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For decades, Jessica Jackson had a secret: Her high-school social life was an inspiration for the hit film “Mean Girls.”For decades, Jessica Jackson had a secret: Her high-school social life was an inspiration for the hit film “Mean Girls.”
Today, Jackson is 38, an HR director at a software company in Rockville. She called me recently while she was leaving work, en route to pick up her kids from school. I asked if she recognized her quotes when she first sawback when it came out in 2004. “Of course I did,” she replied. “Tons of them—‘We wear pink,’ ‘You can’t sit with us’—I was tickled. I wasn’t mad.”
But here’s the thing: When I started making calls, the rumor fell apart. Yes, at one point that particular school engaged the services of an expert to sort out its girls—but so did dozens of others all over the DC area. The expert was, who wrote a book about the cruelty of adolescent girls, which Tina Fey went on to adapt.
Mean Girls made Zeina Davis feel “seen.” But she worries that viewers “still want to be Regina George.” Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou. For research, she interviewed Davis extensively, and some of her stories made it in. The three-way-calling attack was one of them, and another was when Davis started at a new school in tenth grade and ate her lunch in a restroom stall. “I didn’t want to look like I didn’t have a friend group,” she explained, “so I would kind of walk in circles and say hi to people from my classes, then I would, like, eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.
Top left to right: Rosalind Wiseman and Jessica Jackson. Bottom left to right: Zeina Davis and Tanzi Crayton. At a 2004 viewing in Silver Spring, Jackson and others saw bits of their lives onscreen. Photograph by Paramount/courtesy of Everett Collection.story, she never returned to GAB, so she wasn’t there in the spring of 2004 when Paramount rented the AFI theater in Silver Spring for an advance screening ofWiseman, the guest of honor, brought friends, family, and an assortment of GAB alums, Crayton among them. “I just remember being so starstruck,” Crayton said.
Days before, on the phone, I’d asked Jackson directly if she was a Queen Bee. “So, let’s do some layers here,” was her bristling reply. “When you’re confident and bold, are you a bitch? Are you Miranda Priestly? Do I only get to be either Taylor Swift from ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ or Regina George?” For what it’s worth, Jackson has a “wild affinity” for Regina, for her fashion and brazen self-regard.
But as I puzzled, two of Jackson’s comments rattled around my brain. “Teenage friendships are a lot like teenage love,” she’d said. “Her laundry ends up in your clothes, you’re in each other’s closets and cars and dinner tables and bedrooms.” That thought seemed related to this one, an offhand remark about the actor Sydney Sweeney: “I just want to be her best friend really hard. We would braid each other’s hair and I would tell her all my secrets. I want us to smell the same.
“This is what I love,” she told me. “ ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink’ is not a fuck-you to those who don’t wear pink, but it’s power, almost—it’s like,at a wine-drenched Christmas party for a moms group in suburban Maryland, Jessica Jackson got vulnerable. It was deep in the night, and the women were discussing their difficulties—toddlers, divorces—when someone quoted a line fromIt shook loose a secret.
Jessica Jackson enjoys the film—despite her teen words being voiced by the Plastics. Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou. At the time, Wiseman was 22 or 23—not much older than her pupils. She listened as they talked about their lives, and it struck her how often they discussed other girls: how important and complicated their friendships were, and how painful and elaborate their cruelties. “I felt it was important to go to the foundations of why girls were doing the things they were doing in their relationships with each other,” she told me.
In her lowest moment, Davis fell victim to a particularly cruel ruse: A friend called one of their classmates and asked her opinion of Davis, who was secretly lurking on the phone. The result was devastating. “ ‘Oh, I just want to punch her in the face and she’s so fat and she annoys me so badly,’ ” Davis recalled hearing. Recounting it, she paused briefly to sob. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m 38 years old and it still hurts.
In the early 2000s, Talbot learned of a cutting-edge psychological theory: that adolescent girls are not, in fact, nicer than boys. Instead of socking each other on the playground, they bully through “”—exclusionary cliques, caustic gossip, and arcane social cruelties. “I’d had some personal experience with the ingenuity of girls when they wanted to be dominant in a social setting,” Talbot said, so the theory resonated.
The issue was talking to a reporter. The last time she’d done so—besides a previous phone call with me—was for thestory, which is still a source of shame. But on the phone, she’d thought I seemed “normal,” so she invited me over to set the record straight. She’s never been a mean girl, she insisted—though she’s certainly an “undercover celebrity.
“Everybody quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.”but she first watched it in full at the AFI screening. “My experience of that was this kind of like—horror is a strong word, but it was like seeing a picture of yourself that you’re not really sure you want everybody to see.” She found the characters “so real” and “scary” and their meanness true to life.
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