‘Clueless’ v. ‘Mean Girls’: Without Tai Frasier There Would Be No Cady Heron

Twenty years ago, writer/director Amy Heckerling put a Beverly Hills spin on a Jane Austen classic with Clueless. We’re honoring this pop culture powerhouse with Clueless Week on Decider. Click here to follow our coverage.

We’re all vaguely familiar with the surface similarities between Clueless and Mean Girls: an outsider is invited into the folds of the popular crowd and given an all-encompassing makeover in order to rise to the top of suburban high school hierarchy. Not without a few bumps and moral dilemmas along the way, both adaptations — of Jane Austen’s Emma and Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabees, respectively — serve as contemporary feminist film staples in discovering that having it all doesn’t necessarily equal happily ever after. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless and Mark Waters’s Mean Girls satirically and brilliantly visualize the initiation of the meek new girl, her hesitant then welcome reputation rebirth, followed by her necessary self-destruction, and finally, her eventual return to normalcy in the films’ third acts.

Though Clueless is told through the perspective of Queen Bee Cher (Alicia Silverstone) while new kid on the block Cady (Lindsay Lohan) narrates Mean Girls and the saga of Regina George (Rachel McAdams), the latter film simply couldn’t exist without the former by way of the late Brittany Murphy‘s perennial Tai Frasier. Twenty years after her first day at Bronson Alcott High School, Tai’s fish-out-of-water Beverly Hills journey is marked by more than hair dye or fitting in, per se, and is carried on in the form of Cady, who managed to manipulate the most manipulative of the popular crowd and eventually fits in all her own — but not without casualties, and certainly not without remorse.

Though Tai preceded Cady in pop culture lineage, one could argue that Murphy’s beloved ugly duckling was far more self-confident and self-aware of what she was getting herself into compared to her Millennial dopplegänger. Tai’s acceptance of Cher’s Beverly Hills bubble is widely mistaken for burnout naïveté — cluelessness even — and her often forgotten confrontation with our protagonist near the end of the film is overshadowed by Cher’s epic driver’s exam fail. In hopes Cher will tell her what she wants to hear, Tai opens up about her schoolgirl crush on Josh (Paul Rudd), but is taken aback by Cher’s jealousy, masked in a condescending defense:

“Tai, do you really think you’d be good with Josh? I mean, he’s like a school nerd?”

“What, am I some sort of a mentally challenged airhead? What, I’m not good enough for Josh or something?”

“I just don’t think you mesh well together.”

“You don’t think we mesh well? Why am I even listening to you to begin with? You’re a virgin who can’t drive.”

While the exchange comes off as immature or uncharacteristically bitchy on Tai’s part — because, duh, we love Cher! — her confronting the Queen Bee who, in the words of Regina George, “invented her or something” is a subtly marvelous feat that evened the playing field between the two as young women attempting to hold their own without entirely losing face. In this moment, Tai’s snark pushes for an exchange of respect before they can continue their friendship — a major character development that didn’t occur between Cady and Regina until the concluding seconds of Mean Girls when the two offer up a civil head nod, all things considered.

Unlike Tai, Cady’s character evolution comes later and at a much heftier cost. Before she is able to “suck the poison out” of her life, Cady’s eye-for-an-eye approach to dethroning her own evil evil Queen Bee resulted in a near-fatal (albeit comically legendary) bus accident as well as investigations into damaging Burn Book accusations. Instead of confronting Regina head-on, Cady and her partner-in-crime, Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan), decide sabotage was the way to reap revenge, turning the playing field into a battleground and leaving little-to-no hope for mutual respect. Only at the Spring Fling does Cady finally put her ego aside and rise above peer pressure to be a Bee or a Wannabee — eventually becoming the best version of herself and in many ways, more like Tai: confident and at ease. Though, to be fair, Mean Girls wouldn’t necessarily rank among high school cult classics without all of the unforgettable sabotage against Regina George, despite killer performances and an endlessly quotable adapted script from Fey.

Being that Cher is such an endearing protagonist and Regina a bonafide villain, it’s clear why Tai may be universally overlooked as the most developed character of Hecklerling’s film, one with just enough sass and thick skin to put Cher in her place when it necessary. Ten years later, Cady inherited the ability to rise above, sure, but her return to normalcy and ability to choose her own friend group can be attributed to her inner Tai.

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Photos: Everett Collection