Thirteen

Yep, adolescence is a potentially dangerous time.

Every day is an eternity, during which an inexperienced girl can suffer a million deaths.

Prepping for Permanent Obscurity, I studied this movie endlessly. For a while it practically ran as a loop at my house, during which time I—the perv—tried to absorb all I could from it.

Is it an earnest “real-life” coming-of-age drama or just a teen exploitation flick?


Maybe both?

Like “Kids,” the Larry Clark masterpiece, “Thirteen” tried to avoid the exploitation stigma by having a “real” teenager as one of its screenwriters (in this case, Nikki Reed).

I saw this movie when it opened on the big screen, and the first thing I noticed (aside from Evan Rachel Wood’s unselfconscious, natural talent as an actress) was that it borrowed a bit from Sophia Coppola’s movie (actually a short) called “Lick The Star,” a film that was also about peer pressure, vulnerability, and the fickleness of female friendship.


(No, not “Go Fish”—“Lick The Star”)

“Thirteen” piles up all the dangers associated with girl coming-of-age flicks: drugs, trendy fashions, sex, the sudden awareness of being seen as a sex object—coupled with a contradictory anger and resentment over it (hence the “cutting” and anorexia [obsession with body image or the source of this precarious newfound “power”]). It shows the hypersensitivity with parental control, the cruelty of youth, not to mention the sudden dizzying freedom to explore all the dark places of the world at once (love that last shot of a disoriented Evan Rachel Wood on that spinning, playground ride).

This is another do-or-die, “buddy-love” story with two girls pairing up as one.

Every time I see it I’m reminded of how much potential young female fictional characters have. In fact, there was a time in writing Permanent Obscurity when I thought of making the characters younger, like maybe 17. But then I felt uncomfortable casting them in hardcore situations. And, anyway, being 22 these days is almost like being a teenager, right? There’s something about our culture that retards or protracts adolescence. (Maybe a side-effect of all that endless youth-targeted marketing?)

“Thirteen” is also another study of the trials of female friendship, with one of the girls being manipulative, a little bit of a bad seed. And it catalogues all the elements I needed to work with: youth, blind inexperience, drugs, sex—exploitation stuff, essentially.

To prove my point—about the exploitation underpinnings of “Thirteen”—here’s a portion of the movie’s description from the back of the DVD:

“Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) goes to shocking lengths in order to befriend Evie (co-writer Nikki Reed) … Now the two are inseparable—and incorrigible—leaving Tracy’s desperate mom (Holly Hunter) powerless to rescue her from a whirlwind of drugs, sex and crime.”

Crime? The crime of being alive maybe.

Oh wait. No. I forgot about the shoplifting. Another element of fun and rebellious coming-of-age flicks.

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“Richard Perez has the ears of the angels—lend him yours.”
—Barry Gifford, author: WILD AT HEART, PERDITA DURANGO

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“Ready-made for Russ Meyer—
assuming, that is, if Meyer was around and still at his peak.”
—Josh Alan Friedman, author: TALES OF TIMES SQUARE, WHEN SEX WAS DIRTY

Dolores & Serena:



“They were young and immoral!...”

 

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