‘Mean Girls’ is, like ‘Shaun of the Dead’, also subject to a 20^th anniversary cinema release, far more dated than many other films from the early 2000s. Since the film came out in 2004, social media has rendered so many of the methods resorted to by the mean girls, or Queen Bees, at a Chicago high school somewhat superfluous. These days, if one wanted to spread scurrilous gossip about a fellow high school student it would not take long to disseminate it via WhatsApp or Instagram as we saw in one chilling scene in ‘AfrAId’.

But, back in 2004 we see a vengeful Rachel McAdams, the meanest of the mean girls, realizing she has been outsmarted and upstaged, resorting to photocopying pages from her Yearbook – a physical scrapbook, no less, containing barbed, viperish thoughts about her classmates, and spreading them around the school corridors, lockers and under classroom doors.

This is a slice-of-life comedy about the cliques and power games that are easily identifiable across the generations, such that this wasn’t a difficult film to update and reimagine, in a social media age, earlier in 2024. What is most effective about ‘Mean Girls’ is that it doesn’t resort to giving us caricatures of high school life – everyone is given sufficient backstory for their particular foibles and quirks to be accentuated and critiqued, and no one is here the unqualified villain of the piece. Lindsay Lohan is the new girl at the school whose parents are zoologists and had home tutored her up until this point when travelling around Africa.

This allows for a certain element of analogy to take place, as the high school is seen through the lens of an animal kingdom, with Lohan’s Cady Heron someone who starts by not fitting in to her new environment, but ends up evolving quickly to know how to outwit her peers, even knowing how to feign ignorance and to deliberately underperform in her class tests in order to strategically win influence with those whom she needs to win favour in order to succeed in seizing their place in the social hierarchy. She goes undercover, courtesy of two class outsiders – one is a goth, the other is purportedly ‘too gay to function’ – who befriend her on her first day, to try and subvert from within the balance of power.

Akin to ‘Donnie Brasco’, we are no longer sure whether Lohan has really been consumed by the adulation and power that comes with being the ‘queen of mean’ or whether she is play acting all along, and her friends are also unsure as to her motives, lending ‘Mean Girls’ a rich intertextuality.