If Burn Books, Then Murder: A Study of Two Teen Classics

If you're anything like me and you grew up in the early 00s, you would have seen all the the millennium had to offer; the butterfly clips, the discmans accompanied by a fat wallet of CDs and an ever-shrinking set of headphones, the frosted tips and incredibly questionable applications of tartan as far as the eye could see. Even moreso, quotes from a movie all about American highschool politics would have made it into your pop culture encyclopedia at one point or another.

"Four for you Glen Coco! You go Glen Coco!"

"Stop trying to make 'Fetch' happen, it's not going to happen!"

"I'm not like a regular mom, I'm a cool mom!"

"Get in loser, we're going shopping!"

If you can see the scenes attached to these quotes in your mind's eye, then odds are you have seen Mean Girls once or twice in your time.

I absolutely love it; I would have been about 11 when it came out and as a dorky 11 year old, it spoke to me in an unlikely way. I felt seen, like I wasn't the only one who was intimidated by the tall, blonde, beautiful girls in my school. I saw myself in both Cady Heron and Janis Ian; someone who was a little offbeat and felt maligned by just how right things went for these girls who seemed to have it all.

While I'm now in the latter end of my 20s and have since left school behind, I see it now through a nostalgic lens; it was a part of my childhood, just as all of those awkward feelings and comparisons of myself to those girls were. Not only that, but I think Ms Norbury's (played by the fabulous Tina Fey, who also penned this script) words of wisdom have endured in the 17 years since appearing on screens.

"You have all got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores."

Considering this sentiment is now reflected in spades amongst young women realising that we need to uplift one another (and hence, not get petty and mean when someone who seems to have it all crosses our path) for the collective good of women everywhere, I'm glad that this nostalgia isn't marred by being too stuck in its time. Sure there's moments that can make a person squint, but for a film made in 2003, it's actually quite progressive.

However, I maintain that another teen movie has gone largely overlooked in the public consciousness. Another teen movie that walked so that Mean Girls could run. No, I'm not talking about Heathers, even though that would be a worthy comparison to what I am about to discuss with you now (Fun fact: this movie was inspired by Heathers). The movie I'm talking about was made only a few years prior to Mean Girls arriving onto our screens.

I am talking about a little movie called Jawbreaker.

Fair warning, there are spoilers stuffed throughout this piece so if you want the spoiler-free version of what I'm about to say, it's this: if you love Mean Girls, go see Jawbreaker. You won't regret it.

For those still curious about what I have to say about these too glorious movies and the well crafted characters within, I will preface this with a content warning for mentions of kidnapping, murder, rape and sexual assault, as they are a part of Jawbreaker's plot. Having said that, are you comfy? Good, let's begin.

Written and directed by Darren Stein and released in 1999, we start with a commentary on a group of popular girls as they walk through an empty hallway of their school, speaking about them as if they were more than human; god-like figures, sitting up the back of English class.  For fans of Mean Girls, this would be the movie's equivalent of the "Regina George punched me in the face....it was awesome." From the get-go, you get the sense that there's not just one but two queen bees within this one group- Courtney Shayne, the iron-fisted terror in 8 inch heels and Liz Purr, the teen equivalent to Princess Diana. You also get the first glimpse of Fern Mayo, the school dork who is having such a hard time juggling her books that she drops them all over the floor. While the others continue to strut down the hall, stepping over the scattered pieces of paper strewn across it, the only one who bothers to stop and help is Liz, which brings us to the beginning of our story.

It seems that Liz truly has it all; a fancy house, good looks, intellect and public adoration due to her kind, sweet demeanour. The world is truly at her feet...or is it?

She is rudely awakened by three masked assailants in what appears to be a kidnapping; a jawbreaker is shoved in her mouth, her wrists are tied and she is carried kicking and screaming in her underwear to the boot of a car. Once the lid closes, it becomes apparent that her assailants are in fact her three hall-walking friends from before: Courtney, her best friend Julie and Marcie. This is a messed-up hazing to celebrate her birthday, where they plan to get her breakfast and humiliate her further. The girls excitedly scream "She is gonna DIE!"

