A Comparative Analysis of Thirteen and Mean Girls
“Mothers, lock up your sons!” –Tracy Freeland
Tracy quickly befriends troubled Evie, and the two teens get sucked into a world of hard drugs, sex, violence, and whatever else they feel like getting into.
Kathleen Karlyn discusses the film stating that while “exposing an array of cultural poisons particularly deadly to girls today, the film places its protagonists in a toxic but nearly irresistible brew of consumerism, drugs and precocious sexuality, with little help from adults distracted and overwhelmed by pressures of their own” (453). The most frightening thing about this film is that it is based on true events and was co-written by a thirteen-year-old girl, Nikki Reed, who had experienced many of these things, herself. Nikki Reed starred in the film playing the character Evie, who Tracy desperately seeks social approval of.
Possibly even more unsettling, reflects Karlyn, is the fact that many of her friends and colleagues who have daughters did not see this film and admitted to having no desire to do so. “Rather than surprising [Karlyn], this avoidance resonated with one of the most important concerns of the film, the refusal or inability of adults to see painful realities unfolding in their midst” (454). She explains that “according to the film, there is not much new about femininity today except that girls experience its perils at ever younger ages and with less help from the adults in their lives. But the film also offers an antidote to these poisons by using the moral force of melodrama to argue for the imperfect but atavistic power of maternal love” (454).
Thirteen’s Tracy Freeland is eager to ditch her straight-A, honour roll, geek status, and to become one of the popular girls, after she becomes fed up with getting teased about the clothes she wears. Evie Zamora is the hottest, coolest girl in school. All of the girls want to be her, and all of the guys want to be with her. Tracy is ecstatic when Evie invites her to go shopping with her and the other popular girls. It seems that Evie had given Tracy a fake phone number as a cruel prank, but Tracy meets the girls downtown to go shopping anyway. She finds Evie and a friend, and quickly realizes that to these girls, shopping means shoplifting. Eager to do whatever it takes for Evie to accept her, Tracy follows their lead and steals a woman’s wallet from her purse. The girls go on a shopping spree with the stolen money, and Evie and Tracy quickly become best friends. The two girls are constantly together, and Evie even ends up moving in with the Freeland family.
While the two pre-adolescent girls become closer throughout the progression of the film, Tracy distances herself from her mother, who she had previously been extremely open with. At first, it seems as though Tracy is avoiding her mother in order to hide stolen clothes, and other newly acquired things that would cause suspicion and/or upset her mother, such as her piercings, but as the plot thickens, Tracy shows a lack of concern and consideration toward her mother, flaunting her piercings, new clothes and radically different behaviour. This transgression toward her disrespectful interaction toward her mother occurs when Tracy becomes engulfed with her new identity, and her abrasive disconnect with her mother seems to stem from her mere disrespect, and unappreciative attitudes she now projects toward almost everyone. Tracy wildly expresses her opposition toward her mother’s tolerances regarding her boyfriend Brady, who is recovering from a cocaine addiction, as well as her welcoming nature to friends in need of help, when Tracy condemns her mother of not even being able to take care of their own family and financial situation.
Evie accompanies and guides compliant Tracy on a disruptive, corruptive downward spiral of hard drugs, sex, violence, alcohol, deceit, piercings and petty crime. Devoted to her new popular friend, Tracy shuns all of her old, faithful friends, turns on her family, and fails seventh grade.
Tracy’s newfound popularity does not make her happier, and she begins cutting herself to cope with the stress. The film is disturbing and powerful, dealing with themes and issues that should not be experienced at Tracy’s young age, including but not limited to depression, self-destructing violence, suicide, hard drugs, crime, casual sexual activity, and violence. The film presents an unsettling path a young girl takes in her desperate search for popularity and social acceptance.
