Poor Girl Problems: Revisiting "Thirteen"

by Stacy Jane Grover

During the rainy Ohio summer of 2003, I saw the film Thirteen at my local mall theater. To my thirteen-year-old self, the film was a piece of cinema verité. I had never seen the life of impoverished teen girls, my life, reflected with such complexity, honesty, and care. I emerged into the afternoon light of the noisy food court enraptured. Someone out there, far away from my tiny rural town, understood me. For the first time, I learned that my experiences could become the stuff of movies. 

The film’s reception was not so positive. Parents boycotted the film, claiming it encouraged teen viewers (the film is Rated R. I saw it with parental permission) to emulate the character's bad behavior. Many found the events depicted in the movie incredulous. Roger Ebert questioned them when he wrote, "The horrors in this movie are worse than those found in the lives of most 13-year-olds, I believe and hope." Whether the film showed an amplified version of reality or reality itself, it was quickly reduced to a cautionary tale about the dangers of teen life. 

Thirteen was marketed as a piece of “cinematherapy." Therapists, rehab center directors, juvenile court judges, and stacks of D.A.R.E brochures even accompanied the cast and crew at film screenings and Q&As. Filmgoers who were interviewed for the article claimed they felt "horrified" and "sad" at the "tragic" events that unfold in the film. 

In 2003, I felt defensive, baffled, and outraged at the negative response to the film. Why had it taken so long for someone to tell the truth, even fictionally? Why was everyone still denying this truth? How had everyone missed the film's heart? I tried to convince everyone I knew to see the movie. I wanted to talk about it; I wouldn't stop talking about it. 

At the time, I'm sure my passion for Thirteen came off as evidence of its danger. Or as a cry for help for someone to notice my issues (maybe it was). Yet, after two decades, my contention remains. The ordinary lives of poor girls and women shouldn’t be twisted into horrible social tragedies used to shun and discipline others. On a deeper level, the cautionary tale tropes attached to the film espouse widespread classist and misogynist sentiments that have stained its legacy. 

Thirteen has not received the same critical cultural resurgence that other women-written, directed, and cast-led films from the 2000s have rightfully had. Thirteen was a foundational film for complex and tender representations of poor women and girls for my generation. After 20 years, it deserves a critical reevaluation. 

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Thirteen follows the mild-mannered, straight-A student Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) at the beginning of 7th grade. Her father has left her mother, Melanie (Holly Hunter), who struggles to make ends meet for the family while working to maintain her sobriety. Tracy befriends the popular girl Evie (Nikki Reed), who lives unsupervised with her guardian, Brooke (Deborah Kara Unger). To gain Evie's attention, Tracy steals a stranger's wallet and takes Evie and her friend on a shopping spree. Tracy and Evie’s friendship expands to include smoking, drugs, risky sexual encounters, and self-harm. Evie essentially moves in with Tracy as Melanie’s boyfriend, home from a halfway house, also moves in, straining Tracy and Melanie’s relationship. The emotional tension eventually explodes when Evie betrays Tracy and Melanie stages an intervention. 

Thirteen has had an emotional impact on audiences over the last two decades. The film has garnered a cult following and enjoys consistently high ratings and positive user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxed. The success of Euphoria has renewed people's interest in it. Sentiments such as "Thirteen is Euphoria for Millennials" and "Thirteen walked so Euphoria could run" are common sentiments in online discussions. Yet many viewers note the film's feminist viewpoint, how it avoids the negative aspects of Euphoria while portraying the same issues. There is a distinct and welcome lack of the male gaze. No unnecessary sex or bedroom mirror scenes show nude or partially clad adult bodies as teen stand-ins. The film even passes the Bechdel test. Many viewers express that the film makes them feel protective and empathetic for the teen protagonists instead of mesmerized by their revelry. 

Many, like me, have seen all or parts of their adolescence represented in the film and learned something from it. Some viewers wish they had had mothers like Mel or any relationship with their parents so that someone had intervened. Many expressed that the film has given them the courage to work through their interpersonal struggles or cut off a damaging friendship. Many have come to see their single mothers in a different light. Fans of Thirteen all rightfully attribute the film’s continued relevance to the fact that it was written by, for, and about women and girls. Yet, to film critics, it seems that being a woman is the only thing worse than being poor. 

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When covering Thirteen, film critics engaged in a process of using misogynistic and classist rhetoric to turn the complex characters into tropes and then write them off as trivial, thus reducing their humanity and any need at all for empathy or understanding. James Berardinelli attributes Tracy's behavioral shift, drug use, theft, and self-harm to the neglect she suffers from her “white trash” mother, Mel, who lives in what Roger Ebert describes as a "sprawling house she can't afford." The house in the film isn't sprawling; Tracy's room isn't a proper bedroom but a space turned into one. When a friend needs help, her daughter and dog sleep in Tracy's room, likely because there aren't others. Other reviewers describe Mel's household as "chaotic," "unmanageable," and "dysfunctional" due to the number of family and friends who interact in the house. Mel styles hair out of the kitchen as a source of income and provides food to neighborhood kids and family friends. But Mel doesn't garner sympathy for her parenting or mutual aid from film reviewers. Instead, she's shamed for her actions. 