If only they had a crystal ball.

They arrive to their destination, popping the boot with a camera at the ready to capture their friend's surprised face. What they don't bank on is finding her pupils dilated with the eponymous jawbreaker lodged in her throat, bereft of life in the space between her house and the diner. What began as a prank has now ended in the death of one of their best friends....and all before the morning bell.

Cue an excellent intro set to Veruca Salt's 'Volcano Girls'.

"You're the shadow. We're the sun."

- Courtney Shayne, Jawbreaker.

While Mean Girls doesn't include the accidental murder of a friend, I can't help but think that these two films are birds of a feather. They feature a group of girls within school that are almost idolised by their peers that they're spoken about as if they're celebrities, but at their core are awful to the people closest to them. Courtney in particular would meet her match in Regina George; both are incredibly self absorbed, cruel and rule over their cliques with absolute tyranny. While Regina wields a Burn Book as her weapon of control, Courtney resorts to far more manipulative methods; at first she uses a jawbreaker to take out her biggest competition in Liz, then she dangles the promise of adoration and social status to manipulate the mousey Fern into silence, once the latter discovers Liz's fate.

The way in which these girls abuse power and manipulate those around them is similar with a few small but important differences as well. There seems to be a modicum of friendship between Regina, Gretchen and Karen that then extends to Cady through inviting her to shopping trips and makeover sessions. With Courtney, Julie, Marcie and later Fern, it's very clear that Courtney sees her friends more like subordinates from the get-go, even going so far as to refer to herself as God and to change Fern's name. More on that later.

When you take murder out of the equation, these are two young girls who have figured out at an early age how to assert dominance on a level that borders on sociopathy and narcissism. They'd make great CEOs...or serial killers.

"I know I may seem like a bitch, but that's only because I'm acting like a bitch."

- Cady Heron, Mean Girls

However, where would we be in a tale like this without a hero to follow while they navigate the pitfalls of climbing the social ladder?

In Mean Girls, we have Cady: a sweet-natured, homeschooled girl who has spent most of her formative years in the wilds of Africa and hence, has no frame of reference for the social food chain of an American highschool. Throughout Mean Girls she is befriended by Janis Ian and Damian Leigh, a couple of outcasts who bear a grudge against the Plastics (Regina George, Gretchen Wieners and Karen Smith) for spreading horrible rumours about them that they've never fully recovered from. Cady then draws the attention of the Plastics, leading to a recruitment into a revenge scheme that involves slowly destabilising their stranglehold on the school. Seeing as these are girls who can make cut-out boobs in shirts the hottest new trend, their work is cut out for them.

We follow Cady's commitment to the scheme when Regina gets wind of Cady's crush on Aaron Samuels, a boy in her maths class and incidentally, Regina's ex boyfriend. This is also where we begin to see the subtlety of Regina's terror; she initially presents herself as a strong, confident girl who has a fierce, if a little controlling loyalty to her friends. However over time, you see that she is more than willing to take her subordinates down a few notches if it means staying atop her throne.

We see Janis, Damian and Cady resorting to giving Regina high-calorie protein bars to gain weight, sowing seeds of dissent amongst Gretchen and Karen and playing dumb in Maths (a subject that Cady is gifted in) to gain the attention of Aaron. All the while, she begins to feel her own rise to being the Queen Bee at the cost to her friendship with Janis and Damian.

Which brings me to Fern in Jawbreaker. Fern is different to Cady in that she has grown up amongst these powerful, beautiful girls since childhood. However, in spite of her namesake, she is more of a shrinking violet when we first meet her- we don't see her with any friends, save for the odd amicable encounter with Liz and Julie. She's largely invisible to her classmates and seems to have adopted a meek, barely-there demeanour as a means of protection; if she is invisible to the preying eyes of Courtney Shayne and Co, maybe she might just get through the day in one piece.

