2022’s Not Okay begins with a bold statement plastered across the screen in big letters: the female character is unlikeable. Immediately, you’d expect a character like Regina George, someone who is, and I cannot stress this enough… a bitch.
But she’s not. Where the mean girl is exacting, deliberate, and decisive, Not Okay’s protagonist Danni (Zoey Deutch) behaves in ways that are mostly just silly. The proud declaration that the movie boasts an unlikeable female character is immediately followed by a scene essentially apologizing for Danni being unlikeable. Danni’s voice is heard saying: “Don’t you just want to be seen? To feel important?”
Not Okay focuses on a girl who lies about being a victim of a terrorist attack for attention. Danni works at Depravity, a parody of Vice, where she’s failed as a writer. When people mistakenly think she was present during the terrorist attack, she sees an opportunity to gain notoriety and a platform.
In a way, the film presents a more compassionate take on the mean girl archetype. Danni is desperate, lonely, and almost unable to understand her own feelings and desires. Miserable and wallowing in self-pity, Danni acts out. But throughout the film’s clumsy attempts to take on the issue of the unlikeable female, we end up with a flat character, desperate to excuse herself, instead of a real analysis of how people abuse their social power.
Not Okay is one of many recent pieces of film and television that have been skirting around the real villainy of their female characters, creating characters who feel one-dimensional and hindering the possibility of real discussions of harm by insisting on the supposedly feminist idea that women cannot be “bitchy,” ending up instead creating more problems than solutions.
A mean girl is no longer mean; instead, she’s a victim. In this we see a new problem: killing the mean girl kills a fundamental discussion of trauma. Not Okay hopes to satirize trauma porn, self-centeredness, and bullying. In reality, the film dips out before offering any chance of reflection, let alone redemption.
This is a recurring trend. Popular shows like The Sex Lives of College Girls and Euphoria have all taken their own watery approaches to the mean girl. In TSLOCG , Leighton (Reneé Rapp) becomes close friends with her roommates who span all different kinds of lifestyles, incomes, races, etc. Magically, the wealthy and often rude private school girl learns almost overnight how to get along with the roommates she previously bullied. They rarely have any real conflict. In Euphoria,” Maddy (Alexa Demie) is set up as the mean girl character. However, she never asserts the power that the mean girl often does, as her whole character arc is centered around her on-again/off-again relationship with her abusive boyfriend. A core pillar of the mean girl stereotype is the idea of her control and cunning. Maddy is never really seen in a position of real power until the very end of the second season. Both these characters are set up as mean girl types only to be softened later, skipping over real character growth.
Lately, I have been asking myself: where is the mean girl? Not because I love her, but because I know her. Everyone knows her. In the recent era, shows have reckoned with the way that they depict women. But the mean girl isn’t a trope that needs to be recontextualized or even redeemed. Women can abuse their power, too. Women can be mean. There’s an important relationship between why women act out the way they do.
The mean girl is a shade of woman. A negative one, certainly, but no less essential.. As “The Take” says,: “The core of the mean girl’s identity is rage. ‘Mean Girls’ star Rachel McAdams described Regina George as “a really angry kid who had no boundaries or guidance,” said director Mark Waters.” So who is the mean girl, if not a reflection of the worst ways that society conditions women to be?
“The Take” goes on further to explain that the mean girl often showcases positive traits like leadership and confidence. However, the societal pressure to be seen as pleasing to men discourages women from putting that aggression into sports, career advancement, or seeking leadership roles. Instead, it is pushed toward acquiring social status and the attention of men. The world shuns women for striving for career power. That means angry women might turn to finding power and respect through “relational aggression,” spreading gossip and mocking others. Since women’s bodies are often valued higher than their intelligence, angry women are pressured to search for validation and confidence through appealing to men, not their skills. Hence, the shallow, beautiful, bitchy mean girl stereotype. People suffer because of systems. The way they act out tells us about our systems. The mean girl is the product of misogyny. Not the other way around.
Films like Not Okay spoil the discussion of trauma by forgetting the mean girl. Instead, we’re subjected to Danni’s endless pity party and her inability to reckon with her actual flaws. It cheapens her relationships, as the movie never shows her making amends or taking accountability.
Cruelty is often about power systems. It’s a lie to pretend that the cruelest people in the world can change abruptly, as in The Sex Lives of College Girls. It’s a lie to pretend that someone like Danni is a victim, instead of the malicious and conniving character she should be. It’s okay to write terrible women. It’s okay to redeem terrible women. It’s not wise to pretend terrible women are helpless victims, who were never that terrible in the first place.
The mean girl is interesting to me because I think, deep-down, we all underestimate our capacity to hurt others, most often even accidentally. By studying the mean girl, we can study the nature of harm and how it spreads to others. I don’t know if anyone could tell you about the birth of the mean girl. If not our earliest myths, one could probably go back to Aesops’ fables or Hans Christian Andersons’s tales of evil stepsisters. I think of a mean girl in the vanilla lip gloss, pink kitten heels, y2k haze of 90s mean girls I grew up watching. But then again, the mean girl is also spiritual question, and we all have a side to us that references the mean girl question.
There’s a lot of speculation about what Gen Z loves or hates, and how those trends show up in cinema. One of the most discussed topics is how an emerging interest in social justice might be affecting their viewing content. So —- amongst the online discourse of whether or not Gen Z hates sex scenes, 3-hour movies, and the show Friends —- this new question has emerged for me: Does Gen Z hate the mean girl trope? Did they kill it forever? Wouldn’t that be, a loss for feminism and cinema alike?
I think so.
