An Adolescent's Story: Youth-Made Media and the Study of Youth

Allison Wright Munro

Thirteen.  Dir. Catherine Hardwicke.  Perf. Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed, and Holly Hunter.  Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2003.

Catherine Hardwicke's 2003 film Thirteen highlights one of the truths of adolescence that is the most difficult for adults to accept: you don't always know what kids are doing, even in their own bedrooms. And, Thirteen suggests, what they are doing may be more horrifying than anything your adult brain ever imagined. The opening scene of the film exemplifies just how troubling this prospect is, as Tracy (played by Evan Rachel Wood) and Evie (played by Nikki Reed) engage in a game of "hit me" -- the girls take turns inhaling the contents of an aerosol can of compressed air and then hitting each other in the face -- in the privacy of Tracy's bedroom. "Hit me!" "I can't feel anything!"  "Do it harder!" they shout amidst laughter and smiles, only their increasingly bloody faces betraying the seriousness of the game. Never underestimate the creativity of teenagers, this scene reminds us.

Co-written by director Hardwicke and teen actress Nikki Reed, Thirteen is the story of what happens to seventh grader Tracy -- unpopular, smart, straight-A student -- when she befriends the more popular and dangerous Evie. Evie is the sexy, popular girl all the boys, including Tracy's older brother and his friends, think is the hottest girl in school, never mind that she's only thirteen. In order to keep up with Evie, Tracy quickly ruins her perfect grade point average by skipping school and staying out past curfew.  Together Evie and Tracy chain smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, take acid, smoke pot, snort prescription drugs, have sex, shoplift, and pierce their bodies. Tracy alone becomes anorexic and engages in an all too common practice called cutting, in which people (usually females) induce physical pain by cutting themselves with sharp objects as a way of escaping emotional pain.

Tracy's pain, we are to understand from the quick, jumpy scenes and nauseatingly fast soundtrack, stems from her dysfunctional home life. Her absent father appears sporadically, talks about his new job, and apologizes for not spending even his court-ordered time with Tracy and her brother; her mother (played by Holly Hunter), a reformed substance abuser, supports her two children by supplementing their child support payments with a hair salon she runs out of her kitchen. To complicate matters even further, Tracy's mother treats their home like a halfway house for her down-on-their-luck friends and Tracy is especially upset with her mother for taking back her ex-cocaine addict boyfriend who Tracy witnessed overdosing before his latest stint in rehab.  Added to this is Tracy's entrance into adolescence, that indescribably confusing stage between childhood and adulthood when one's hormones and emotions often overwhelm one's intellect and common sense. Located precisely at the juncture between girlhood and womanhood, Thirteen offers an answer, albeit a chilling one, to the question of how girls negotiate adolescence.

Thirteen is semi-autobiographical; Reed was thirteen years old when she collaborated with Hardwicke on the screenplay. Reed was fourteen when the movie was shot and won the Movieline Young Hollywood "One to Watch" Award for her portrayal of Evie. Though she plays Evie in the film, Reed's own experiences specifically inform the character of Tracy. In interviews about the film, Reed repeatedly emphasizes the disconnect female youth experience when they are thirteen but look and are treated as though they are eighteen. Such emphasis implicates the broader American issue of society's expectations of women and teenage girls' responses to them. In a celebrity culture that celebrates a particular type of youth -- thin, attractive, twentysomething -- how do female adolescents respond to pressures to conform to such standards?  According to Reed and Thirteen, they become anorexic, pierce multiple body parts, smoke, drink, do drugs, and shoplift to acquire the various accoutrements of the lifestyle they want to emulate but ultimately cannot afford. Thirteen, then, not only offers an answer to the question of how girls navigate adolescence but also offers an answer to the question of how girls negotiate the shifting parameters and unrealistic expectations of womanhood.

Thirteen is not a perfect film. As others have suggested, it lacks character development, isn't always compelling, and employs racist stereotypes throughout.(1) It may, in fact, be a(nother) variation on the by now old fashioned theme of juvenile delinquency as well.(2)  However, one cannot overestimate the importance of Reed as its co-writer. Even allowing for the numerous decisions made by Hardwicke that undoubtedly shaped the film, its story is thirteen year old Nikki Reed's own, largely in her own words. Co-written by Reed, Tracy and Evie (played by Reed herself) are thirteen year olds' representations of thirteen year olds. Yes, the film was influenced by adults and it may or may not accurately reflect the lives of all twenty-first-century American youth. But it is at least partially an example of youth-made media and this is the crux of its significance to me. As a researcher of children and youth who strives to include the voices of actual children and youth in her scholarship, Thirteen, with its screenplay co-written by its teenage actress, represents a new and exciting way to study the lives of youth.

Notes:

(1) See, for example, Robert Goethals, rev. of Thirteen, dir. Catherine Hardwicke, Cineaste 29.1 (Winter 2003): 22-24; Jeffrey M. Hornstein, "Reflections on Race in Thirteen," Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education 2.2 (Fall 2003): 1-3.

(2) Daniel Eagan, rev. of Thirteen, Film Journal International 106.9 (Sept. 2003): 42.