Fern's journey begins where Liz's ends; namely, when she's asked by the school principal to drop off Liz's homework upon being informed of her mysterious 'illness' that's stopped her from showing up to school. She jumps at the chance, presumably to just have an opportunity to bask in the glow of Liz Purr, whom she seems to idolise to the point of rehearsing what she'll say to her outside of her house.  Alas, she is very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. She walks in on the girls placing Liz's body back in her bed and trying to make it look like she was raped and murdered by an unknown perpetrator.  She hears the girls discussing the breadth of the mess they're in, only to have them open the door on her dead body, revealing what they'd done.

As a means of keeping the only witness to their crime silent, Courtney gives Fern an offer that she couldn't refuse; the chance to exist within their orbit. In exchange for the power she has in sinking them all, she receives a makeover and gets restyled as Vylette, a mysterious new student that gets the entire school talking in record time. With her multiple parallels to 80's icon Angelyne (the blonde hair, pink and red colour scheme and stardom that came from absolutely nowhere), she soon eclipses Courtney in terms of not just her popularity, but her demeanour as well. Just as her old Fern looks and name are buried, so is her sweetness.

This is where both Cady and Fern's journeys converge; they begin as oddballs, gain the attention of the school's Queen Bee, get in with the In Crowd and eventually begin to rise even higher than the Queen, leading said Queen to cut them down by any means possible. Again, Regina utilises the Burn Book, painting herself as a victim of Cady rather than a perpetrator and instigating a full on riot in the school. With Courtney however, she has a few more weapons in her repertoire; this time, she reveals that Vylette is none other than a repackaged version of the school dork, Fern Mayo. Thus begins a spectacular fall from grace, in which she is picked up by Julie and Zak and the three decide to balance the scales of power on the school's favourite tyrant.

Does that sound familiar to you?

"We just killed our best friend. Do you realise what this means?"

"That you're a shoo-in for prom queen?"

- Courtney and Marcie, Jawbreaker

The similarities between Mean Girls and Jawbreaker don't end there however. When we look to the dynamics of each respective group, while there is a similar blueprint to both, the characters have undeniable differences. In Mean Girls, you have Gretchen and Karen, both loyal foot soldiers to Regina who would do anything to keep their positions. Gretchen is a spoiled rich girl who, among being partial to introducing foreign slang into common lexicon and namedrop her famous dad, is riddled with insecurity and attempts to tend to Regina's every need....until Regina crosses her one too many times and she ends up letting slip that Regina is casually cheating on Aaron.

Surprisingly enough, Jawbreaker also features a break in rank in the form of Julie, Liz's best friend and unwitting accomplice in her murder. While Gretchen tries her hardest throughout the film to prove her unwavering fealty to Regina, Julie calls Courtney out from the get-go, wracked by the guilt of killing her best friend. She becomes a pariah amongst the girls, leaving ample space for Vylette to fill. In the process, she forms a relationship with Zack Tartak, the school's resident drama darling and begins to spread her wings in such a way that wouldn't be possible under Courtney's rule. In the end, she is instrumental in Courtney's downfall, Fern's subsequent redemption and avenging Liz. Amongst a cast of flawed characters, she is the closest thing to decent in this film.

Both Marcie in Jawbreaker and Karen in Mean Girls serve as comic relief throughout their respective films. While Marcie's characterisation is more akin to Gretchen Wieners in that she serves as Courtney's true-believing, never-thinking sycophant, she is more like Karen in the respect that instead of being an evil mastermind on Courtney's level, she has traded in her ability to know better for belonging to the top of the food chain. While it can be argued that Marcie's antagonism is more outwardly malicious than Gretchen and Karen's combined, there is a fact that remains; even when they're not mean, even when they're also under the heel of their leader, they are complacent in cruelty towards others.

