The original 2004 film “Bad Girls” contained something unusual, both then and now: a home-schooled main character. But no that kind of home schooling.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells us. “Homeschooled kids are freaks.” The film cuts to a tiny bespectacled girl spelling “xylocarp” at the National Spelling Bee. “Or that we’re weirdly religious or something,” Cady continues. A family of boys in suspenders appears. behind them are sandbags displaying paper targets with human outlines. “And on the third day,” one of the boys plans, “God created the Remington bolt-action rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs. And homosexuals.”
“Amen,” his brothers cry.
It was kind of funny, no matter who you were in 2004, dependent on Bush-era notions of homeschoolers, as well as weirdly religious, survivalist freaks who insisted that God made the world in six days or so before 6,000 years. Like everything about “Mean Girls” — and, indeed, Tina Fey’s entire oeuvre — it was an exaggerated caricature based on a kernel of truth. Homeschooling in the 1990s, at least in the United States, was largely insular, and mostly the purview of conservative evangelical Christians with views that could seem extreme even to others in the same pew.
I was a college student when “Mean Girls” first came out, and the joke tickled me because I’d spent the last few years trying to figure out hierarchies myself: I was homeschooled, as was Cady.
Well, not just like Cady. I left my private school after fifth grade to be homeschooled, and many of the communities my family dipped into along the way were similar to the kids in the movie who love guns and dinosaurs. (The first time I really felt that way my youth represented on the screen was last year’s documentary series “Bright happy people.”) I went to seminars where we were taught that dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time as humans, that fossils were designed by God to mess with scientists and many other things.
But I was lucky. I knew homeschoolers who had fallen behind academically or, worse, were abused and neglected by parents. But others, like myself, have had a largely positive experience. My family was never as extreme as the caricatures, and I received a good education that served me well when I finally started taking SATs and applying to colleges.
But as many homeschoolers of my generation will tell you, if you grow up to spend your life in a more mainstream society, there’s always some part of you that feels different, like Cady. A song comes on at a party or a ball, and everyone sings along, and you have no idea what the song is. You see long denim skirts with buttons coming back into fashion and know in your heart that you can never bring yourself to wear them again. (Search “home-school chic” on social media to find out why.)
And most importantly, everything you know about 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 “Ignorant” and “They never kissed” and “come on.” Later I would get into John Hughes movies or TV shows like “Freaks and Geeks”. I learned some valuable lessons from them. Coffee shops and gyms are dangerous places. Teachers and parents are mostly irrelevant fests. Proms are the pinnacle, or nadir, of your year. And everyone is forced to sort into cliques to survive.
The moral of every high school movie is basically the same: don’t judge a person by their looks and don’t be a stuck-up snob or something terrible might happen to you. “Mean Girls” was the stalwart of the genre: funny, funny, infinitely relatable, larger than life and yet authentic about it. When I later became a college professor, the only movie I could guarantee students a generation younger than me had seen was Mean Girls. It had this staying power.
In its most recent iteration — a 2024 film adaptation of the Broadway musical “Mean Girls,” in turn based on the 2004 film — “Mean Girls” hasn’t changed much. There are now songs and videos shot in portrait. There are more queer kids and more non-white kids and Damian now drives his grandma’s scooter instead of a car. But Tina Fey is still teaching math (and writing the screenplay), Tim Meadows is still the master, feminism is still a little wobbly, and fetch still isn’t happening.
Homeschooling, on the other hand, has changed drastically in recent decades, evolving from margin selection in a mainstream. That’s reflected in this new “Mean Girls”: the dinosaur kids are gone, replaced with a joke from Fey’s math teacher about homeschooling that represents an innovative way to take money out of the teachers union. There are still many of my homeschoolers out there, but many more who come from other identities and subcultures and have other reasons for making the choice. However, homeschoolers are still rarely seen on screen as more than a line or a track.
That’s why it was so funny when the new “Mean Girls” reminded me that Cady is a homebody until she gets back to the U.S. When I saw the original, I mostly forgot about that part. The fact that she had grown up in Africa, where her parents did fieldwork, seemed much more important to the story and to Cady’s awkward attempts to fit into the American high school hierarchy. Lohan—who was gorgeous—never exactly projected what can only be described as home-school energy. He had the look and feel of someone who felt quite comfortable in a classroom, right from the jump.
The new Cady, played by Angourie Rice, feels much more familiar. She’s dressed in the same tank top and jeans that Lohan wore at the beginning of the original, but Rice embodies a certain awkwardness that I recognized as my own: a desperation to watch and learn and to avoid embarrassment at all costs. She may, like me, have missed the jokes and double talk thrown around by most worldly children and is certainly 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 highlight the hierarchies and classification mechanisms that govern our lives, even after we’ve graduated and moved on.
But a homeschooled protagonist is the absolute way to go in this kind of story, because when you’re homeschooled, those structures just aren’t there. And without them, you’re a free agent. Of course you don’t belong anywhere. This can lead to a strange kind of delusion when you do the work, so neatly done 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. Without being pressured into a lifetime of one group or another by your peers, you’re a little unattached. This is mostly a good thing in the end, but it’s confusing and chaotic right now. “Mean Girls” perfectly evokes this feeling, with a protagonist who is co-opted by two different groups for their own ends.
Of course, Kandi finds her way. We all do… eventually.