Seeing Mean Girls With Your Litle Sister

My little sister is an angel. During my senior year of college, she bought me a carnation from an eighth-grade Valentine's Day fund-raiser at her grade school. Every bit the hotheaded near-graduate, I insisted on staying at college to attend to the gravely serious dalliances of my routine. When I finally made the hour trip home for Easter in April, I found a pink carnation on my nightstand, floating in a juice cup of water, its stem trimmed down to an inch and a half. Every weekend, I rebuffed her offer to come home, and every weekend, she brought the near-wilting flower to our mother for another lease on life.

This precious, selfless wonder was my armrest partner to the left for Mean Girls. She's had the poster up in her room for almost a month, clearly on the merits of its star, Lindsay Lohan — she's had the soundtrack to Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen in her CD player for some time, and our family is known to enjoy a viewing of the Freaky Friday. One of those renaissance 11-year-olds, she's accomplished on the piano, computer literate, looks every bit the supermodel-in-waiting and, according to her latest IOWA test scores, performs at an 11th grade level. Fitting, then, that the family spent Friday night watching Lohan face — and succumb to — the prurient and petrifying challenge of being a high school junior. Is high school really like this?

Her siblings may not have the best capacity for relating to the antics we absorbed in Mean Girls. We boys attended an all-male Jesuit academy in urban Milwaukee, and the older sister went to Divine Savior Holy Angels, its all-female sister school. My opinion is that my parents raised us perfectly; with the youngest of us approaching her teen years, we're all making a hell of a good pack of mature adults, apart from a penchant for Super Monkey Ball.

Which is what makes this a nightmare vision of what my sister will have to confront in three years. The number of times characters defaulted to "slut" to dress down a comrade was beyond belief. In high school as Tina Fey has penned it, everyone is everywhere and at all times talking about sex in unholy terms. The mathlete ringleader doubles as a rap impresario who prescribes exactly how you'll take to his loving in an all-school Christmas concert. The follow-up act isn't much better; Lohan and her patrician partners in the elitist Plastics clique come on stage and spill out of their dresses in rhythm to "Jingle Bell Rock."

Our multiplex crowd, predominantly female 13-year-olds, was atwitter about Fey's genius, even if they couldn't stay up late enough for "Weekend Update." The arc of Lohan's character was maddening; she falls from her father's daughter to fashion icon like lightning, and to what effect? It finally enables her to joust with the Plastics. By prostituting her persona, Lohan's Cady Heron is empowered, and hundreds of newly christened teenagers sat there, sucking it in and arming themselves for freshman year. Cady's initial friends, the outcasts that charged her to infiltrate and sabotage these queens of the hill, are forced out of her favor with great objection, but who cares? Lohan loses her role modeling license in Mean Girls, but she got to wear plenty of sporty threads, right?

Mean Girls is a mishmash of bad behaviors of all ages, ranging from infantile name-calling to twentysomething sexual politicking. I was able to breathe easier when Fey herself stepped in after a brawl and led the junior girls on a testimony-and-trust session that assuaged most tensions, but lo, Cady and her rival, Regina George (Rachel McAdams), didn't get it, and it took getting hit by a bus to end the spat.

At all times peeking at my little sister, I saw her sit somewhere in the middle, confused by terminology and landscape but still enthralled by the basic tenets of humor and fashion. The family, all in attendance, followed up with tentative half-conversations over the next day or two to gauge exactly what was taken as scripture. Lohan was painted the ambitious, industrious musician (well, rocker) by her previous two films. Here, no — she's failing math to get the cute boy's attention; she's reneging on family time to host a house party; she's sabotaging a dieting Regina with super-carb energy bars.

This is how we've seen West Coast students rampage, but the Herons just planted roots in Evanston, Ill., square in the heart of Midwestern values and manners. Granted, suburban Chicago high school girls haven't been the pride of the flatland as of late, but it still makes the behaviors all the more real, especially when Cady flakes on her parents' trip to Madison to see Ladysmith Black Mombazo.

Even now, I still can't discern what cues my sister could properly pick up from Cady or her pack. Her reconciliation comes with a girl in a medical halo and a student body that elects her Spring Fling queen because they figured she pushed Regina into the bus, all in a lawsuit-free world where the gym teacher carries on affairs with dueling Asian students. The movie baits girls like my sister, who still concerns herself with recitals and spelling tests, while landing humor that would make Stifler smile. Admiring girls a half-decade younger than Lohan stared at the screen and tried to relate to high schoolers like Lacey Chabert, who already ran the high school gamut on "Party of Five," and McAdams, who plays Regina and is 27. Mean Girls is marketed at a tricky demographic — fathers' daughters who still have Winnie the Pooh pajamas and nap with a blankie. It bends my heart to think that this odd, lurid conjecture could be the world that my blankie-toter will encounter in three years. You can ask her; for now, it's hard enough being tallest in her class, and her biggest challenge is keeping that carnation alive. Unfortunately, according to Mean Girls, the grace period will soon be over.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)