Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mean Girls
2004 · Mark Waters · Mean Girls on Sightlines
Field note, first week. The lunchroom is loud and crowded, and then for a few seconds it stops being a lunchroom. Cady Heron looks out over the tables and the film cuts the scene like a nature documentary. The students become animals at an African watering hole. Cady grew up in Africa, the daughter of two zoologists, and was home-schooled until sixteen. This is the first thing at her new Illinois public school that she recognizes. The trick is cheap, just editing and simple compositing. It also contains the whole movie. Cady reads the place the only way she knows how, as a habitat. The film's best joke, and its serious idea, is that the habitat reads her back.
Gilles Deleuze has a useful word for this. In his account of the classical cinema he calls it the action-image: a situation, a creature placed in it, and the creature acting to change it. The situation that surrounds everyone and calls for action is what he calls the encompasser, and the cafeteria is about as encompassing as a milieu can be. He also has a name for the two-way bond between a milieu and whoever lives in it: the imprint. The situation presses on the character, the character presses back, and each ends up shaped by the other. That is the arc Tina Fey wrote for Cady. She enters The Plastics as an observer doing fieldwork, and the field leaves its mark on her. By the middle of the film she is the specimen. We know it before she does, because the voiceover keeps calling it research.
So why bring Deleuze to a teen comedy? Because he gives us a way to see what Mean Girls is actually made of. It is not built from characters so much as from signs that everyone in the school has learned to read. Deleuze, borrowing from the philosopher C. S. Peirce, calls this the relation-image: meaning that lives in the relations between things, which an audience holds in its head. His smallest unit is the mark, an object or gesture that means something because of the habit attached to it. When you see this, expect that.
"On Wednesdays we wear pink" is a perfect mark. Pink on a Wednesday tells you who belongs. No pink tells you who doesn't. The Plastics are defined visually before they are defined dramatically, through the coordinated color and the exposed midriffs, so the uniform does the work of a rulebook. Then there is Gretchen, forever trying to make "fetch" happen. It's a running gag, and it's also a lesson in how marks work. A mark only exists if the group adopts the habit. Gretchen keeps offering one and nobody picks it up.
Janis's seating chart takes this further. She draws the cafeteria for Cady as a map of cliques, and the lunchroom becomes a closed system, what Deleuze calls the frame: a composition so full of information that it works as a model of the whole social order. The Breakfast Club codified the high-school clique taxonomy. Mean Girls literally hands its heroine a drawing of it, and the staging keeps returning to that room as a battlefield.
At the center of the system sits the Burn Book. It is a designed, physical object, and its materiality matters to the climax. Deleuze would call it a symbol: one object that holds the film's organizing relation, which here is exclusion turned into writing. This is where the film commits to the action-image at full strength. Fey is disciplined about consequence, and what Cady does really changes the situation.
The fantasy inserts, the watering hole and Cady's angry impulses literalized on screen, do something subtler. Deleuze describes a reflection-image, in which an action gets turned into a figure or a spectacle instead of being carried out directly. The Jingle Bell Rock talent-show number, polished routine sliding into chaos, works the same way. The comedy lets us see the violence of the hierarchy as a staged figure, so the film can be cruel and buoyant at once. The tempo never sits on the cruelty long enough to turn bleak.
Fey's real invention was structural. Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes, a guide for parents, had no plot, no protagonist and no characters, only a taxonomy of behavior. Fey put a scientist inside the taxonomy and let the scientist turn into data. Fast Times at Ridgemont High had already shown how to turn immersive reportage (Cameron Crowe's undercover year) into an ensemble comedy. Fey did the same with sociology. From Heathers she inherited the color-coded clique, the invented slang (Heathers had "very") and the revenge plot aimed at a tyrannical alpha girl, and she softened its pitch-black cruelty. Clueless gave her the ironic first-person female voice guiding us through a glossy ecosystem where clothes are a status system. Election showed that voiceover could dissect power and self-deception while still getting belly laughs. 10 Things I Hate About You showed that a structural argument could be smuggled inside genre pleasure.
Rachel McAdams plays Regina as charisma that hunts. It is the right performance for a film whose metaphor is the food chain: magnetic, controlled, never simply monstrous. Against her, the SNL-trained adults, Fey and Tim Meadows above all, play it dry and deadpan, so the teenagers' heightened register has a floor to bounce off.
What did Mean Girls do to film as an art? Technically, very little, and the honest account says so. It was shot on 35mm, lit high-key and clean, and covered for comic clarity. Its achievement is that a modest studio comedy carried a rigorous idea about how girls are trained to use exclusion as a weapon, and made that idea feel like pleasure. Then something stranger happened. A film about how phrases and colors harden into a group's code became that code itself. Two decades later its lines work as a shared vocabulary. The marks escaped the screen.
Which raises the question to take into your next viewing. When you laugh at a line before the character finishes it, which side of the watering hole are you on? Watch the clothes before you listen to the dialogue. Watch Cady's outfits drift toward pink. Notice how often you read a mark before she does. The film is teaching you its taxonomy as it goes, the same way the school teaches her.
Concepts in play
- imprint (empreinte) — Cady comes into The Plastics as an observer doing fieldwork and is remade by the milieu. 'The anthropologist becomes her own specimen' as she slides from naïf to corrupted insider.
- the encompasser (synsign) — The school, and especially the cafeteria the staging keeps returning to as a battlefield, is the all-surrounding milieu that calls Cady's actions into being.
- mark — 'On Wednesdays we wear pink': the coordinated dress codes make conformity a literal uniform, readable by habit. Gretchen's failed attempts to make 'fetch' happen show a mark that never catches on.
- relation-image (mental-image) — Sustained dramatic irony: Cady's voiceover frames events as fieldwork, so the audience, as a knowing third, sees her turn into her own specimen before she does.
- the frame as closed set (cadre) — Janis's hand-drawn seating chart of cliques turns the lunchroom into a dense diagram of the whole social order.
- symbol — The Burn Book is a designed physical object that condenses the film's organizing relation, exclusion as writing. Its materiality matters to the plot.
- reflection-image (the Figure) — Stylized inserts recast action as figure: the cafeteria as an African watering hole, Cady's angry impulses literalized, the 'Jingle Bell Rock' routine collapsing into chaos.
- action-image, large form — Regina's reign presses on everyone and calls up Cady's revenge scheme, and Fey's script lets those acts genuinely transform the situation.