Leaders of the pack -- and they bite

It has been a long held theory of mine that to create a truly terrifying army, one need only recruit seventh-grade girls. They are ruthlessness incarnate. My theory was given some legitimacy a couple of years back, when Rosalind Wiseman wrote “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence.” The Crown book quickly became a bestseller, as did others focusing on teen behavior, such as “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls” by Rachel Simmons. Suddenly the secret was out: When it came to teenage girls, the sugar and spice years were long over.

Wiseman is co-founder of a nonprofit organization called the Empower Program, which teaches violence prevention in schools and communities, focusing on issues such as bullying, hate speech and harassment. While counseling, she came across a lot of behavior in middle-school girls that became fodder for the book. She gave names to the roles the girls played -- such as the “queen bee (mean girl leader),” the “torn bystander” and the “target” -- and recounted anecdotes about the ways they treated each other. Though she says she believes the codified conduct of cliques has its purpose in socializing girls, it can also have devastating effects.

Just about any girl who’s been through the middle school experience can attest to that. She either has her own mean girl story to tell or one that was perpetrated against her. In most cases, both. There’s a strict hierarchy, and it is ignored at one’s own social peril.

It’s also pretty ripe material for satire. “Saturday Night Live” head writer Tina Fey read about Wiseman’s book in the New York Times Magazine, and her interest was piqued. Upon reading the book, she found the stories about the girls very funny and saw movie potential. The result is “Mean Girls,” out Friday from Paramount. The comedy stars Lindsay Lohan as an innocent 16-year-old who’s been home-schooled by her parents in Africa and who steps into high school completely unprepared for the savagery within. (Fey made the characters a little older than middle-school age to increase their range of activities, such as driving.) She falls in with the popular girls, learning their ways a little too well. Clever comparisons with life on the veld run through the film. The lions come off nicer. And though the action in the movie is highly exaggerated for the sake of the humor, it strikes some uncomfortably resonant notes.

Recalling her own youth, Fey considers herself a former “banker,” the type of mean girl who stored gossip for use in future transactions. When asked if the movie was in part an expiation of past mean teen gossiping sins, she replies, “It was a little bit, because after reading Rosalind’s book I sort of looked back at my behavior and went, ‘Oh, right, that was an all-consuming waste of time.’ Or as my friend Michael called it, ‘chewing the air with your cancerous talk.’ ” In the movie, Fey plays the role of Ms. Norbert, a math teacher who sees right through the mean girls’ actions.

The movie veers from sophisticated satire to silliness to gross-out gags and back, but under all the jokes, the moral is close to the heart of Wiseman’s work.

Late in the film, when the girls’ cruelty to one another has overtaken the school, Fey’s character confronts a gym full of girls to force them to examine their behavior. The scene pretty much exactly replicates an exercise Wiseman conducts during her program.

Fey feigns a groan at the mention of a moral. “We did the whole press junket and all the adults were saying, ‘Oh, the message is so good,’ and we were like, ‘Please don’t print that; no one will come!’ ” At the same time, Fey has seen the movie with audiences made up of younger girls and noticed how much they took the story to heart. “As [director] Mark Waters says, they watch it like a reality show. I said they sort of watch it like ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ ” Fey says.

What does Fey want girls to take away from the movie?

“I don’t think the movie can fix the problem at all,” Fey says. “But I think if it sort of addresses it, and people can laugh about it, then the behavior is clarified, and if it happens again in real life, you’ll be able to -- hopefully -- laugh at it and see it for what it is.”

Maybe that can help take some of the sting out of teen life.

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More girls behaving badly

“Mean Girls” is probably the most straightforward look at the scary social dynamics of schoolgirls, but it is by no means the first. A sampling of other films featuring girls’ inhumanity to girls:

“Carrie” (1976): director, Brian De Palma; writer, Lawrence D. Cohen; from the book by Stephen King. The classic horror movie featuring enough mean girls to choke a pig, and some helpful boys to carry out their torments on poor benighted Carrie White (a perfect Sissy Spacek). After a shower of humiliations, who can blame Carrie for her incendiary response? “Plug it up! Plug it up!”

“Puberty Blues” (Australia, 1981): director, Bruce Beresford; writer, Margaret Kelly. A little-seen gem this side of the planet, proving that meanness isn’t just a stateside issue. High school girls in this seaside town treat each other even worse than the boys treat them -- and that was bad. Even the popular girls have to abide by such strange laws of the jungle as no eating or using the facilities when in the presence of boys. The incredibly satisfying ending is worth the trauma that precedes it.

“Heathers” (1989): director, Michael Lehman; writer, Daniel Waters. This mean-girl extravaganza stars Winona Ryder as Veronica, a girl who falls in with the popular girls, but has enough sense to realize popularity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As she points out to her cool rebel boyfriend (Christian Slater), “My life’s not perfect. I don’t really like my friends.... It’s just like they’re people I work with, and our job is being popular....” (Writer Waters is the brother of Mark Waters, director of “Mean Girls.”)

“Dazed and Confused” (1993): writer/director, Richard Linklater. High school, circa 1976. Not the main thrust of the ensemble piece, but Parker Posey was a scene stealer as a senior leading a series of a hazing rituals on freshman girls. Some snarling Darla lines: “Lick me, all of you.” And “What are you looking at? Wipe that face off your head, [expletive].”

“Welcome to the Dollhouse” (1995): writer/director, Todd Solondz. This is a horror movie in its own way as cringe-inducing as “Carrie.” Star Heather Matarazzo plays Dawn Wiener, called Wiener Dog in school among many other indignities. In one of the film’s most heart-wrenching scenes, Dawn brutally takes out her anger on a younger victim at the first possible opportunity.

“Jawbreaker” (1999): writer/

director, Darren Stein. The most popular girls in school (Rose McGowan, Rachel Gayheart and Julie Benz) accidentally kill the prom queen, and the school geek knows about it. To try to buy her silence, they transform the geek into a beauty.

-- Lisa Rosen