We Need More Teen Girl Buddy Comedies
Written by Shelby Edison
There are only so many times that you can re-watch Mean Girls before getting real envious that teen boys get so many movies made especially for them. I love Mean Girls, but it’s no teen girl buddy comedy. Mean Girls plays its role in pop culture, satirizing the social circles that teen girls are forced to run in. But at its root, the film is satire. Though satire is based in reality, it is chock-full of exaggerations which means that I don’t fully see myself represented in Mean Girls. Meanwhile, teen boys get movies like Superbad and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Teen boys get movies with main characters that feel real and friendships with chemistry that’s off the charts. Teen boys get to pursue silly quests and laugh as their plans go astray. Teen boys get to tell raunchy jokes and break free from stereotypes. But in the movies, teen girls seem to have to fulfill an archetype, be that nerd or party girl or boy-crazy, and follow more contained adventures. Quite frankly, teen girls deserve better. Teen girls deserve their own buddy comedies.
Luckily, we live in 2021 where some amazing women filmmakers see that teen girls want buddy comedies. I’d like to specifically thank Olivia Wilde and Natalie Morales for their contributions to the genre. Booksmart and Plan B are both the teen girl adventures that any cinematic universe deserves. In Booksmart, Molly and Amy try to cram four years’ worth of high school parties into one evening as they realize that they spent their whole high school career studying instead of having fun. In Plan B, Sunny and Lupe embark on a road trip to the nearest Planned Parenthood to get Sunny the morning after pill. In both films, disaster strikes multiple times, friendships are tested, and solid, helpful life advice is dropped onto the audience, and we get to see some revolutionary representation of nerdy and/or queer teen girls.
Speaking of that representation, Booksmart and Plan B are truly the full package. I’m so sick of seeing nerdy teen girls portrayed as the naïve, boring, bullied members of their graduating classes. The teen girl nerds that I’ve met in high school have been fashionistas, artists, boy-crazy, and hilarious. Teen girl nerds have it all. Sure, some of them are a bit naïve and keep to themselves, but that small fraction doesn’t represent all nerdy teen girls. The lead characters in Booksmart are complete nerds, even getting fake IDs to sneak into the college library, but they also wave hello to (and get crushes on) the popular kids at school, talk about sex and drugs, and have aspirations outside of high school. In Plan B, Sunny, the smartest girl in her grade, throws a house party and loses her virginity all in one night. Yes, Sunny from Plan B and Molly and Amy from Booksmart are geeky, but they are also human like any high schooler is.
High school movies have never been applauded for winning in queer representation. More specifically, high school movies and lesbian/Sapphic representation is severely lacking. Diving even deeper, finding a high school movie with good queer representation that doesn’t revolve around homophobia is as impossible as, well, finding a high school movie with queer representation that doesn’t revolve around homophobia. Amy from Booksmart spends the runtime out and proud, crushing on a cute skater girl, to the chagrin of absolutely nobody. It’s so refreshing. Amy is a realistic teen lesbian. She goes through the same romantic struggles as any straight teen girl does, just about girls instead of guys. Plan B also contains some delightful queer representation. Talking about it comes at the expense of spoilers and spoiling this film feels like heresy, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that it’s some good representation.
These teen girl buddy comedies also applaud female friendships. I’m jealous of the friendships in these movies because these girls are truly ride or die for each other. There is no backstabbing or gossiping that tears the friendships apart. Molly & Amy and Lupe & Sunny feel written by women and based on personal experience. Seeing healthy female friendships onscreen can be so helpful for teen girls in the real world. Watching good friends on screen shows them that they don’t have to follow the popular girls; you should hang out with the people that make you feel good about yourself. I wish I had a movie that told me that when I entered high school.
And if I had these movies entering high school, I’d have some solid life advice in my back pocket. One of Booksmart’s main morals is that even the popular high schoolers are smart. In my favorite scene, Molly has a complete crisis when she realizes that the kids who spent all high school having fun are going to the same Top 20 colleges that she (a girl who spent all of high school studying) is. After watching Booksmart, I knew that I needed to make serious changes to my mindset about college admissions. By senior year, I had prepared myself to learn that our valedictorian had more of a social life than I did. The college blogs and YouTube vloggers don’t teach you this life advice, but Booksmart does. Plan B shines a light on the difficulties involved in accessing reproductive healthcare. Living in a big city with a Planned Parenthood close by, I never realized how getting the morning after pill is a luxury for young folks where the nearest clinic is a road trip away. Plan B is about more than just the morning after pill though. One of the big lessons it imparts on its audience is to trust and communicate with the people close to you because they will help you when you need it most. Besides being incredibly sweet, this lesson is lifesaving to an audience of teen girls. These girls are entering a world of sex, alcohol, drugs, relationships, and self-discovery, and the media they consume could be telling them that communicating their worries to their friends and family is healthy. Now that’s the power of film!
Personally, I have never felt more seen than while watching Booksmart. Amy, a nerdy gay girl with aspirations of changing the world, mirrors me so much. Seeing her experience joy and love and loss brought tears to my eyes. The other weekend, I bought a blue sequin dress because it looked similar to a dress that Amy wears. I find myself daily wondering what would Amy do in any given situation. This fictional character is my role model! That’s beautiful, but I should have more teenage girls in film to look up to. The nerds in movies I looked up to, like Mia in The Princess Diaries, always went through transformation to become “more beautiful” before the movie ended. The main teen lesbian I resonated with in a movie before Booksmart was Megan from But I’m a Cheerleader, a movie set in a conversion camp. Do we see the issue here?
Booksmart and Plan B are the teen buddy comedies that girls deserve. But there should be more of them. Filmmakers, write nerdy girls! Write queer girls! Write high quality friendships! Give teen girls advice that can carry them through adolescence! Give the teen girls what teen boys have gotten to enjoy for years: movies that truly resonate with them.
Photo Sources:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489887/mediaindex
https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/a32161/mean-girls-facts/