「 ✦ Thirteen ✦ 」

This is an analysis, so it is likely to contain spoilers.

Thirteen was such a beautiful movie. I really wanted to talk about it. Actually, I already did talk about it but I had to do it better, so I deleted the post. Also, I'm so sorry about the way this will be written, I have to get better at writing y'all, but in the meantime please excuse my horrible writing.

At the start of the movie, we're introduced to Tracy. She looks like a normal teenager, has some friends... I'm not going to talk much about the beginning right now, we'll save it for later.

The movie gets interesting when Tracy meet Evie Zamora. Evie is portrayed as a popular girl, with piercings and nice clothes. She was that girl, and probably everyone was dying to be her friend. Tracy wasn't paying much attention to her at first, until Evie and her friends made fun of her clothes. So naturally, she tried to change her clothing style and decided to talk to Evie.

That's where it also gets bad. Tracy is introduced to a lot of things she wasn't used to do: stealing, staying up late, drugs, alcohol and sex...the full package. She had drastically changed from who she was at the beginning of the movie.

Tracy and Evie

Despite Evie being a terrible influence on Tracy, they did have a genuine friendship. I think Evie liked Tracy a lot but she also wanted her life. Hers was messed up and we could just see that from how much she crashed at Tracy's place every occasion she had. She wanted Mel to adopt her to bad. It was sad to see but that's not an excuse for what she did to Tracy at the end of the movie.

Mel

Mel was also being a very bad mother throughout the whole movie. She saw how Tracy changed but she never tried to talk to her or even listen to what Tracy had to tell her. She was being selfish, all she wanted was for her boyfriend to not leave her again like he'd done in the past, and don't forget how she kept bringing strangers to sleep at her place when that definitely wasn't what Tracy needed. When she realized how bad everything was going with Tracy, it was already too late.

The atmosphere of the movie

I think we could talk about the lighting/colors of the movie as Tracy's mental state. The beginning of the movie had a warm and nice lighting, suggesting Tracy was doing just fine before she met Evie. After she met her, the lighting started slowly but surely changing from warm to cold, until that was the only thing you could see. Every bits of color had disappeared from the screen. What was left was a very cold blue. It showed how bad Tracy was doing, and the state of her degrading mental state.

The last scene

The last scene seemed very confusing at first -to me at least-. We had to see Tracy on a roundabout on a kid's playground. She wore her old clothes back and got rid of her piercing. The fact she was playing in a playground may suggest that she wanted to be innocent again, like a few months ago when she was just a child and knew nothing about everything she'd discovered with Evie.

Realistic or not?

I know that some people think that Thirteen was not realistic because everything that'd happened there was happening to thirteen years old, but it is actually very realistic. Everything depends on the people you talk to/hang out with, and there's is not "average" age to be living a life like this. What makes it even more realistic is the fact this is inspired by Nikki Reed's life, the actress that played Evie.

This movie was so beautiful. It just show that even small things can change everything about someone in a matter of seconds. What would've happened to Tracy if nobody made fun of her clothes? What if Mel was a good mother and actually listened to her? What if her brother tried to talk to her?

I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone that haven't watched it yet. I wish I got to watch it when I was thirteen too, but even though I was fifteen it hit me just as hard.

What did you think about Thirteen?

Kisses xx