck for so long. With that in mind, how reg­u­lar­ly does Waters receive Mean Girls memes? ​“Oh, all the time. Because I direct­ed it, any­body who comes across a Mean Girls meme that they clear­ly like – it ends up on my phone. I’m not real­ly a meme per­son. I’ve actu­al­ly cre­at­ed some before – I’ll send them to my wife as a joke. But I’m not an afi­ciona­do. You’d have to talk to my kids.”