While Jawbreaker is interspersed with scenes of a police investigation into Liz's murder, both films' breaking points and climaxes occur in the same spots. Cady's breaking point comes in the form of a school riot sparked by Regina, presenting the sensitive contents of the Burn Book to not just her teachers, but on printouts thrown throughout stairwells and hallways. In doing this, she sets off a powderkeg by revealing all of the vicious rumours of varying degrees of truth to the students, inciting a riot to truly take down her former friends.

While Courtney takes a far less destructive route, it still has the same sting and employs the same medium as Regina. Printouts of Fern's old yearbook photo are plastered throughout the school, revealing the true identity of 'Vylette' and causing her to become fodder for the various students throughout the halls.

Either way, both Cady and Fern are essentially right back to where they began, only without the benefit of invisibility to shield them. Cady once again has lunch on her own in the girl's bathroom while Fern is left unconscious in the hallway, covered in posters of her former self, lamenting about how she is now nothing in the eyes of her peers.

If the movies ended there, we'd be left with a couple of unfair tales where things don't work out for our heroes, the arseholes win and ultimately the journey we've been on has been fruitless. Seeing as that's not what Hollywood's about, what's a teen movie without a spectacular finale set at the school dance?

"We should totally just stab Caesar!"

- Gretchen Wieners, Mean Girls

This is where Mean Girls and Jawbreaker differ the most, in my opinion; aside from the whole murder aspect, of course. While Cady spends the last chunk of the movie paying her penance for crimes committed at the height of her power, she begins to realise in the middle of the Mathletes state finals that her worth as a person does not depend on her looks or her status within her social circle. Putting others down doesn't make you a better person whatsoever. She proudly declares on the stage of the Spring Fling dance that each person there is special, has their own value and that lifting others up is far better than dragging them down. She makes up with Janis and Damian, reaches a truce with the Plastics and they end up disbanding, forming healthier friendships and starting to treat one another with dignity.

Jawbreaker on the other hand goes a far different route, and rightfully so. While I have dedicated much of this piece describing the similarities between Regina George and Courtney Shayne, I can't explain why Jawbreaker has the ending it does without reflecting on their differences. For all of Regina's faults, arguably the worst thing she does is stand atop the school stairs like a modern day Nero while the riot breaks out. While she is at the centre of the destruction, from spreading the rumours to quite literally spreading them throughout her school, that's all the really does- she's mean and hurtful, but she is an instigator and a bully more than anything.

Courtney Shayne would eat Regina George for breakfast with her best friend in the trunk of her car. Not only is she cruel and controlling towards her close friends, but she also has a body count; she was the one who stuffed the jawbreaker into Liz's mouth and hence, is the one who truly killed her. Not only that, she is the most unbothered by the murder itself, opting for a more pragmatic stance rather than admitting any kind of guilt and washing her hands of responsibility. I'd go so far as to say that she may even revel a little in the fact that her main competition for prom queen is now dead. Throughout the movie, her main arc seems to be covering her tracks as much as possible, from making over Fern into Vylette to intimidating Julie into silence by threatening to reveal her as the true killer if she spoke out against her. Seeing no consequences to her actions, she goes so far as to seek out a strange man to have sex in Liz's bed, framing him for her murder to save her own skin. When Vylette's popularity overshadows Courtney's, she promptly threatens "I made you and I can break you just as easily."

When Vylette seems thoroughly unfazed by Courtney's threats, she comes through on her word in bringing down the whole Vylette persona without so much as a blink. She establishes herself as an irredeemable Social Darwinist throughout and for that, she sees an ending that's befitting her character arc.

After stripping the shreds of Vylette away and revealing Fern, she goes to prom with the full intention of becoming prom queen, completely free of any and all guilt in regards to killing her friend, framing an innocent man and publicly humiliating the only witness into a shadow of her former self. So she gets an ending that's befitting someone as shameless and unredeemable as her. One in which her confession to her crimes is played out over the loudspeaker during her crowning glory by Fern, Julie and Zak. Oh, and a walk of shame peppered with having corsages thrown at her by a furious student body. Her fate is left open, but it's safe to say that someone probably called Detective Cruz, the lead detective, once the yearbook photos were taken.

