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Editor's Note: As promised, here is more Moore. Although she has emerged this fall with a new name for her wide-ranging column, she hasn't changed her feminist perspective.
by Anne Moore
When we first see Regina George (Rachel
McAdams) on screen in Mean Girls, it feels more like Skinemax than Disney
- the camera pans longingly down her body, savoring every slo-mo hair
toss and lip-lick. What's (maybe) redeeming about this shot is that it's
not from the perspective of some ogling boy, but from a group of high
school outsiders - new girl Cady (Lindsay Lohan), artsy weirdo Janis (Lizzy
Caplan) and their gayboy best friend Damian (Daniel Franzese). Ostensibly,
their desire is to be Regina rather than to be with her, but the camera
tells a different story.
"All right!" I thought to
myself, seeing the movie for the first time, "Finally, a high school
movie with an 80's sensibility where the lesbian subtext isn’t totally
buried!" I prepped myself for something akin to Ally Sheedy making
out with Molly Ringwald at the end of The Breakfast Club instead of suffering
an insulting makeover and winding up with dumb jock Emilio Estevez. Will
this be the movie where the homoeroticism inherent in girl-on-girl competition
will be acknowledged or (dare I say it?) even celebrated? I wish. Instead,
we witness a denial of lesbian desire that feels weirdly anachronistic
in this day of GSAs and The L Word.
But maybe denial isn't the right word
as much as rejection, because we do see the specter of lesbianism in the
source of Regina's status as a "life-ruiner." Apparently she
passed a rumor about Janis in seventh grade that she was a lesbian, which
caused her to drop out of school and is apparently the "root,"
if you will, of her weirdness. Sounds okay so far, right? Standard queer
subtext stuff.
The weird thing is how completely the movie
cops out on its queer subtext, even while it seems to be establishing
one. For instance, Janis shows up at the winter formal in drag with her
gay best friend, but ends the movie making out with a cute (if dorky)
mathlete. Just Regina - the character who has been only the receiver,
never the initiator, of lesbian desire - ends the movie single. Both Cady
and Janis are linked in happy heterosexual couples, shown cuddling on
the lawn at the school as they make their way into a bucolic, clique-free
future. Leaving the movie, my sister commented that it felt like a 50's
pulp novel ending, where the bland hero comes in at the last minute to
provide the big het finish and save the heroine from a lifetime of perverted
misery.
It's not so much that any of the homophobia
in Mean Girls is that surprising within the context of the representation
of lesbian relationships in film and movies over the last fifty years
or so, but the virulence of its rejection of lesbianism seems a bit off,
especially since male homosexuality is so normalized. Damian's queerness
just seems to insure his status as a trustworthy best friend, but Janis's
possible lesbianism is frightening enough to completely disrupt her life.
Is lesbianism still so scary? You wouldn't think so, considering the proliferation
of big-time out lesbian icons, but there's clearly still some pretty effective
taboos in place if this movie shies away from explicit lesbian erotics
with such vehemence.
I'm particularly interested in how these
taboos break down right now, having just returned from my tenth high school
reunion. It felt a little similar to my experience watching Mean Girls
- I'd shown up with high expectations of seeing the girls I'd been crushed
out on when I was fifteen, and that we would finally acknowledge the desire
that had always been just below the surface in our relationships. What
I got was, sadly, more of the same kinds of games that had gone on in
high school, but (I hope) I've gotten a little less awkward in playing
them.
Most of the cute softball jocks I'd
pined over were AWOL, although one was scarily tanned, and, I think, married.
One of the first girls I ever had a crush on is on her second husband
and has three kids. I traded the "we're both queer" nod (I think)
with Tiffany Reutiman, a girl I hardly knew when we were in high school,
but there was no erotically charged bonding over being closeted tenth-graders.
No one was there with a girlfriend, although one guy brought his boyfriend,
and I still (even now, working as a queer organizer in a queer town, even
out to my friggin' grandparents!) felt totally awkward about coming out.
It's not so much that my queerness
felt dangerous, as it felt shut out as an option in that environment.
Which is maybe the same as what's happening in Mean Girls. If you take
out the competition-over-men part of girl-on-girl competition, you lose
the vocabulary to talk about it. The love that dare not speak its name
seems, at least in the context of high schools, still a little mute.
Anne Moore is a cheerleader and local gadabout who hails from various
interchangeable suburbs all over the country. She currently lives in Burlington
with her cat and exhaustive collection of Buffy DVDs.