Movies for brain fog
In addition to the vagus nerve exercises, the other activity that routinely eases my brain fog is watching movies. At home in soft pants, in the theater enjoying my short-lived immunity, they both work. Usually I’d turn to my slate of older-millennial high-school comfort movies—your Mean Girls, your Bring It Ons, your 10 Things I Hate About Yous—but thanks to the marketing power of Y2K nostalgia, we’re in an onslaught of new content that’s in conversation with the teen movies I imprinted on. Some of those conversations are more interesting than others, but all have offered my struggling brain a welcome dose of low-energy novelty. Here are capsule reviews of three of them.
Bottoms
This is the only movie I’ve seen that comes close to representing my actual experience of high school: As piece of endurance performance art. You’re trapped in a closed world with an inviolate, intergenerational value system that makes absolutely no sense outside of, or even within, its own context, but no one will admit the obvious truth that none of it matters—especially not the adults. And so the only reasonable survival strategy is to lean into the absurdity and meaninglessness until the arbitrary day arrives when you no longer have to play along. One must imagine Sisyphus as Homecoming Queen, as it were. And I actually was Homecoming Queen of my big public high school, which is a story for another newsletter but suffice it to say I know what I’m talking about. Jeff!!
Mean Girls (2024)
I didn’t go to the theater alone on a Wednesday afternoon to see the movie musical remake of Mean Girls because I expected to like it. I went because I was curious to see how the ur-millennial high school text would be updated and translated for a Gen Z setting. Gay panic, racial segregation, fatphobia, and slut shaming are the unapologetic engines of the original Mean Girls, and you simply can’t pretend they hold the same power over today’s teens (or at least credible cinematic representations of them). I wanted to know what the Gen Z equivalent would be of, say, Regina George’s Planned Parenthood phone message. Twenty years later, what all-powerful, implicitly understood, and yet obviously deranged (see again: Bottoms) value systems would she reinforce and manipulate to grind her enemies to social dust?
As it turns out: None. The 2024 version of Regina doesn’t grind anyone to dust. She never even does anything particularly mean to another character, not with the specific, targeted cruelty the original Regina deploys. This Regina is the star of the school because she exudes charisma and a free-floating sexuality, not because she meticulously destroys anyone who poses a hint of a threat to her dominance. No one has ever been personally victimized by this Regina George.
That makes Cady the only person to do anything mean in 2024’s Mean Girls (most notably the Kälteen bars—of all the things to keep!). Which could be an interesting narrative choice if the movie showed a modicum of interest in it—or in anything else. The overtly queer performances delivered by Renée Rapp as Regina and Auli’i Cravalho as Janis, in particular, open up a compelling new interpretation of these characters and the story they’re in, but the movie refuses to pick up or even acknowledge what they’re putting down. To the creative team who gave their excellent cast this lazy, timid, shitty-first-draft material, I say: Boo, you whores.
Do Revenge
Now here’s a movie that makes an effort to understand and engage with Gen Z social hierarchy. Weaponized allyship, marginalization as social currency but only ever a path to precarious social power, queer crushes so intense they compress themselves into hydrogen bombs of love and loathing—Mean Girls (2024) wishes!
Do Revenge is also interested in Gen Z’s relationship to millennial culture, offering multiple homages to Y2K teen movies that blessedly ignite all the fizzy pleasures of the originals. For example: 10 Things’ iconic paintball scene, the presence of Sarah Michelle Gellar as untouchable über-bitch, and an actor named Talia Ryder in the Winona Ryder part, who looks exactly like her and yet, in a shocking twist on the nepo baby discourse, is apparently not related to her in any way. (Admittedly Winona Ryder is more of Gen X touchstone, but just as Gen Z grew up on Mean Girls, we grew up on Heathers.) I’ll be comfort-watching this one again in the future, which I believe is the greatest honor an older millennial could bestow on it.