“13 Going On 30” Retrospective
Christa B. Allen, young middle school doppelganger to Jennifer Garner in 13 Going On 30 is turning 30 this year.
Rewatching this film with an adult hindsight, I marveled at the strangeness of the whole enterprise. I had a younger sister, we were close, and so DVDs like this were easy to come by in our household. 13 Going On 30 is one of many transformation movies both magical and pragmatic. Mean Girls is a transformation of sorts, in a similar way to when our main character in this story, Jenna Rink, betrays her next door neighbor Matt Flamhaff to pursue a life of admiration by other women. But others like Freaky Friday or 17 Again were fantasies asking the question: what if things had gotten so terrible that you would choose to change your life instantly? We might find all these flicks to be a fantastical rejection of our reality in the mid-2000s: war, terrorism, surveillance, and a burgeoning housing crisis. The chance to leap forward removes us of responsibility (or so we might think). The chance to leap back is to have a do over, to correct perceived wrongs. And a lateral switch, like with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, fosters empathy.
Fortunately for Jenna Rink, global geopolitics is not on her radar.
Jenna lives as a middle schooler in 1987 as an upper-middle class suburbanite with dreams of being accepted by a young Lucy Wyman (an adult Judy Greer!) who is surrounded by her “plastics” as they routinely bully the nerd Matt Flamhaff out of the picture, and encourage Jenna to finish a group “report” for school on her own. Oblivious and naïve, Jenna is excited for her house party to go off without a hitch, with a pregame strategy of kissing the television, dancing to “Thriller”, wearing clothes she immediately doubts, and (when the party starts) hazing Matt with the same pathetic line Lucy used back at school: “you don’t have to give me the play-by-play.”
Little did we know that Matt instigates, through his magical dust that he poured on his homemade dream house model for Jenna, a worm hole through time and space. After an awkward “seven minutes in heaven” game gone wrong (“You go into the closet and wait for a man to have his way with you”) the magical dust falls on Jenna and she’s whisked away to 2004, where she is Jennifer Garner, living in a luxurious New York flat that hardly anyone could afford, with a career as editor for a style magazine.
Where to even begin with this movie?
For starters, Brie Larson is in there somewhere. Go find her. (Clue: Six Chick #3)
Jennifer Garner is not the only level up. Matt Flamhaff became estranged since their falling out in middle school, which, let’s be real, happened for all of us. In the change over to different friends, Matt turned into a laid back but still rustically handsome Mark Ruffalo. When Jenna has her initial freak out moment, seeing a naked hunk of a hockey player in her apartment and discovering just how much responsibility she has at her job, Jenna asks her assistant to track down Matt. Only in Hollywood convenience would it be possible that, yes, Matt’s in the Village.
“Which village?” Jenna asks. Canned laughter.
Matt recounts a blasé high school trajectory: Jenna became popular and rolled with Lucy for the remainder of high school. She went out with the school hottie and won prom queen. She did it all. We’re not exactly sure if Matt buys in to Jenna’s telling him that she’s a thirteen year old caught in a thirty year old’s body, but something in his reserved grimace hints that there’s still a spark left. Jenna comes to the realization that, after all these years, she got exactly everything she wanted. As is also the case with celluloid, the joy is short-lived.
The first analysis to make is the one concerning her workplace. Similar to Tom Hanks’s Big, it turns out that staying young works wonders for Jenna and her creativity. Her boss, Richard Kneeland (Andy Serkis) is at wit’s end. Their rival magazine continues to steal all of their ideas and take the credit. In a desperate bid for attention, they hold an upscale mid-2000s party. Jenna is ecstatic as she realizes she’ll arrive in a limo. The party, however, is grinding to a halt. Richard is desperate. Jenna approaches the DJ and asks for, you guessed it, “Thriller”. Matt, though he rejected her invitation to the party at first, shows up, and it’s magic in the making. Jenna forces him on the dance floor, and the choreography begins. Who can believe that Jennifer Garner, Andy Serkis, and Mark Ruffalo were getting paid the big bucks to start a line dance to “Thriller”? The dance floor is soon snuggly filled. Jenna’s brash adolescent confidence wins the day.
