Ice, Ice, Baby

I wanted to write something about the role of "Thriller" in 13Go30. Unfortunately, "Thriller," though fantastic, is mostly just very silly. Have you ever read all the lyrics to that song? It's really just about watching scary movies. Classic video, though, and some killer zombie dance moves.

Anyway. This did get me thinking about the role of music and music videos in 13Go30. There are three dance numbers in the film, which seems like a surprising number, even for a film in this genre. We have the classic "Thriller" group dance, the slumber-party jam-out to "Love Is a Battlefield," and Jenna's hockey-hunk boyfriend Alex Carlson's "Ice Ice Baby" striptease.

The striptease is an interesting scene. It is  one of child-as-adult-Jenna's only encounters with adult sexuality. Adult-Jenna is sexually active and has a number of regular partners. Child-as-adult-Jenna would have to deal with these men and with sexuality at some point. At the same time, Jenna's only 13 and not ready for the sorts of relationships adult-Jenna has formed (and audiences might be uncomfortable with a thirteen-year-old girl in a thirty-year-old woman's body sleeping with a grown man [not an anxiety shared by the producers of Big]. How to handle the scene? With a goofy striptease.

Jenna is placed in a sexually charged situation, but Alex is changed from an actor/aggressor into a performer: he becomes someone Jenna can choose to (uncomfortably) ignore. The choice of song and Alex's awkward and vain posturing serve to further de-sexualize the scene. (This is also one of Jenna's few encounters with post-1987 music. Too bad for her.)

More on the other two songs later.

It's not Big or Freaky Friday

At first gloss, the premise of 13 Going on 30  seems familiar: an adolescent wishes to become an adult, believing life will be better and easier once childhood is in the rear-view, and this wish is magically granted. We've seen this before: Freaky Friday and Big are notable examples of the genre.

But there is an important distinction between the situation of the characters in those earlier films and Jenna Rink in 13Go30. Whereas Josh Baskin wishes to be big and subsequently has to find his way as a child in an adult world, Jenna wishes to be "thirty, flirty, and thriving," and has to find her way as her child self in her adult self's world.

The distinction here is essential: whereas other films about children magically becoming adults explore what might happen if a child were to become an adult, 13Go30 wonders what would happen if a child become her adult self. Jenna has magically woken up as her thirty-year-old self. She has already lived the intervening 17 years and become a person she doesn't know, but who has thriving professional personal lives. Other movies in the genre explore the gaps between childish naivety and innocence and adult experience and cynicism. 13Go30 is more interested in the implications of amnesia. What would happen if you couldn't remember more than half your life? What challenges would you face? How might your childlike perspective influence your adult world?

Given the era in which 13Go30 was written, produced, and released, there is one significant takeaway from this: Jenna Rink is perhaps the only adult American without any knowledge or experience of September 11th and the attacks' aftermath.

Whereas everyone else in Jenna's social circle--successful, well-connected, upper-class Manhattanites--remembers exactly where he or she was that morning when the planes hit, perhaps lost friends or loved ones in the attacks, has been following the invasion of Iraq over the past year, will soon be dealing with the revelations and implications of the torture at Abu Ghraib, Jenna Rink has experienced none of that. While the film never directly explores this aspect of Jenna's character, it is on some level the biggest gap between her character and everyone else around her. Jenna has been spared the trauma that the rest of the country and the world are still working through.