“It Felt Like a Movie About Being a Musical And a Movie.”
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong on her new book about Mean Girls, the 20th anniversary and the musical movie.
Prolific pop culture author
, who has written books on Sex & the City, Seinfeld and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, published a book on Mean Girls earlier this year, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Not only is it the 20th anniversary year of the original film, but So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It) came out within a week of the movie-musical remake in January.I sat down with Jennifer to talk to her about both iterations of the iconic film. Now that’s fetch!
You begin the book with a case study of tweens watching Mean Girls for the first time. Were you surprised by the popularity the original movie has among Gen Z and Gen Alpha?
I convened that meeting specifically because a lot of people had been telling me that it was still catching on with young kids. That was just a bunch of adults, most of them involved in the movie, telling me this. So it’s great if it’s true, but I wanted to make sure it was true. I wondered a lot about how they see this, what do they see in it, do they think it’s old or weird. I wanted to know better how this is going over with them because I don’t have kids of my own. I didn’t want to be that old person who was like, the kids love this and it wasn’t true. I was asking around, posting on social media asking for [young] people. Finally my acupuncturist was like, oh, my daughters and I watch it all the time and they love it. They were in sixth and eighth grade at the time. They each invited some friends over and we watched it together at my acupuncturist’s house! It’s one thing to tell an adult [that they liked it], but it was great to see [that] from their real reactions how into it they were. They knew so many of the lines. Some of them had seen it before; one of them had not and she knew the lines from TikTok. They knew the Jingle Bell Rock dance. They were very excited about certain characters: they loved Damian, they loved Kevin G, the loved the main girls. I asked them about [Aaron Samuels] and they were like, who?! So that [wasn’t] registering for them yet. But they were really interested in the Burn Book and the friendship antics that go on. They did not love the new one as much as they were excited about the old one!
We will get to that, but
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Scarlett Woman to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.