The movie follows the life of a
thirteen year old balancing, family, friends, social status, drugs, and pretty
much anything you can think of. We
follow the protagonist’s transition from the quiet, smart girl, to the rebel,
bad girl. She begins to hang out with the girls who are deemed popular, later
to learn that there is a cost to popularity. Not everything that glitters is
gold. As the protagonist continues on
her spiral downfall she learns the hard way that not everyone you consider a
friend is genuinely a friend. I consider “Thirteen” a feminist work because the
movie shows light on a side of the female society that we rarely get to see.
For once we have a movie where the storyline is not about getting prince
charming. And there are numerous female characters in both leading and
supporting roles in the film. The film
goes into hard detail on some of the social constructs that many teenage girls
are faced with but is never talked about.
Having to deal with the drugs, sex, friends, family, emotion, and much
more as a way of coping with these things the protagonist begins to cut herself
on the arm. This is later realized buy the protagonists mother who takes charge
and sets things straight by the end of the film. I think thirteen was an
important film that needed to be made because until recently not a lot of
mainstream films touch on the violent act of cutting ones self. Which I know at
one time was deemed highly popular by teens as a form of stress relief.
Many of Catherine Hardwicke’s films
are dramatic compositions. Instead of
casting the girl in Hollywood who is deemed the prettiest person at the moment,
she tends to cast the unknown or the actors with little to no notoriety. For example in Twilight she could of picked
out of numerous girls to play Isabella Swan but she took the risk of casting
Kristen Stewart who at the time was still building up her acting resume and was
not really considered and A-Lister at the time. Hardwicke started off as a
production designer and worked her way up from the bottom as a film director.
Although she had many famous film directors as friends they were unwilling to
take a chance on an inexperienced director to create any type of film.
Hardwicke took this feedback and went out and produced her own work on her own
budget with her own limits. And now today she is associated with some huge
releases in Hollywood, I mean you would have to be living under a rock to not
have heard about Twilight.
Although most of her
works outside of Twilight have not garnished as much success, those who do
follow her works can say she has a solid body of films that she has contributed
to, and is still building her name in the Hollywood sphere.
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