Fiona's Blog: Is Girl World More "Heathers" or "Mean Girls?"

I re-watched the film Heathers this week for a class I'm taking at my high school on rebels in film. I realized that, while satirical and exaggerated, aspects of Heathers are more truthful than a film like Mean Girls could ever be.Only one person in my class aside from myself had seen Heathers before our teacher showed it to us, but everyone was more than familiar with Mean Girls. Both movies deal with the same basic concepts: the intensity of girls and the classic love-hate girl relationship known as "frenemies."The difference is that Heathers is about ten times more intense, complete with murders, suicide, and an attempt at a school-bombing. Because the story is so exaggerated, the heroine is also much more powerful. Heathers' heroine, Veronica (played by Winona Ryder) confronts her teachers and parents, unintentionally kills people and single-handedly saves the entire student body of her school from being bombed.In Mean Girls, Cady (played by Lindsay Lohan), follows a similar pattern of character development in that she climbs the social ladder, becoming "popular" through befriending the nasty, manipulative beauty queens of her high school, with whom she has frenemy-like relationships. She eventually realizes that she has become too caught up in being "plastic" and decides to act more like her true self, joining the math team, and going back to her old, "nerdier" friends.

However, Cady's decision to end her friendship with the mean girls of her high school does not appear to cost her very much. She is able to continue a relationship with the boy she has a crush on (who, incidentally, is also one of the mean girl's ex-boyfriends), and in the final scene of the movie is portrayed as a sociable, happy girl surrounded by friends on the front lawn of her school.

This scene falls in stark contrast with the final scene of Heathers, during which Veronica walks through the hallways of her school looking dirty and beaten up after a scuffle with her now dead ex-boyfriend, and is shot dirty looks by nearly everyone who passes. Veronica eventually stops in front of a severely overweight social outcast nicknamed "Martha Dumptruck," who she invites over on prom night.Which film is more hard-hitting? Mean Girls is definitely less gruesome and disturbing, but it also seems much more realistic and relatable at first glance. But, is Mean Girls more realistic in every way?

Can an ex-mean girl really return to the student body and be greeted with friends and a hot boyfriend? Or, is it more likely that such a person would be shunned by most of the student body, and return to a friendship with another social outcast?

Heathers only allows us to infer Veronica's social destiny, but one can assume it won't be sitting on the front lawn of her school surrounded by an eclectic mix of geeks and jocks, under the arm of a boyfriend. In this way, does Heathers portray a more realistic outcome for a girl who "risks" her popularity. Is Veronica a stronger heroine because she recognizes this risk and takes it anyway?My classmates' reaction to Heathers ran the gamut from being shocked to being appalled; basically, no one thought the film was the least bit realistic or serious, and almost everyone was disturbed by it. Meanwhile, we all seem to consider Mean Girls the fact book on high school life. Could it be possible that even in films like Heathers and Mean Girls, movies meant to illuminate the close-minded, uniformity of judgmental teenagers, we can't help but feel uncomfortable with a heroine as strong as Veronica?Fiona Lowenstein is a high school junior, weekly guest blogger and Girls Leadership Institute alumna.