Mean Girls is a 2004 American teen comedy movie directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey. It is based in part on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 non-fiction self-help book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which describes female high school social cliques, school bullying, and the damaging effects they can have on students. Fey also drew from her own experience at Upper Darny High School as an inspiration for some of the concepts in the film. It is also clearly an adaption of of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.
Sixteen-year-old homeschooled Cady Heron and her parents return to the United States after twelve years in Africa, settling in Evanston, Illinois. After an intimidating first day at North Shore High School, Cady befriends outsiders Janis Ian and Damian Leigh, who explain the school’s various cliques and warn her to avoid the “Plastics”: wealthy but insecure Gretchen Wieners, sweet but dimwitted Karen Smith, and “queen bee” Regina George. When Cady is invited to sit with the Plastics at lunch, Janis persuades her to infiltrate the ruling clique.
In Shakespeare’s play and Tina Fey’s script, the main antagonist is popular, dangerous, and inspired fear and envy from everyone. Regina George and Caesar both rule their empires through their armies, intimidation, their wealth, and their supreme self confidence. In addition, both names are associated with royalty – Regina in Latin means queen. Like Cassius, Janis claims that once Regina is destroyed, the social order of the high school will change from a dictatorship to a democracy, but what she really wants is to supplant and replace Regina and make herself the new queen Bee. Even her name is a clue to her malevolent nature, she is named after the Roman god with two faces! Similarly in Julius Caesar, Cassius convinces Brutus that once Caesar dies, Rome will be a republic again. In real life, Brutus was Caesar’s close friend, so Brutus agonizes over whether he is doing the right thing and whether he owes more loyalty to Rome, or his friend Caesar.
If Janis is Cassius, what about Brutus? Cady Heron (played in the movie by Lindsay Lohan), is naive but intelligent. Like Brutus, she is manipulated and carefully chosen to betray the king. Janis chooses Cady because she’s pretty enough to get close to Regina, her looks are like social currency. Brutus’ social currency was his family: he was descended from the founder of the republic so he leant credibility to the conspiracy. He was also close in family to Caesar and Cassius.
In both stories once the monarch is destroyed, the power vacuum immediately starts to close; rather than change the social order, a new monarch arises. In Caesar, the second triumvirate takes over for the first, and Caesar’s nephew Augustus eventually becomes the supreme ruler of the Roman empire. In Mean Girls, once Regina loses her social cache, Cady takes her place. Then when Janis exposes Cady and Regina, she briefly basks in becoming a new Queen Bee – her revolution to overthrow a tyrant has paid off, bit now she is the tyrant herself. This actually mirrors the real Julius Caesar, who took power from the feared dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
Like Regina and her Burn Book, Sulla kept a list of people he saw as threats called the Proscriptions, only Sulla used it to execute the people on the list and seize their property. Caesar started his career as a populist soldier working for the Senate against Sulla and for the people, but became a dictator himself, the very thing he was sworn to oppose! The movie does end on an encouraging note when the adults finally step up and address the terrible things that their students are doing, which has important lessons about bullying that every young person should see. Though the movie ends happily, the Cesarian parallels are not over; even though this high school has been democratized, the problems that created this Mean Girls autocracy remains. As you can see in the final minutes of the movie, a new crop of Plastics arrive just as the old group disbanded.