In his unsympathetic review for the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, "Never was a mother in a worse position to get her child back on the straight and narrow." He acknowledges that Mel provides the necessities for her children but accuses her of playing the "middle youth kidult" because she tries to maintain a relationship with Tracy and seek out moments of fun and deep connection with her. Bradshaw writes that Evie has become a master emotional manipulator due to the complete absence of her guardian, Brooke, who he calls a "nightmare of dysfunction and trailer-park heartbreak." 

The reviewers aren’t any kinder to the girls in the film. Roger Ebert described Tracy and Evie as “accurately, jailbait.” For ReelReviews, James Berardinelli described Tracy as being “on the ripe side of puberty,” that her “transformation from shy girl to slut” is a believable one,” and that her relationship with Evie is “laced with obvious lesbian overtones.” He paints Evie meanwhile, as an “oversexed manipulator,” and “every guy’s wet dream,” a comment that says more about the worldviews of men who view the film than the characters or girls who play them. No matter the scenes that show her tenderness, vulnerability, and care toward those around her, Evie is simply the “oversexed manipulator.”

Here, the film critics sexualize the characters and teen actresses regardless of how they were portrayed in the film, whether the writers (one of which was 13), actresses (both teenagers), director, or cinematographer viewed their characters that way, thereby discursively transforming them into adults. In one scene in the film, the adult neighbor Luke allows Tracy and Evie to smoke, drink, and make out with him in his house. Yet, Roger Ebert only mentions that Tracy and Evie "all but rape" Luke, as if the 13-year-old girls hold power in the relationship. 

He then questions whether Tracy and Evie’s behaviors were societally induced, as the old culture of poverty myth and a long train of eugenicists have theorized, the girls were doomed by genealogy to reenact “their mothers' abject lives.” To Bradshaw, the events in the film portray a "grisly blue-collar tragedy bred in the bone," not a story of deep care amid struggle and transformation. 

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The film critics don't judge the men and boys in Thirteen by the same standards as the girls and women. In the film, Tracy's brother Mason inhabits the same social circles as Tracy and Evie. He drinks and wanders around Melrose unaccompanied. He admits to smoking weed. In one painful scene, after Tracy and Evie sneak out of the family movie night (Mason doesn't join) to run around Melrose Ave, he and his friends inadvertently sexualize Tracy. Yet he escapes film critic ire. 

As does the body piercer who pierces Tracy's tongue without parental permission and overtly sexualizes her and the construction workers who give Tracy, Evie, and her friends safety vests and drive them around in a pickup bed while they trip on acid. 

Tracy's absentee father climbs the corporate ladder but doesn't send Melanie money or see his children. Where is his blame for their situation? Where is the outrage at the systems and structures that allow him to not financially support his children and the social support that often ones that fail or aren’t accessible to women and children? 

In her article "Girl Problems: Against Treating Complex Women in Literature as a Trope," Bea Sutton examines the rise and subsequent hatred of complex women characters written by women. Any complex woman or girl character who experiences a full range of emotions, thoughts, and experiences gets lumped together into a trope, no matter their differences, and then written off as trivial. Only experiences that meet a suffering threshold —commonly rape and abuse—are validated if they fuel misogynist fantasies about the world. Meanwhile, white culture in the Global North doesn't hold these same tropes of white men and boys. The thoughts, experiences, and emotions of the protagonists of The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby, for example, aren’t frivolous; they are the stuff of literature. 

No surprise then that Elvis Mitchell, in his New York Times review, writes that Tracy "vibrates those flashes of rage that erupt from the hearts of young girls growing up without a father in the house -- a boiling mélange of anger and frustration born of what feels like rejection." He lumps Tracy with other girls, regardless of the range of their life experiences, allows them a singular emotion (anger), then attributes their various range of actions (symptoms) to a single cause—daddy issues. In the scene when Mel throws the store-brand cereal around the kitchen and rips up the "damn $1.50 a square foot flooring," she's not taking out her justified feelings on the physical symbols of her situation. She's a hot mess. 

All of the characters in Thirteen have justification for their rage outside of this reductive explanation, and they all express a range of emotions throughout the film that all stem from a range of experiences. Tracy can’t contribute to her household finances or her mother's sobriety. She's been burdened with having to help care for friends and family, a task often given to elder daughters. Tracy might not know how to advocate for herself as her household grows. Maybe she s it more mature by not burdening her mother with more issues than she's already juggling. Tracy possibly realized that contrary to what she's been told her whole life, good grades won't pull her out of poverty. She might have gained the growing realization that her life might not amount to more than the one she has, so why bother? What responsibility does she have for the messaging and products of an industry and culture that tells her she's less than if she doesn't have what they're selling. 

