Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2023. I’m so happy you’re here.
The first time I watched Thirteen—on the couch at home, a while after its 2003 release, as I’d initially been scared even of the poster—my mom accused me of “taking notes.” She told me she could see the mental gears turning. She wasn’t entirely wrong.
I was intensely curious about the, to me, foreign world the movie depicted. Broke-ass Los Angeles single moms and their quasi-fuck-up kids. Drugs and petty theft, sneaking out at night—things I, a goody two-shoes, had never even attempted. I admired the central teenagers’ (Evan Rachel Wood’s Tracy and Nikki Reed’s Evie) gumption, even if they directed it in unsavory and not even all that fun directions. The act of putting something on film glamorizes it, always has, so yes, this movie made pill-popping and shoplifting and dressing like “jailbait” look appealing. But the dirty houses they partied at and the attention from men who weren’t even rich or good-looking, just older? Not so much. And then there was the cutting. It freaked me out then and still does: I just can’t watch people slice their own flesh open.
As a movie, it’s sort of a patchwork zine of mini-adventures as the girls fall deeper into trouble while Tracy’s loving but immature mom Mel (Holly Hunter) is too caught up in her own bullshit to notice. Evie tries to manipulate her way into the family permanently, while Mel’s addict boyfriend (Jeremy Sisto) sucks up all the caretaking the house has left. It’s undeniably girly—they’re always shopping, doing each other’s hair, screaming about boys—and not too narratively complicated. It checks off tropes like Degrassi episodes and tries too hard to be edgy, with funky angles and a grainy aesthetic and a thumping soundtrack.
But once you’ve bought into the fact that this movie is called “Thirteen,” it works, playing with the tension between the innocence of the characters and the dirtiness of the world around them in ways that feel grounded and honest. It looks at first like a kiddie version of Requiem for a Dream or Trainspotting, but is actually closer to The Basketball Diaries: a coming-of-age story that’s about friendship as much as it is about drugs.
It checks off tropes like Degrassi episodes and tries too hard to be edgy, with funky angles and a grainy aesthetic and a thumping soundtrack. But once you’ve bought into the fact that this movie is called “Thirteen,” it works.
Thirteen heralded the arrival of production designer (Tombstone, Vanilla Sky) Catherine Hardwicke as a director, who would revisit seedy-adjacent LA in Lords of Dogtown two years later before launching the incredibly successful movie adaptations of Twilight (which also features Nikki Reed). In between, she took a detour through The Nativity Story, which at least fits the theme of teen girlhood—if only barely.
Like Tracy, Twilight’s Bella is a quiet good girl raised by a single parent who falls in with a more dangerous crowd at school, tempted by an alluring alpha. I won’t push the comparison too far except to say that many of the stylistic choices made in Thirteen—a muted color palette, pulsing soundtrack, moodiness in the mundane—are replicated with a bigger budget in Twilight, and when you take that first movie away from the rest of the franchise, it really does hold up as a quality teen flick with a supernatural monster twist.
Hardwicke notably co-wrote Thirteen with Reed, and I haven’t looked into how that collaboration came about, but it does affect the viewing experience. Reed and Wood, who are the same age, are both, let’s just say, put on display in this movie in a way that’s not entirely exploitative but would certainly be appealing to, well, perverts. With Reed, at least you can think, “She wrote this!” Even when things get a little…statutory…she wrote it! But with Wood, especially knowing how much she would subsequently be mistreated in her personal and professional life, it’s hard not to see this as the beginning of all that. It’s hard not to want to scream, “Put some clothes on this actress, she’s just a kid!” No, I don’t think you could make it today.
But the thing that stands out most upon a 2023 viewing is how lesbian it is. Like, very, very lesbian. Tracy and Evie find any excuse to touch each other, sleep in the same bed, make out, wear each other’s clothes, hold hands. When they hook up with men, it’s in the same room as a shared bonding experience, which they unpack later in a conversation far more intimate than anything physical. They’re so in love it’s insane. And somehow, this makes the whole thing less scary and tragic.
It looks at first like a kiddie version of Requiem for a Dream or Trainspotting but is actually closer to The Basketball Diaries: a coming-of-age story that’s about friendship as much as it is about drugs.
Tracy has been abandoned by her father and more or less left to fend for herself by her mother. She craves her brother’s approval, more stimulation, and less responsibility. She’s outgrown childish things but is given no realistic path toward maturity, and what the underworld promises her is not only freedom but experience, grown-up-ness. And this is a path that leads only downward.
But if what attracts Tracy to Evie isn’t an innate desire to be “bad” but to transgress and explore and hook up with a girl, maybe it’s just a growing pain. I know very few people who have come to have a good relationship with hard drugs and crime. But I know plenty of people who figured out a healthy way to be gay. If all that other stuff was just background decoration for Tracy’s sexual awakening, then she doesn’t have to undo damage as much as she needs to find a better outlet.
Maybe it’s Vanessa Hudgens! Yes, Vanessa Hudgens is in Thirteen. FL
