Rebooting a Classic

There’s a stickiness to “Mean Girls” quotes. For a certain generation, long passages can be plucked from the mind and performed, cadence-perfect, on demand. As a child, I watched the movie over and over on DVD, and the words wormed their way into my impressionable mind.

My experience is by no means unique. “It became part of my vernacular,” Samantha Jayne told The Times of her teenage reaction to the film, which was released in 2004. “Every single sound bite.”

Jayne is a co-director of a new version of “Mean Girls,” which came out on Friday. It’s an adaptation of an adaptation, refashioning songs from the 2018 Broadway musical based on the movie. (It should also be mentioned that the original film was inspired by a nonfiction book.)

Like its predecessor, the new “Mean Girls” follows Cady Heron (Angourie Rice), a teenager who has arrived at an American high school after being home-schooled by her zoologist parents in Kenya. She is introduced to the terrors of a teenage social hierarchy and drawn into the orbit of a group of popular girls, led by Regina George (Reneé Rapp).

Along with adding musical numbers, the filmmakers updated the script to better reflect our times. Some dated and less-sensitive jokes have been retooled. And there’s greater diversity: Karen Smith, played in the original by Amanda Seyfried, is now Karen Shetty, played by the Indian American actress Avantika.

In the nearly 20 years since its release, “Mean Girls” has remained unshakably relevant. “It has this little net that catches girls as they pass through preteen and high school age,” Tina Fey, who wrote both the original film and the reboot, said in 2014.

It’s clear why the film spoke to people. It took all the things I loved about teen movies — interpersonal drama, clothes, love interests, a morally satisfying ending that lets us know we’re all spring fling queens — and elevated them, putting an intelligent frame around subjects other films might treat as frivolities. Fey’s script is sharply funny and often crude, both silly and sinister. Watching it feels like opening a pink crushed velvet box and finding a knife inside.

So, why rehash a story that people still consider relevant and special? If done poorly, the endeavor could be tantamount to desecration. Even done well, it is cause for a fair bit of existential angst — as the trailer told viewers: “This isn’t your mother’s ‘Mean Girls.’”

The response appears to be: Why not? “I have other things that I’d like to do,” Fey told The Times. “But I have so much gratitude that this movie seemed to stick with people.”

And it seems that fans have little to worry about. In her review, the Times critic Manohla Dargis writes that despite the tweaks, Fey and the directors stay close to the original template — perhaps even too close.

“Few stories, it turns out, are as comically and horrifyingly reliable as those set in high school,” Manohla writes. “Few villains are as dependably hissable as a desirable young woman with an ostensibly cold heart.”

It may not be your mother’s “Mean Girls,” but it’s pretty close.

Read Manohla’s full review here.

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TALK | FROM THE TIMES MAGAZINE

I spoke with the author and radical climate activist Andreas Malm about his upcoming book “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.”

Explain the term “overshoot.”

The simplest definition of “overshoot” is that you shoot past the limits that you have set for global warming. But the term has come to mean something more in climate science and policy discourse, which is that you can go over and then go back down. So you shoot past 1.5 or 2, but then you return to 1.5 or 2, primarily by means of carbon-dioxide removal.

And your argument is that overshoot provides cover for business as usual?

Yes. What’s happening now is that you see Exxon Mobil or Occidental or ADNOC — these companies are at the forefront of expanding DAC [direct air capture] capacity. So we can continue to have fossil fuels; we’re just going to take down the CO2 that we emit by DAC. It isn’t a reality.

Which of your arguments are you most unsure of?

I cannot claim to have a good explanation for what is essentially a mystery, namely that humanity is allowing the climate catastrophe to spiral on. One of my intellectual journeys in recent years has been psychoanalysis. Once you start looking into the psychic dimensions of a problem like the climate crisis, you have to open yourself to difficulty in understanding what’s happening.

Is it possible for you to summarize your psychoanalytic understanding of the climate crisis?

On the far right, you see this aggressive defense of fossil fuels that verges on a desire for destruction, which is part of Freud’s latent theory of the two categories of drives: eros and thanatos. Another category in the psychic dimension is denial. Denial is as central to the development of the climate crisis as the greenhouse effect.

Read more of the interview here.

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Times best sellers: Ashley Elston’s thriller “First Lie Wins” is new on the hardcover fiction best-seller list.

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THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For

• Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, the longest-serving monarch in Europe, will formally complete her abdication today.

• Tomorrow is Martin Luther King’s Birthday.

• The Republican presidential Iowa caucuses are tomorrow.

• The Emmy Awards are tomorrow. The ceremony is normally held in the fall, but was postponed because of Hollywood strikes.

• The global elite will gather in Davos, Switzerland, tomorrow for the start of the World Economic Forum.

• A trial to determine defamation damages against Trump in relation to the writer E. Jean Carroll is set to begin on Tuesday.

• The Sundance Film Festival begins on Thursday.

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