Thirteen vs Fight Club

“Let’s just say my mom won’t be getting a bumper sticker this year.” With that comment, tossed off at someone who asked about a test score, Tracy sums up not only her entire seventh grade year, but also Thirteen, the scathing, terrifying, fascinating movie that follows it.

On the morning of her first day of junior high, Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) is up early, walking the dog. She climbs into her mom’s car with a friend and heads off for Learning and Fun, dressed like the kid she is.  She gets a reality check right away, when some girl shoulder checks her and mouths off “bitch.” She gets another when her brother, only a year or two older, acts embarrassed to know her. The final blow comes when Evie walks by.  Everybody, boy or girl, ogles her. She’s got a clique of similarly-dressed friends—bare-midriff, low-slung jeans, glitter, fake tans, etc—but Evie is the center of attention. In her mind, Tracy can’t compete. Tracy is sort of Mandy Moore circa 1999. Evie is Christina Aguilera next weekend. At home later, Tracy panics, throwing away clothes, dolls and other evidence of her continuing childhood.  Her mom (Holly Hunter) is a hippie beautician, a recovering addict with a houseful of casual acquaintances. She counsels her haircuts and feeds their kids. All in all, she’s a cool mom—hell, even her kids seem to like her—and so it’s not a surprise when she scrapes together some change to buy Tracy a cooler new outfit. The surprises come later.

At school the next day, Tracy and Evie meet up again. The camera zooms and freezes on the girls’ various accessories. Glittered eyes, wristbands, navel rings, etc. Each little consumer trophy gets a moment of its own, appropriately, since the girls place so much value on them.  Evie invites Tracy shopping, but gives her a fake number. When Tracy shows up anyway, Evie and her friend give her the brush-off for being childish.

One stole wallet later, Tracy has a new best friend, not to mention a drawer full of porno underwear.  Soon, she’s pierced (navel and tongue), drugging (“The itsy bitsy spider dropped acid in the park,” Evie sings after a particularly eventful night), sneaking out, making out, and mouthing off. She’s a nightmare. She becomes one of those door-slamming teens, especially mad because Mom’s ex-boyfriend, an addict played by Jeremy Sisto, has returned, this time potentially for good. Is Tracy mad because she fears for her mother’s happiness, or because the boyfriend is more streetwise than the mom and might threaten her new risky lifestyle? Because Evie basically just lives with, I dunno, a roommate or something—at different times she calls her an aunt, a cousin and a guardian—she’s soon at Tracy’s full time, constructing a different sad story from her past any time Mom threatens to make her leave.

Evan Rachel Wood is fifteen, but gives a performance of such variety and focus that she exists as an actual teenager. Imagine that. People always compliment young actors by implying that they seem older than they are (Jodie Foster and Haley Joel Osment have been called “old souls” so much they should collect royalties on the term), but Wood fully embodies her character and the age that goes with it. When she gets all up in Mom’s face and taunts “no bra, no panties” over and over, it’s such an aggressive provocation that I looked away, even though the accompanying visual was just close-ups of Hunter and Wood. Seriously, how Tracy’s mom keeps from smacking her speaks either to the power of AA or the restraint of Holly Hunter as an actor. And that’s another thing: Holly Hunter is so freakin’ cool. Everything about her is lean. She cuts right to the chase over and over. There’s a multitude of emotions and strategies right behind her eyes, and it’s amazing at times to watch it wash across her face, just before she speaks. Several times in the movie, she starts to say…but no, and ends up measuring her words. It’s the sort of thing people do every day in life, but hardly ever in movies. Holly Hunter is one of those actors—Samuel L. Jackson, Sigourney Weaver and Ed Harris among them—who transcend pats on the back. It would almost be an insult to give her an award at this point. I mean, come on, would you have the guts to call Nick Nolte “Employee of the Month” or Kathy Bates “Volunteer of the Year”? Holly Hunter’s got enough problems with her teens at home; she doesn’t need your patronizing. Lay off, dude.

The danger with material like this is that in the wrong hands, the topic of teens-gone-bad can either dip into exploitation (Poison Ivy), after-school cliché (Life as a House) or-- worst-case—that weird realm where being a teen is fetishized and viewed as a lifestyle rather than an age (Kids). Somehow, Thirteen dodges these dangers when necessary, and embraces them when plausible. In other words, it didn’t make me feel pervy, which I appreciate. Most of the credit, I assume, goes to director Catherine Hardwicke and her co-writer Nikki Reed, who also plays Evie, and apparently based the story on her own experiences. Here’s hoping she was Tracy in real life, otherwise Hollywood’s going to get very interesting in a few years.

By the way, at one point, the characters attend a movie, and their choice is The Misadventures of Ezekial Balls, featuring Jack Black and a cartoon pig. I’m not going to repeat that, but feel free to reread the previous sentence until it no longer makes you smile.

