I found this article in The Guardian and thought it was really funny:
Meet Lauren and Heidi and Whitney. They're interchangeable blondes who whine their way through MTV's bogus reality show, The Hills. There's a brunette as well; her name is Audrina. Maybe if they had personalities we might be able to tell them apart; their boyfriends seem to have problems distinguishing between them as well, which sometimes leads to friction between the friends.
Though I'm too busy trying to work out which is which to notice their clothes, these girls are frequently hailed as fashion icons. Lauren launched her own clothing line in March this year. Heidi launched hers in April. Lauren, or Whitney, works at Teen Vogue. Heidi (or is it Audrina?) is an event planner. Whitney, or possibly Lauren, works at People's Revolution, which has to be the most ironically hilarious name for an LA-based fashion PR firm ever.
Could these vapid prom queens be any shallower and more annoying? The funny thing is, we're supposed to care about the daily nail-parings of these jumped-up cheerleaders, pom-pom girls, jock-chicks, Queen Bees, pampered princesses. Even if you've never been anywhere near LA, you know exactly who they are. They're the characters you always hated when they were in teen movies. And now they're everywhere — not just in teen flicks but in rom-coms and horror movies, on TV shows, popping out of magazines and newspapers, plastered all over the internet. We can't get away from them. The cheerleaders are running amok.
Once upon a time, the prom queen was a despised figure of fun, or a malicious teenage despot whose mission in life was to torment geeky classmates who didn't fit the mould. In days gone by, she would invariably get her comeuppance: blown to smithereens (Carrie) or poisoned (Heathers) or stabbed (Halloween) or flattened by a truck (Mean Girls). Or, at the very least, she would be humiliated. But not any more. Now the cheerleader is indestructible — literally so in the TV show Heroes. The jock-chicks have trampled in their Jimmy Choos all over their more simpatico sisters to usurp the role of heroine and survivor. The Final Girl in today's slasher movies is no longer Jamie Lee Curtis, girl next door, one of us; in the remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre it's babelicious, belly-button-baring Jessica Biel. And yes, I know Paris Hilton gets a pole through the head in House Of Wax — but it's another braindead blondie, Elisha Cuthbert, who gets to emerge unscathed for the finale.
Ironically, I think we can lay some of the blame for the prom-queen plague at the feet of smart shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which didn't just turn the stereotype upside-down by making her an honorary geek and social outcast, but also introduced the then-novel idea that hot blondes who looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar weren't necessarily snotty bitches to be hissed at but heroines, worthy of our respect.
The heroine of Gossip Girl, the horribly addictive TV show that comes across like Cruel Intentions Lite, is precisely the sort of rich, popular girl who would once have been the she-villain, but now we're supposed to care about her tribulations on the Upper East Side or in the Hamptons. Even rich bitch Ashley Tisdale in the High School Musical films is a softie whose comeuppances inconvenience her for about, ooh, five seconds before she's singing and dancing again. Seriously, where's Carrie when you need her?
Maybe it's a side-effect of the Bill Gates syndrome — the geek inheriting the earth, and getting his choice of chick along with it. Young male nerds who, pre-internet, would have been social and romantic non-starters, now find themselves forming the dominant demographic, dictating movie content and taste for the rest of us. And naturally their preference is not for their geeky female counterparts, but for the sort of hot totty that, in real life, wouldn't give them the time of day. Look at the Judd Apatow school of young male-orientated comedy, in which creepy, charmless no-hopers like Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill get it on with cheerleader types. As if.
But if the male nerds end up with the prom queens, who's left for the geeky girls to get off with? Don't worry, it's not a problem; there are no geeky girls any more. Snippy Ellen Page in Juno and chubby Nikki Blonsky in Hairspray are exceptions that prove the rule. It's as though there's been a cosmetic pogrom; the prom queen has so utterly ousted her homelier rivals that, nowadays, Hollywood's idea of a girl-nerd is Katherine Heigl in 27 Dresses, or Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, or Jessica Alba in Good Luck Chuck. But just look at them: if these actresses are nerds, then I'm Angelina Jolie. And I can assure you I'm not.
On those occasions when we do get ourselves a glimpse of genuine fem-geek, her physical "flaws" are exaggerated to such an absurd degree it's like fancy dress (see Ugly Betty). And there's an unspoken movie rule that geeky girls have to undergo a prom-queen makeover before the final credits. In upcoming movie The House Bunny, blonde bombshell Anna Faris (whom we'll give a free pass because, unlike some of the actresses I've mentioned, she is very talented) teaches a sorority house of female brainiacs how to dress like hookers so they can attract boys. Which is apparently preferable to being clever.
The makeover is endemic in real life (or what passes for real life in places like LA) as well. There must be countless young actresses who, like Lindsay Lohan, have reinvented themselves as cheerleaders, replacing their quirks with long blonde hair extensions and plasticated body parts. At least Lohan has, or had, a modicum of talent; unlike, say, Jessica Simpson, an actress so dumb she can't even play a dumb blonde convincingly — though she is lucky enough to have a film-producer dad.
But we can't just blame cheerleader-itis on the wish-fulfilment fantasies of young male nerds. Young women are increasingly colluding in their own Barbiefication — falling over themselves to have surgery to remake themselves in the image of idols who seem to resemble live-action incarnations of Disney's cartoon princesses. It's a modern epidemic that seems to have picked up speed after the remodelling of the Disney Channel in 2002 and the rise of mini-heroines like Lizzie Maguire, Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus, but it's not confined to Disney.
Films, TV shows and magazines aimed at teenagers are constantly peddling the message of "being yourself" — so long as it's a self that cleaves to the three Fs of fashion, fame and fuckability. But just watch the frantic back-pedalling if the sexuality gets too explicit, as with Annie Leibovitz's photographs of Miley Cyrus for Vanity Fair.
And the clone-like aspect is emphasised by the popularity of sister acts: Hilary and Haylie Duff or the freaky-looking Olsen Twins (whose hollow-eyed goth pose can't conceal their privileged princess personae).
Otherwise, it's as though an entire generation of young womanhood has adopted Reese Witherspoon's dumb prom queen send-up in Legally Blonde as a role model. Witherspoon was also responsible for one of the more sinister cheerleader portraits of the 1990s; in the sociopolitical satire Election, she played the ultimate schoolgirl overachiever, the terrifying Tracy Flick, last glimpsed climbing into a limo with an important Republican. It's all too easy to imagine Tracy being captain of the school basketball team, head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant. For what is Sarah Palin if not a brown-haired Tracy Flick, 25 years on? Yes, the prom queens are taking over the asylum, and if America doesn't look sharp it really is going to find itself saddled with the cheerleader from hell.
Anne Billson
The girls from The Hills
Katherine Heigl