Sue Short delves into an evaluation of two misfit sisters who are both hampered by a ‘dysfunctional’ upbringing in which each is abandoned by the father and cursed with a mad mother (88). Although Short is specifically analyzing female relationships and familial relations within the horror genre, this formula can obviously be applied to Hardwicke’s Thirteen, as both Evie and Tracy have experienced a dysfunctional upbringing and were abandoned by their fathers. In regard to Short’s stipulation of the mother figure: Evie’s mother is not present in the film, and she lives with a parental guardian, Brooke, who is overwhelmed with her own issues. Brooke is trying to make it as a model/actress, having to suffer through and spend money on cosmetic surgery to keep up with the demanding industry, and has to bartend to make a living. She is oblivious, and pays little attention to Evie. Tracy’s mother on the other hand has been a part of Tracy’s life growing up, and seems to have been a very good mother considering her struggle through divorce and the family’s financial situation. Her ex-husband drives an expensive car, but he misses child support payments, leaving the family financially unstable. Prior to Tracy’s corruptive friendship with Evie, Tracy and her mother were extremely close. It was only after she began to adopt her disrespectful, unappreciative attitude that things started to make a turn for the worse between the mother and daughter. Fortunately, her mother was still able to recognize glimpses of the old Tracy, and had the strength to hold on tight, never leaving her daughter’s side, even when things got hard, “I love you and your brother more than anything in the world. I would die for you, but I won't leave you alone right now” (Melanie Freeland, Thirteen).
“As a melodrama, Thirteen links the suffering of its protagonists to a broad array of social forces, including the increasing penetration of consumerism into the psyche, addiction as a means of coping with the frayed communities and families in late capitalism, and the financial struggles of a largely female working class struggling in the media-saturated landscapes of the New Economy” (Karlyn, 453). Karlyn discusses the ways in which the film personalizes the political, “registering through the suffering of its protagonists the impact of wider social forces on their lives. In its depiction of female adolescence, the film explores themes associated with postfeminism: sexuality as an expression of empowered femininity, and the pleasures of consumerism as a means of self-expression and identity formation” (454). However, the film places these themes within larger social and cultural frameworks. Thirteen deals with difficult questions and topics, such as, the appropriate age and circumstances for girls to engage in sexual activity; the “consequences of conservative economic policies on single mothers and a largely female working class”; and “the implications of individual freedom celebrated by postfeminism and neoliberalism when that freedom is pursued primarily at a shopping mall and personal expressivity takes place through the acquisition of consumer goods” (Karlyn, 454).
“Much of Thirteen’s drama centers on the ways the body of a girl becomes a stage or battleground for the most compelling dramas of her life as she enters adulthood” (Karlyn, 455). In addition, “Tracy’s path to adulthood requires her to participate in a relentlessly trendy consumer culture” (Karlyn, 458). During the flashback showing Tracy before her transformation, “she is reading [her mother] a poem she has written, and expressing herself through an act of personal creativity”. Tracy would express herself through her poetry, diffusing her fears and anxieties. She would often show her mother her poems, read them to her, expressing her true feelings, seeking comfort and guidance, only to be repeatedly turned away or misunderstood as her mother was almost always preoccupied and consumed by her own issues. “Under Evie’s tutelage, however, she soon learns that the path to female power requires articles of sexy clothing bought, or better yet shoplifted, from boutiques on Melrose Avenue” (Karlyn, 458). Tracy ditches her seemingly useless poetry writing, as it never eased her anxieties, and never brought her closer to her mother. “Structurally, the film is organized around a melodramatic struggle to return to the primal mother/child bond, a place of innocence which has been threatened by invaders on all fronts and which must be restored before Tracy can begin to assert her own independence. The challenge then becomes shoring up and sorting out a series of boundaries against these invaders- boundaries of the self, the body, the home, relationships” (Karlyn, 460).
Rosalind Wiseman offers a list of perfectly natural things to expect from an adolescent daughter, which is applicable and relevant when analyzing both Thirteen and Mean Girls, as main characters Tracy and Cady progressively demonstrate many, if not all, of Wiseman’s expected behaviours of young girls toward parents: “stops looking to you for answers; doesn’t respect your opinion as much as she did before; believes that there’s no possible way that you could understand what she’s going through; is absolutely certain that telling you her problems will only make her life worse; lies and sneaks around behind your back; denies she lied and snuck behind your back- even in the face of undeniable evidence” (6-7). On the other hand, Wiseman offers a list of natural thoughts and feelings most parents experience during this time in their daughter’s life: “feel rejected and angry when she rolls her eyes at everything you say; have moments when you really don’t like her; wonder whose child this is anyway, as this person in front of you can’t possibly be your sweet, wonderful daughter; feel confused when conversations end in fights; feel misunderstood when she feels you’re intruding and prying when you ask what’s going on in her life; are really worried about the influence of her friends and feel powerless and angry to stop her hanging out with them (Because, of course, she’ll keep the friends you don’t like if you expressly forbid her from seeing them); feel sad because you don’t know how to deal with problems she won’t even discuss with you” (Wiseman, 7). In both films, the teenage girls feel this way once they have become absorbed into the Girl World framework, while their poor parents exhibit many of these confused, helpless feelings, unsure of how to approach the situation.
