Step Aside Regina George, This Teen Drama Gives Us a New Queen Bee

The Big Picture

• Selah and the Spades
  redefines the queen bee archetype, showcasing Black teenagers with complexity and depth.
• Director Tayarisha Poe draws inspiration from her own boarding school experience to create a tense, atmospheric film.
• Selah’s unique character as asexual adds depth to her relationships and power dynamics in the elite high school setting.

In almost every movie or show that revolves around the high school experience, there is a character that embodies the “mean girl” archetype, the most famous of which is arguably Regina George of the appropriately named 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls and the 2024 movie musical of the same name. The mean girl, or queen bee archetype, can be a one-note villain whose sole purpose is to torment the protagonist. This over-the-top character rules the school with an iron fist, and sometimes, is also a complicated young woman who purposely uses an icy exterior to mask deep-seated insecurities. The 1989 cult classic Heathers paved the way for later films that explore queen bees and their place in the high school social hierarchy, like Mean Girls, Jawbreaker, and Jennifer’s Body, and popular teen shows like Gossip Girl and Riverdale. The trope continues to evolve along with the genre, and one of the most unique recent iterations of the mean girl is Selah Summers (Lovie Simone) of the 2020 film Selah and the Spades, which offers a fresh take on the high school drama.

What Is ‘Selah and the Spades’ About?

Written and directed by Tayarisha Poe in her feature directorial debut, Selah and the Spades follows Selah, a senior in her final semester at an elite Pennsylvania boarding school. On top of being a straight-A student and captain of the Spirit Squad, Selah also happens to be Haldwell Boarding School’s drug queenpin. The Haldwell student body is divided into five factions – the Sea, the Skins, the Bobbies, the Prefects, and the Spades – each specializing in different, illicit on-campus activities. The titular Spades, led by Selah and her right-hand man Maxxie (Jharell Jerome), are the drug-dealing faction, providing students with everything from ecstasy to Adderall. Unlike the rest of the factions, the Spades have not yet selected a candidate to take over once Selah graduates. Enter Paloma (Madame Web‘s Celeste O’Connor), a sophomore transfer student and photographer for the school newspaper whom Selah takes under her wing, grooming her to take over as leader of the Spades. But when Paloma starts taking more initiative, Selah feels threatened by her bold and confident decision-making and takes drastic measures in her attempts to sabotage her.

Instead of leaning into comedy and typical teenage infighting, Selah and the Spades takes a more serious approach to the underbelly of elite American boarding schools. Selah is not only beautiful, popular, and ambitious like most queen bees, but a cold and calculating, teenage anti-hero akin to Michael Corleone of The Godfather or Walter White of Breaking Bad, both of which Poe cites as inspiration for the film’s premise (via Salon). The muted color palette, music by Aska Matsumiya, and strategic use of handheld camera shots romanticize the atmosphere and life at this elite boarding school while maintaining an undercurrent of tension and a mounting sense of danger. Poe drew from her own experience attending boarding school growing up, telling Salon in 2020, “What started me writing that story was just this desire to see somebody who looked like me and felt like me, but who got to live a life however they wanted, no matter the consequences, and they just kept doing that.”

‘Selah and the Spades’ Gives Us a New Kind of Queen Bee

What we’ve come to identify as the queen bee or mean girl in mainstream film and television are typically wealthy, beautiful, confident, and often cruel and manipulative. They also happen to be overwhelmingly white, though we’ve seen this archetype begin to evolve in recent years with characters like Euphoria’s Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) and Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander) of the Gossip Girl reboot. Black characters in teen movies have historically been pigeonholed into the role of the best friend, like Dionne Davenport (Stacey Dash) in Clueless and Chastity (Gabrielle Union) in 10 Things I Hate About You. Selah and the Spades offers a refreshing deviation from this trope, centering the film on a group of Black teenagers with queen bee Selah Summers front and center.

A story like the one at the center of Selah and the Spades, in which an outsider is recruited into an ingroup and later supersedes the group’s leader, would typically be told from the outsider’s perspective, but Poe instead focuses on Selah and her fall from grace from her own point of view. We watch Selah size up Paloma, recognizing and nurturing her potential, believing Paloma to be a worthy successor after she graduates. Though there is a sense that she sees Paloma as a friend, it’s never totally clear what Selah’s intentions are, and whether her friendship with Paloma is genuine, contrived, or a little bit of both. Selah is charming and flattering when she wants to be, blunt and commanding when she needs to be and wields her power in a Machiavellian fashion.

Selah is also a unique queen bee in her attitude towards sex and relationships, both of which she is utterly disinterested in. Unlike Regina George or Heather Chandler, Selah isn’t vying for any man’s attention and doesn’t care for casual sex or the idea of “waiting for the right person.” This makes her relationship with Paloma, who seems infatuated with her, or at the very least always trying to impress her, all the more interesting. Selah recognizes Paloma’s desire for her approval and uses this to her advantage to get Paloma to do her bidding, despite never returning those feelings.

In a 2020 interview with HuffPost, Poe confirmed that Selah’s character is asexual, but didn’t quite have the words to express it in her confession to Paloma, which is something that has never really been explored in a queen bee character before. It informs the way she views her power and those who threaten it. When Maxxie starts dating a member of the Spirit Squad, Selah lashes out at him not out of jealousy, but because his new relationship has caused him to neglect his responsibilities in the Spades. She has no resentment towards his girlfriend and even goes out of her way to praise her after cheer practice, but refuses to spare Maxxie the brutal consequences of his actions despite their years of friendship, simply because he threatened their business and her reputation.

What’s Happening With the ‘Selah and the Spades’ TV Show?

The relationship and shifting power dynamic between Paloma and Selah is a fascinating one, but the exploration of Selah as a character is the driving force of Selah and the Spades. Played brilliantly by Lovie Simone, Selah brings a new layer of complexity to a familiar archetype, and Selah and the Spades demands she be taken seriously, as teenage girls so often are not. It was announced in 2019 that Amazon Studios had plans to develop Selah and the Spades into a series based on the film, with Poe set to write, direct, and produce. Unfortunately, nothing has come of this series quite yet, but it would be an ideal venue to expand upon the rich world we’re given just a glimpse of in Selah and the Spades. Nevertheless, the riveting teen drama is worth a watch for those looking for a new queen bee.

Selah and the Spades is available to stream on Prime Video in the US.

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