It is the high school trope that any girl who is popular has a car, and, obviously, the most au courant model, to boot, depending on what year the movie is released. One supposes this cliche became the most noticeable with 1995’s Clueless. Cher Horowitz and her white Jeep traipsing through L.A. like environmental destruction on wheels. L.A., of course, gets more of a pass than other cities because the people of the present had no say in its car-centric infrastructure. Yet it seems Cher wouldn’t have bothered taking public transport even if it was more accessible, for her rich girl sensibilities and the popularity that goes with them simply wouldn’t permit such plebeian behavior. Loser behavior, if you will. And yet, as time wears on, it becomes all the more manifest that the carless losers in high school (or even just the losers who couldn’t afford to drive a Hummer when it was peak chic in the 00s) were the ones vaguely sparing the planet with their lack of good fortune in matters of being born to a “successful” (if success is measured solely in wealth, which, as we know, it is) Mommy and Daddy.
As the 90s continued, the status symbol that was one’s car became only all the more important to a high school student, and cinema reflected that. With turning sixteen and being able to engage in one of the few modicums of freedom a teenager can have, the all-importance of a car was made even more so by the fact that it was indicative of one’s social standing. Take, for example, Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook) in She’s All That. Unlike popular girl Taylor Vaughan (Jodi Lynn O’Keefe), she’s driven to school by her father in a rundown truck advertising his pool business. Oh, the shame. Not only of the fact that it’s a truck, but that it parades just how “working class” her father is (despite the fact that they live in a cush L.A. house like every other character in the movie). Taylor, instead, drives a convertible, just like the vast majority of popular girl archetypes. Something about the model simply adds to their free-spirited, not a care in the world vibe. Not to mention that it connotes having parents who are both affluent and “cool.” The more present and/or non-enabling a parent is in a teenager’s life, the more of a loser she is. And, of course, if the girl doesn’t have a car at all, she’s hopelessly damned to her state of loserdom for not partaking gleefully in the dispersion of gas that comes as much out of a popular girl’s mouth as it goes into her tank.
Even a one-off line from Thomas Haden Church in Easy A directed at a stoner iterates that only “winners” have cars as he tells one of the burnout kids that smoking pot “can lead to mismatched tires on your vehicle, which is nonexistent.” When Olive (Emma Stone), who becomes the ultimate ostracized trollop early on in the movie, tries to restore her original reputation after working to fortify the false illusion of being a slut, she asks one of the guys (namely, the fat kid) to tell people it wasn’t true. He rebuffs, “I paid you.” She scoffs, “You gave me a gift card to AutoZone. I don’t even have a car.” He shrugs, “I thought it would be aspirational.” This connotation that not having a car (particularly in Olive’s California milieu) is synonymous with being a loser despite how overtly it’s saving the planet to not have one has been far too long perpetuated by the proverbial popular high school girl.
What’s more, the total lack of cars in a movie indicates the absolute extreme of poverty, as is the case in 2001’s Save the Last Dance. Orbiting around an uppity white girl ballerina named Sara Johnson (Julia Stiles), who has just moved to Chicago’s South Side in the aftermath of her mother’s death, we see that not only does she not have a car, but neither do most of the black students at the school she’s been transferred to (of course, Malakai [Fredro Starr], the gang banger of the narrative, manages to secure a vehicle for a drive-by). In another Julia Stiles movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, her unpleasantness is supposed to be complemented by the non-chic make and model she drives around town: a Dodge Dart GT. While this still means that even unpopular girls aid and abet the emission of fossil fuels, they’re more likely to convert to an “ugly” car that Gavin Newsom would approve of, thereby making them inherently more sympathetic characters in their role as the underdog (just as environmental preservation remains an underdog concept).
Speaking of suburban white girls, Molly Ringwald as Samantha Baker is the invisible woman at her school. She can only dream of getting a car for her sixteenth birthday (a black Trans Am, in her fantasy). Caroline (Haviland Morris), on the other hand, is featured prominently in a Rolls Royce (even if it’s not her own, and even if we’re supposed to gloss over the fact that Anthony Michael Hall’s character banged her while she was passed out). Though we never see her in her own car, the point is that she’s the type of girl who can finagle a ride in any luxury vehicle, whereas Samantha has to settle for sitting alone in the dark in the rough-hewn one that the shop class is in the process of building. In another John Hughes classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Jeanie Bueller (Jennifer Grey), is the one who gets the parental gift of a car, but it’s one that suits her misanthropic personality, making her brother the “clear deserver” of a “bitchin’” ride instead of a computer.
As the 00s dawned and high school movies became released at a breakneck pace, Regina George would be a major addition to the oeuvre, and Rachel McAdams was already auditioning for the part by playing a similarly vapid and conniving popular girl named Jessica in 2002’s The Hot Chick. In which, yes, she had a car that was wielded primarily for shopping and ensuring that everyone else was aware of how irrelevant they were for not having a convertible. But it is as Regina that she finds her symbolic niche–the prime representation of the popular girl who seeks to destroy undercuttingly. Not just toward the “loser girl” nemesis that might somehow try to upstage her, but by using her clout to reiterate to “inferior” students that having an impressive car is instrumental to being seen as desirable. Even if that desirability comes with making the Earth even less so in the long run. With “two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus” being key descriptions of “who” Regina “is,” the emphasis on materialism as it pertains to decimating the Earth through capitalistic practices is most manifest as she rolls up in that fossil fuel-emitting car and screams at Cady (Lohan), “Get in loser, we’re going shopping.” In fact, there has never been a clearer picture of just how much of a hideous washout popular girls really are (despite being positioned as exactly the opposite) in large part thanks to what they drive. So yes, there’s plenty of good reason why Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) should assert, “Evil takes a human form in Regina George.”