All done?

Thirteen parallels another movie almost scene for scene, and it’s a surprising one. (Well, not anymore, what with the double posters up top and all). Thirteen opens with a scene of Tracy and Evie, huffing from an aerosol can, punching each other in the face, laughing hysterically the whole time. They keep yelling, “Hit me! Harder! Again!” At first, it’s almost funny, because the characters are so joyful and oblivious. When the scene is repeated later, we come to see it for what it is. The girls aren’t hitting each other because they want to be hurt, they’re hitting each other because they can’t feel anything else. Pain, like the cuts Tracy gives herself with manicure scissors, is the only thing strong enough to drown out the numbness of everyday life. Just ask Tyler Durden.

Fight Club is one of those rare movies, like Pulp Fiction or Thelma And Louise, that captures so much of the zeitgeist, that it leaves it’s own, changed, zeitgeist in its wake. I think it’s underrated, has excellent acting and is atmospheric and groovy and brilliantly edited. It’s David Fincher doing his big David Fincher. Besides entertaining me, Fight Club has three major accomplishments:

1. It uglies Brad Pitt up, but not in any way that pokes fun at him or turns it into some sort of novelty “ugly” role. You know the type. He’s not all fat-suited or bald-capped or tooth-missinged.

2. Edward Norton is a man now. He wasn’t before, but after Fight Club he is. Thanks to this one, he can move freely about the cabin. Or something. And

C. Helena Bonham Carter is funny and sexy. Before Fight Club, she was neither. Oh, knock it off, you big movie snob. You didn’t think she was funny and sexy before you saw Fight Club, and you know it. But she’s smokin’ here, and she gets great lines and wears too much eye-makeup. Also, she does something in the bedroom that requires a glove and thus is something you won’t see in print here (people “Googling” the act wouldn’t like this site anyway, so I’ll save them the trouble. Suffice to say, she gets freaky-deaky up in the bedroom.)

For those of you not familiar with Fight Club, a primer: Edward Norton stars as a sad Generation X office drone, barely living his life, but doing a pretty good job of faking it through consumerism (his apartment is a marvel of catalog shopping) and self-help (he has no official disorders or addictions but attends a variety of group therapy sessions anyway.) At one particular session he meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) and after noticing her at other meetings for other problems, realizes she’s like him. She’s faking problems, “solving” them, and then moving on to another, never having to examine herself or admit that maybe she’s just ordinary.

And then Ed (listed in the credits as Narrator) sits by Tyler Durden on a business flight. Tyler sells soap, and he’s full of practical tough-guy wisdom and fast-talking anarchy. He’s dressed in a mix of thrift store/lounge lizard/rock star, and he seems completely sure of himself and uninhibited. He’s like the child of Courtney Love and Beetlejuice.  Of course Pitt’s look in this movie has been bogarted and bastardized by the “tough guy” in each boy band, though to Pitt’s credit, none of them can pull it off.

Soon, as Tyler and Ed become friends, they begin exploring their darker natures. Tyler shows him, via a parking lot fist fight (“I want you to hit me as hard as you can”) that pain is the quickest, surest way to defeat the emasculation and numbness that Ed feels in his day-to-day life. Eventually, they begin fighting on a regular basis, punching their aggression into each others faces and ribs, and soon the faces and ribs of their growing Fight Club membership.  An underground sensation is born. Men from all over want to beat the shit out each other, and get the shit beaten out of them. Pain is freedom, anger is love, or something. Meanwhile, Tyler and Ed are living together, making soap and sharing Marla.

Fight Club takes violence far within the bounds of fetish, with each punch carefully filmed and with the sound technician working over time. After a while, as with Ed’s meetings and catalogs, the fights lose some of their potency, and he and Tyler have to move on to bigger and more violent acts of aggression. Likewise, after a while, I was pretty numb to the fights as well. The first throwdown in the parking lot was powerful, because it was so random and simple. Later, it took a character literally getting his head pounded for me to flinch away for a second. By the surprise ending, you’re so geared up for a big finish, that the surprise probably seems more like a logical conclusion. I know people who were all “Oh man! I can’t believe that happened!” But I was more “Oh, hey, look, a surprise ending. Neat.”

Watching Thirteen, I was struck by the bliss on the girls faces when they were punching each other, in contrast to the looks of near-relief on the guys in Fight Club. Here’s hoping they’ve gotten it out of their systems, and won’t ever want to be hit when it’s not funny. Holly Hunter, on the other hand, could probably use a few good faces to wail on. One look at her ripping up linoleum in the kitchen is all you need to imagine how quick she’d wipe that grin off Tyler Durden’s face.

Thirteen: A-

Fight Club: A