Thirteen deals with difficult topics, including self destruction and depression, in the very graphic and disturbing scenes which show Tracy cutting herself. She does this three times in the film. The first time is after she realizes that her mother and ex-boyfriend Brady are back together. The second time is after Evie gets up and leaves when they had been hanging out and sneaks out of Tracy’s bedroom window to have sex with a teen boy. The third is after Tracy’s brother tells her that their mother wants to send her to live with their father. “The first two episodes suggest Tracy’s sensitivity to sex as an early adolescent, especially as a virgin. In all three instances, males threaten to violate the space between Tracy and the females who are most important to her life, her best friend and her mother” (Karlyn, 460-461).
Thirteen depicts consumerism not as the harmless “retail therapy” and/or girl bonding time seen in films like Mean Girls, but “as a manic mode of rebellion and identity formation. And while relentlessly exploring the lures and dangers of young sexuality, Thirteen has little interest in heterosexual romance [which is often to be expected and inescapable in typical depictions of teen girl world in film], focusing instead on intense female-to-female relationships” (Karlyn, 458) and casual sex encounters with teen boys and men whom they show little or no interest in.
The film “has attracted mixed reviews and widely varying critical readings. Praised by many for its authenticity, rawness, and emotional power…Others have criticized it for being heavy-handed in its treatment of the perils of growing up female. Still others have questioned…its cautionary messages about teen girl sexuality and the disintegration of the nuclear family” (Karlyn, 454).
“Thirteen’s melodramatic excess centers on the suffering of girls facing what it means to become a woman today. As Angela McRobbie notes, ‘Thirteen depicts a world where the fashioning of a credible female self brings with it incalculable injuries and loss, and the requirement to become a ‘real girl’ gives rise to unfathomable rage’(8)” (Karlyn, 459). While the cinema has avoided the “sympathetic mother” archetype on the screen for decades, “Thirteen’s use of melodrama enables it to foreground its central concerns and its simple but urgent message: we may no longer believe that children are innocent, or that they ever were. Nor do we believe that adults have much power to protect them from a predatory world drained of moral purpose. But as girls enter the perilous time of adolescence, there’s something to be said for a caring woman’s tight grip on them when things fall apart” (Karlyn, 454).
Thirteen “demonstrates the value of dramatizing stories about girls, women, femininity, female relationships, and the often taboo relationship of mother and daughter- stories that are rarely told in other genres, but that urgently need telling” (Karlyn 455).
Mark Waters’ 2004 blockbuster Mean Girls, revolves around the complexities of high school and the adolescent female, and is presented through a comedic lens. The film was inspired by Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction “Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World”. The film is presented through the point of view of fifteen-year-old Cady Heron, who is, for the first time, entering high school and subsequently entering, what Wiseman calls, “Girl World”. Cady’s parents are zoologists and the family had lived in Africa while Cady was growing up. She was homeschooled, and has therefore never had these experiences. Entering an already established realm of tight knit cliques, Cady feels like she does not belong and does not fit in. She soon befriends Janis Ian and Damian, who guide her through the hierarchies and rules of the school.
In Rosalind Wiseman’s book, she explains that although “our awareness of Queen Bees and Girl World is now commonplace…girls are still in the thick of Girl World- where people won’t tell you why they’re mad at you, friends tease you and then dismiss your feelings with ‘Just kidding!’, and everyone texts and instant messages every rumor and embarrassing photograph about you” (2). Wiseman divulges strategic approaches for struggling parents to help their adolescent daughters cope with the inevitably difficult transition. She discusses the impacts technology and media have in Girl World, and how girls are facing much of these experiences at younger and younger ages. She has devoted an entire chapter on Cliques and Popularity, and another on Teasing, Gossiping, and Reputations, and another on the politics of Girl World. She discusses Boy World, sex, drugs, alcohol, and partying in Girl World, and throughout every section, Wiseman offers questions, quotes, and comments from parents and young girls, expressing their thoughts and concerns when it comes to the complexities and shifting dynamics of Girl World.