I know I said at the beginning that I admire Mean Girls for its progressive stance towards relationships between women, however I think that amidst all of the cattiness of Jawbreaker, the idea of sisterhood is still there. It exists between Julie and Fern; Julie consistently reaches out to Fern throughout the course of the film, knowing full well what it's like to live under Courtney's reign of terror. Even when the Vylette persona takes over and she rebuffs Julie, Julie is still there to help pick Fern up from the scraps of posters of her former identity when she's eviscerated in front of the school, reminding her that she is a good person at heart and she understood why Fern took up the chance to rise above her standing.

Not to mention it's always good to see an unrepentant villain get their comeuppance.

"Some of the sweetest candies are sour as death inside."

- Detective Vera Cruz, Jawbreaker

Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that both of these movies are completely unproblematic. While both do give visibility to LGBT people, there are instances where derogatory terms are thrown around with reckless abandon. However, the part that resonates with me is far bigger than the part that hurts me, as an LGBT person. I remember highschool and just how tough it was to navigate if you weren't tall, skinny, blonde and pretty; especially since this was during a time where girls were effectively pitted against one another. While I do like how far we have come in terms of supporting and accepting one another, it is validating to know that I wasn't the only one who felt the squeeze of shitty beauty standards mixed with the awkwardness of growing up, seasoned with the tribalism of pushback against anything or anyone different.

And hey, it triggers that part of the psyche that has since been filled with shitty reality TV drama like Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Real Housewives of Anywhere. Sometimes you just want a jaw-dropping bitchfest and both of these movies deliver by the bucket load.

Nonetheless, it's worth noting that I'm glad that for the most part, Hollywood has since moved past using queer identity as a punchline.

What else is great about these movies? Well, the soundtracks are pretty awesome. While Mean Girls boasts a brilliant soundtrack including the likes of Kelis, Peaches, Blondie and Pink, Jawbreaker is set to the sounds of Imperial Teen, Veruca Salt, Letters to Cleo and Shampoo. Oh, and both feature music by The Donnas, with Jawbreaker actually having the band appear at the prom singing 'Rock n Roll Machine'. Who could resist a soundtrack with great female talent such as these?

If you needed another reason to give Jawbreaker a chance, here it is: it actually passes the Bechdel Test, as does Mean Girls. While both movies are at their core about social hierarchies and frenemy-like relationships between teenage girls, men and the interests thereof take a backseat to their own interests and relationship dynamics. While both Cady and Julie do find love in their respective films, it's always the women who are front and centre of the story. The closest that anyone comes to vying and fighting for the affections of a man is Cady, in which her attraction to Aaron is weaponised by Regina. Conversely, it's also refreshing to see a relationship between Julie and Zak that is not only respectful, but is on equal footing. When they first meet, he rescues her from the indignity of having to catch the bus home (oh the horror!), instead opting to just give her a ride home instead of probing into why her friends aren't there to give her a lift. Julie enthusiastically gives him her number and from then on, he's a pillar of support when her former friends have all but abandoned her for having a conscience.

"This is highschool, Detective Cruz. What is a friend anyway?"

- Fern/Vylette Mayo, Jawbreaker

To conclude, if you have a soft spot for teen movies dealing with the politics of highschool and loved Mean Girls in your childhood as I did, give Jawbreaker a whirl. Considering the excellent casting, music, outfits and story that gives you the macabre with a glossy Pepto-pink finish, this is like seeing the ferocious ancestor to Mean Girls that hits in all the right places. With its pitch black humour and dry wit, all decked out in 90s couture, I can guarantee that Jawbreaker will earn a place amongst your most treasured teen movies.