Just a few months after Mean Girls came A Cinderella Story in the summer of 2004, starring Lindsay Lohan’s so-called rival, Hilary Duff. The notion of one’s position among the social strata correlating directly to profligate waste is instantly apparent in how Samantha’s (Duff) stepmother, Fiona (Jennifer Coolidge), regards the requisite drought in California as Sam suggests they turn off the sprinklers. Fiona balks, “People who use extra water have extra class.” Sam then rushes off to the driveway to get in her car, a beat-up, faded Ford Mustang that she only loves because it used to be her father’s, as an overhead shot of their San Fernando Valley neighborhood showcases a sea of brown lawns, and theirs as the only green one. Sam picks up her friend, Carter (Dan Byrd), after working an early shift at the diner (again, she’s Cinderella) that also once belonged to her dad, but has now been overtaken by Fiona. Seeing Sam in her ill-maintained car, Carter tries to appeal to his father with, “Do you see what I have to go to school in?” He turns to Sam, “No offense,” then continues to his father as he proudly polishes his own Mercedes, “Honestly, don’t you feel sorry for me?”
The car shame continues in the parking lot as the garden variety rich bitch/popular girl, Shelby Cummings (Julie Gonzalo), pulls up in her white convertible and takes the spot Sam was about to pull into, shouting, “You snooze you lose.” Her next parking spot option is quickly nabbed by Austin Ames (Chad Michael Murray), in his own gas-guzzling Mercedes Hummer. As the plot wears on and we reach the inevitable happily ever after, it is the final scene of Sam driving her freshly painted car that shows how she’s transcended into the “cool girl” worthy enough of being with Austin.
Even in the post-Mean Girls climate, the expected cliche regarding cars and popularity persisted in a movie like 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen. Following the suburban Portland life of Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), the film opens with her telling her teacher, Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson, in something of the Mr. Griffith [Thomas Haden Church] role in Easy A), that she’s going to kill herself. When he’s unmoved by her “confession,” she begins her story from the beginning with the voiceover, “There are two types of people in this world: the people who radiate confidence and naturally excel at life, and the people who hope all those people die in a big explosion.” That the first shot commences with Nadine being dropped off at school is a running theme concerning her cipher status, reaching an apex about halfway through the movie when she has to be picked up by her mother, Mona (Kyra Sedgwick), at a party where her brother, Darian (Blake Jenner), and best friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), recently an item, are having a great time while she struggles to understand what her place as a piece in the high school puzzle is supposed to be.
That her brother, popular and conventionally attractive, is the one who drove there in the car inherited from their now dead father (because a girl with a dead or absent father is another important high school movie trope) speaks to how his place in high school and the world is assured due to the ease and second nature comfortableness that comes with fucking up the planet in order to be an accepted member of society. When Nadine calls the only other person she can think of to hang out with, Erwin (Hayden Szeto), she invites him to a theme park, thanking him for driving her by saying, “I don’t have a license ‘cause I’m like, ‘Why not just let people drive you?’ People make such a big deal about being able to do things for themselves…” When he doesn’t quite follow her reasoning, she admits, “That was a joke. I failed the test.”
The symbolism of a high school loser not even being able to secure their license, let alone finagle a decent car, even further drives home the point (no pun intended). Her helplessness in terms of social status is made all the more salient when she loses her secured ride from Krista after Nadine refuses to speak to her for dating Darian. This leads to a moment of anger between her and her brother that prompts her to flee as her mother shouts, “Where are you going?” “I’m taking a therapeutic walk,” she screams as she walks out the door with no car to drive away in. Soon after, Mona is saddled with taking Nadine to school, remarking, “It really bothers me she’s not giving you rides anymore, I’m gonna have to talk to her about that.”
This all seems inevitable foreshadowing for Nadine stealing her mom’s car, irate after Mona tells her that her father would be so disappointed in the way she’s turning out. As the events of the drama escalate, Nadine feels out of control enough to message her crush, Nick (Alexander Calvert), confessing, among other things, that she wants to give him head. Although she’s mortified beyond belief, of course Nick bites at the prospect of no frills sex, while Nadine herself mistakes his interest in picking her up and “hanging out” as a genuine desire to get to know her. When she rebuffs his sexual advances, she tries to joke, “We could sit here silently in your Mercury Marquis all night.” He snaps, “Are you serious? Now you’re making fun of my car?” She tries to backpedal with, “I wasn’t making fun of it, I was just being specific, I wasn’t saying it was shitty. I don’t even have a car.”
This, in short, sums up why she’s not popular, and yet, she’s the most decent and sensitive person of all the high school girl tropes, up there in the leagues of Juno MacGuff and Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson.