Though not much of Evie’s backstory is shown, she was thrust into a scenario in which she had to navigate her world without any power to change it, or the loving support of a parent or what seems like stable housing. She's dealing with something, and from experience, it reminds me of how being abused often leads children to act out, to seek control, or for attention, not so much in the hope that someone will notice but that the lying and other negative behaviors will bury the actual problem in a mess so that no one will notice, sometimes to the point where no one can even believe whether or not the abuse itself is a lie. Many of her actions seem like genuine attempts to find a home with Mel and Tracy and a way to show that she's a difficult child, even when it comes at the expense of her friend. She likely doesn't know how to navigate the situation otherwise. These nuances are missed when the characters are flattened into tropes.

Besides, the film's plot unfolds over four months, a blip by which the women and girls have been harshly and irrevocably fixed into these unforgiving caricatures. 

Eventually, the entire film is written off as trivial. Thirteen "doesn't build, and sometimes feels as cluttered as a 13-year old's bedroom," wrote Elvis Mitchell for the New York Times. Compare Thirteen's coverage with that of Richard Linklater's 1993 film Dazed and Confused, which depicts teen sexuality, drug use, drinking, and crime. For the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote that this plotless film "unfolds in a loose, natural style." In the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote that the film doesn't admonish its characters or their activities but depicts "life during wartime--the wartime of high school." In this double standard, the experiences of the teen boys in Dazed and Confused rise to greatness— that of war—while Tracy's experiences in Thirteen are just girl problems. 

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Thirteen is not a cautionary tale—it doesn't admonish its characters or end in tragedy—it could be one about the dangers of Hollywood. Throughout the film, billboards with muscular men in underwear advertising Sky Vodka and naked women advertising strip clubs and Hustler stores fill the air around Tracy and Evie as they wander Melrose Ave. A cosmetic ad proclaiming "Beauty is Truth" progressively becomes more tagged and worn as the film progresses. The film admonishes the toxic celebrity culture that sexualizes youth and the structures and systems that inflict harm on women and children, as it did to the characters in the film and to the actresses who played them, who continue to do good in the world despite their experiences. 

Writing Thirteen off as irrelevant doesn’t allow space to explore the generative critiques that can and should be made about it. For one, child actors were employed for much of the cast, a problematic practice now in question in the public consciousness. Thirteen contains several scenes that illustrate the mismatch between authorial intention and consequence. 

The boys with whom girls share sexual encounters, drugs, and alcohol are Black teens. These scenes could rhetorically connect the deviant behaviors to the teens so that the Black boys are the deviance that corrupts the white girls. However, the actors in these scenes happened to be one of the actress's boyfriend and his friends. They were chosen for the roles since they and the actresses would be comfortable filming together. With awareness of this authorial intention, this scene could thus show the socialization process by which white youth appropriate Black culture via the idea of “coolness” to be seen as "cool" without inheriting the structural and social harm that Black youth experience, thus critiquing whiteness itself. But with the cautionary tale trope and the film's real-world use as cinematherapy, this potential generative critique can't be sustained because the fear again becomes about white girls becoming degraded by Black culture instead of the way that white people adopt then strips Black cultural practices of historical and political meaning. 

In another scene, Mel's boyfriend helps her into the shower to calm down after a fight with Tracy. Mel steps out of the shower to follow him as he packs his stuff to leave. Mel is briefly seen nude on screen. The scene could be read as showing the very mundanity and tenderness of nudity and the lack of privacy that happens in small, poor households. But authorial intention can't help other reactions or interpretations of the scene. It may not have been necessary at all, considering the social reality of how films perpetuate the sexualization of women. 

In the same light, while I appreciated and found comfort in them—because I no longer felt alone and secretive-- Tracy's many authentic and tender self-harm scenes bring up an ongoing debate about the place of such scenes in media. The film contains many tensions inherent in complex art that draws from real life and the consequences of making it. Girl problems, as it turns out, are complex and worth exploring.  

After 20 years, Thirteen remains a dynamic, complex, and tender portrait, not of a broken or dysfunctional home but of a family searching for and creating homes amid circumstances out of their control. The film continues to teach me, a poor girl who has grown into a poor woman, so many relevant lessons. Our everyday lives are significant. We cannot be reduced to our circumstances. To survive, we cannot internalize them. Living together involves risk, conflict, and exploration, which aren't experiences that make us dysfunctional. Our thoughts, emotions, interests, and hopes cannot be reduced to tropes, no matter how these systems and structures try. Poverty is not the thing that defines life.

 We deserve to experience deep care, grace, and joy while making do, scraping by, and piecing ourselves and our lives together. The search for a home is an ongoing process, and the homes we find might be different than we imagined. And when the double standards of poverty and gender are too much to handle, sometimes, as Tracy does in the film’s final scene, the best thing we can do is go spin on a merry-go-round and scream. 

Stacy Jane Grover is the author of Tar Hollow Trans: Essays, a 2024 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Transgender Nonfiction. Her essays appear in Salon, Autostraddle, Bitch Media, LitHub, and Belt Magazine. She earned an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati. Find her: www.stacyjanegrover.com.