Too often, adolescence is widely misrepresented in coming-of-age films and teen-centered media. Granted, a lot of the canon consists of unrealistically hopeful and somewhat cartoonish films that are meant to be silly, but with each decade comes an addition to this genre that adds a layer of realism to our idea of youth. Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen is this film for the 2000s. Co-written by Hardwicke and a 13-year-old Nikki Reed, it is an undoubtedly raw and harshly unglamorous depiction of two young girls on the precipice of their teenage years – and it forcefully commands our attention 20 years on.
With a semi-autobiographical script based on Reed’s upbringing as a teen girl in Los Angeles, the graphic content in Thirteen is grounded in reality, and yet also carries the distorted perception of adulthood as told by a child. Reed wrote her experience as a middle schooler (she was 14 during production) and transferred it to the film’s protagonist, Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), who is in the 7th grade when she finds herself in a codependent friendship with Evie, (Reed) a popular girl at their middle school. Just like Reed’s real-life childhood, Tracy lives with her mother, Melanie (Holly Hunter), and harbors a deep anger and depression that one could write off as a result of hormones. But because Thirteen captures the harrowing reality of girlhood, these feelings are not cast aside as mere symptoms of PMS, rather they are investigated with an honest look at the circumstances that cause them. The film tracks Tracy’s descent into deviance and heavily focuses on her transformation from childhood to “adulthood” without a trace of mercy.
Thirteen’s distorted nature is due in part to its script which captures the misplacement of two girls desperately trying to assert themselves into mature situations, but also because of its jagged cinematography and aesthetics. A large part of its iconography today is the use of saturated colors to represent Tracy’s fall from grace, and the messy handheld camerawork that gives it the chaos to match intense portrayals of violence and drug use. Hardwicke has said that this was a choice made to maintain the film’s budget, but regardless, it remains as visually stimulating as the script is completely horrifying. Most of the set design and costumes were compiled of items belonging to the cast and crew, which amplified the authenticity of this very real cautionary tale. Aesthetically, it has also become synonymous with the Von Dutch street style of the aughts, which further emphasizes Evie and Tracy’s abandonment of their childhood altogether.
Hardwicke and Reed’s co-written work was received positively at the time of its release and was praised for its unfiltered depiction of addiction and depression. It became part of the greater mental health discourse of the decade as it quite graphically depicted self-harm and opened the conversation to acknowledge that girlhood can be gritty, violent and self-destructive. Thirteen was a harsh contradiction to the bubblegum pop narratives being pushed in popular releases from that year. For context, 2003 saw the rise of Disney stars like Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan, and there was a general atmosphere of girlish whimsy in the air that made the cultural whiplash that was this rotten coming-of-age nightmare much more gruesome. Today, it instills the same permission to view teenage girlhood as varied and complex. Hardwicke, Reed and Wood reunited in 2018 for the 15th anniversary of the film and discussed how it not only impacted their careers, but also the generation of women who grew up watching it and heeding its many warnings.
What remains a staple of female storytelling still leaves you feeling like you’ve just stared into a funhouse mirror for too long. It’s cold and sharp-edged and feels deeply reminiscent of the bad kind of nostalgia you feel when mourning the loss of one’s childhood. The content is graphic and shocking, yet there is something so pure about the origin of its screenplay being that of a real 13-year-old. And because of that it is forever a definitive film about teenage girls, for teenage girls and by a teenage girl.
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