In Wiseman’s introduction to her brilliant guide for panicking parents she explains that their daughter is “facing the toughest pressures of adolescent life- test-driving her new body (while you’re giving her a big sweatshirt to cover up that figure she seemed to have developed overnight), navigating changing friendships, surviving crushes, trying to keep up with school- and intuitively you know even though she’s sometimes totally obnoxious, she needs you more than ever. Yet it’s the very time when she’s pulling away from you” (2). Waters’ film brings a comedic lens to the fore, delving into difficult subject matter and situations in a humourous way. While this proved to be an effective way to reach a wide audience, these issues are very real, and can be extremely detrimental during female maturation and identity formation. The main character in the film effectively embodies, encounters, and experiences many of the trying issues Wiseman dissects in her book, including the distanced daughter routine when it comes to parents, comparable to Tracy’s character in Thirteen.
When Mean Girl’s Cady Heron first arrives to her new school, she awkwardly approaches various cliques and groups in the cafeteria, trying to socialize and meet friends. She is quickly and shamelessly rejected via raised eyebrows, looks of disgust, and folded arms, and is instantly nonverbally shunned. She eats her lunch in a bathroom stall by herself. Soon she meets Janis Ian and Damien, who welcome her into their oddball group. Janis is Cady’s only true female friend in the film. They become friends on their own terms, and while Janis and Damien set out to educate the newcomer on the politics of high school social life, something happens that none of them were expecting.
Janis becomes amused and excited when Regina George, Queen Bee of the school, and leader of The Plastics, invites Cady to sit with them at lunch. Janis convinces Cady to hang out with the popular girls to find out what they do and what they talk about, so they can make fun of them. Cady feels uncomfortable with this idea, but follows through with it as she is in no position to pass up friends. When Cady tries to adapt to the fast-paced idiosyncrasies of high school girl world, she gets so wrapped up that she begins to mimic the “Queen Bee” Regina George, intentionally hurting others’ feelings, spreading rumours, gossiping incessantly, scheming, lying, manipulating everyone around her including boys, teachers, her parents, her friends and her enemies, climbing the social ladder faster than Regina had anticipated when she had initially invited Cady to join their clique.
Sue Short explains that audiences have the “greatest sympathy with [the] newcomer…who undergoes starting at a new school, a troubled relationship with high school jock, and betrayal by her female friends…Her arrival brings the established threesome a new level of confidence…yet a rift occurs when the most charismatic member of the group, [Regina], becomes carried away with her augmented power and growing jealousy” (89). This is true to form in Waters’ film, as Cady Heron provides the narrative’s point of view, and is the newcomer to the high school. She regrettably falls for high school jock Aaron Samuels, and when Regina finds out, she betrays Cady, stealing him back for herself. Regina lies and manipulates the situation, redeeming her innocent exterior, apologizing to Cady, resolving the “misunderstanding”. Regina convinces Cady that she had tried to talk to Aaron for her, and tried to set them up, but claims that all he was interested in was getting Regina back. Regina “is thus presented as a dangerous villain, and it is left to [Cady]…to ultimately put [Regina] in her place, providing a moral tale, in which ‘good’ is seen to triumph over ‘evil’” (Short, 89). By now Cady knows how Regina operates, and knows better than to buy into her manipulative ways. Cady gets ready to get back at her “frienemy”; two can play at that game.
Diane Felmlee, John Hagan and Bill McCarthy discuss “mean girls” and their recent emergence in society, and mainstream cinema and literature, “Mean girls are everywhere. Nasty girls are the antagonists of movies such as Mean Girls and Thirteen…these works emphasize ideas from a growing body of literature suggesting that adolescent females’ use of aggression is often as frequent as that of adolescent males’, but that it manifests in different behaviours…girls typically shun physical aggression, but they use gossip, ridicule, exclusion and other forms of relational aggression, particularly toward other females” (806).
Mary McCord attempts to analyze certain cinematic examples of feminism in action, as “Hollywood has always been a problematic site for feminists”(67): “Mean Girls comes closest to addressing feminist concerns head-on, but with similarly troubling effects. The workshop scene suggests a post-feminist, essentialized depiction of girls: even when the topic at hand is the complex network of female cliques and friendships, it all comes back to the vagina. The scene also suggests that even though men may be aware of the struggles faced by teenage girls, they are fundamentally unable to intervene because it is an essentially female reality” (68). “Regardless of their overt or tacit relationships to feminist projects, each of the films participates in the discourses of girlhood. In addition to their filmic legacies, these films also extend these discourses from academic domains and into the popular zeitgeist” (McCord, 68).
Rosalind Wiseman explains that “most people believe a girl’s task is to get through it, grow up, and put those experiences behind her. But your daughter’s relationships with other girls have deep and far-reaching implications beyond her teen years. Your daughter’s friendships with other girls are a double-edged sword” (3), “but [she] is too close to it all to realize the good and bad influence of her friends” and needs guidance from her parents, even though she is pulling away (Wiseman, 4).
As in both films, the protagonists transform throughout the film, trying on different identities and attitudes. Short discusses audience identification with these characters, “The potential mode of identification fostered is thus odd indeed, seeming to advance and then withdraw approval in a manner that appears both confused and contradictory” (88). She continues to discuss the transformations and eager attempts the girls make in each film, “both outsiders fail in their attempts to fit into the status quo, and while some idea of female kinship is suggested, the nastiness that triggers their fatal rage destroys any hopes of belonging”; “Female power and the very notion of ‘camaraderie’ [is] frequently undermined by sexual rivalry and a narrative impetus towards punishing ‘wayward’ girls” (Short, 88-89). Film narratives often have difficulties establishing female solidarity, which only becomes more difficult as the notion of female solidarity comes second to the greater tendencies to depict women in competition with one another.
“As sites for cultural construction and representation, teen films reveal the narratives of girlhood…films play a role in generating and promoting cultural messages… [as they] contribute to the public discourse about youth behaviour, preoccupations, and attitudes” (McCord, 2). Pamela Bettis and Natalie Adams’ “Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-between” delves into an exploration surrounding how adolescent girls “come to understand themselves as female in this culture, particularly during a time when they are learning what it means to be a woman, and their identities are in between that of child and adult, girl and woman” (xi).
In summation, Thirteen and Mean Girls provide a wealth of information pertaining to female gender identity acquisition and formation, as well as an accurate, consistent portrayal of female relationships. By comparing and contrasting these particular films, we are able to draw similarities and differences pertaining to femininity from pre-adolescent girls as seen in Thirteen, to adolescent teens as seen in Mean Girls, which have been argued, and to some extent proven, to be ever-increasingly similar, if not identical, as feminine norms, practices, rituals, activities, and rites of passage have been being experienced by increasingly younger girls. What does this say about our society, and/or our culture? By examining the representation of female identity in contemporary film culture, we are able to begin to understand the complex realities of “girl world” and femininity in contemporary society.
Works Cited
Adams, Natalie, Bettis. “Landscapes of Girlhood”. Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2005.
Felmlee, Diane, John Hagan, and Bill McCarthy. “Girl Friends Are Better: Gender, Friends, and Crime Among School and Street Youth”. Criminology 42:4. University of California Davis; Northwestern University, 2004. 805-836.
Karlyn, Kathleen. “Film as Cultural Antidote: Thirteen and the maternal melodrama”. Feminist Media Studies 6:4. Oregon: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2006.
McCord, Mary. "'So Very', 'So Fetch': Constructing Girls on Film in the Era of Girl Power and Girls in Crisis". Georgia State University, 2008.
Mean Girls. Dir. Mark Waters. Perf. Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey. Paramount Pictures, 2004.
Pomerantz, Shauna. “Did You See What She Was Wearing? The Power and Politics of Schoolgirl Style”. Girlhood: Redefining Limits. Montreal; New York; London: Black Rose Books, 2006. 173-190.
Rosenbloom, Stephanie. “And for My Princess, a Pedicure”. New York Times. 2007.
Roth, Elaine. “Momophobia: Incapacitated Mothers and Their Adult Children in 1990’s Films”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22:189-202. Indiana: Routledge Taylor & Francis Inc., 2005.
Russell, Rachel, Tyler. “Thank Heaven for Little Girls: ‘Girl Heaven’ and the Commercial Context of Feminine Childhood”. Sociology 36:3. 2002. 619-633.
Short, Sue. “Misfit Sisters: Female Kinship and Rivalry in The Craft and Ginger Snaps”. Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. 88-110.
Thirteen. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Perf. Holly Hunter, Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2003.
Wiseman, Rosalind. Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World (2). New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2009.
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