It’s not just her lack of awareness in adult social mores that works out. Later on in the film, the style magazine has a competition between the editors to pitch the next thematic piece for the magazine. Lucy, the toxic thinker that she might have always been, opts for a Windows Movie Maker montage with intense neon greens. “IT WILL BE DEADLY SERIOUS” Lucy’s Don Draper-like domineering voice intones. “FASHION SUICIDE!”
Jenna instead considers a post-ironic sentimental display of “real women” with her Class of 2004 series of photography sessions led by Matt himself. “You don’t have to hand me any favors,” Matt says when he sees the check. “I like your work,” Jenna responds. And together they sail through several hit songs and montages of their own, and Matt, though he is engaged to be married with only weeks away, is starting to have misgivings. Jenna’s boss, however, has none. After Jenna’s pitch Andy Serkis is crying and applauding, shouting “Bravo!” to Jenna and her science fair tri-fold boards.
Could it be that America, a country always infatuated with youth, would really respond well to Jenna’s jump through time with applause and line dances? Or is it the combination of Jenna’s poignant arrival to some low hanging fruit? We are not given time to see whether Jenna’s magazine pitch sells issues, however, as some backstabbing occurs. It’s Lucy! She’s the mole. But wait! The twist we realize is that, before thirteen year old Jenna had taken control of her older body, she was the mole all along. For perhaps months, Jenna had been feeding information to the rival magazine. She was the guilty culprit all along. The film gets to have its cake and eat it too: success, but all too late.
The second analysis is the bizarre arc of the romance between Jenna and Matt. They were friends before a dramatic changeover, call it puberty, but in this case it is pushing forward in time. We have to concede that Matt is really falling back in love with Jenna as she was at thirteen, which is an age in the mind way too young for the hip and artistic photographer Matt is today. Coupled with this fact, Matt’s fiancé Wendy seems kinda cool. Regardless of the fact that Matt seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time with a middle school crush gone all beautiful (“it’s for work” we might hear Matt say), her positivity she expresses towards Jenna in each scene gives the knife wound a turn of the blade.
But the romance is really a cover for something far deeper in Jenna’s psyche. Matt is sacrificed for Jenna’s self-actualization. Her Class of 2004 campaign has little to do with the prospect of “real women” on pictures in the magazine, but more of a chance for her to reclaim the coming of age story she never got to have. Throughout the film, she gets to shop with newly found disposable income, something we never had until we got high school jobs. In her lowest lows, she returns home to her parents, in those encounters we’ve all had where life is so terrible that the war between us and them is at an armistice. She gets to reject men, like her hunk hockey player who performs one of the most sexy and insane strip teases ever devised on camera (“I’ll show you my DESTROYER”). In all of these cases we have the discretion and scrutiny of getting to decide what you want and, more importantly, what you do not want. Where middle school involves fitting in, Jenna is looking for ways, like we do in high school, to stand out.
Jenna realizes that, in the life she is only able to witness in its telling by Matt and Lucy, she never really left middle school. Sure, she got everything she wanted with glamor, boys, and a style magazine, but in this life she kept up the toxic parade that she used as a cover for success all those years ago. The biting criticisms, the backstabbing, trying liven up the party by removing the outlier; they are all still here as plot points, a kind of adolescent universe, but now it’s everywhere. 13 Going On 30 reminds us that, unfortunately, not too much changes from middle school. There are still hierarchies, still water cooler talk at the office, still gossip that seems inseparable from the social primates we happen to be. What Jenna has to do is long for something that came before that. Matt’s love for Jenna concerns creativity, open-mindedness, grace, and a hint of goofballness, that does not make for mid-2000s coolness. What it did do was prepare them for a post-recession popularity. The culture of the mid-2000s ruptured dramatically, as we all know, replaced by the social awareness turn contrasted in 21 Jump Street, a sort of powerful Gen-z-ish acceptance of each stage of life into the vertical Tik Tok screen. Creativity for its own sake, and not for the likes of Brie Larson and the other “Six Chicks”.
Sure, there may be one too many montages in this one-hour-and-thirty-eight-minute film, that hints at a script unable to push farther into the intricacies of the argument. And sure, we have less confidence in the survival rate of the romance between Jenna and Matt than the movie assumes. But 13 Going On 30 is a fascinating watch in 2021 for its ability to ask all the right and wrong questions about what it means to skip those important moments of identity formation to see what came out on the other side. It begs us to live by that Robert Frost line. It begs us to reconsider.
Happy 30th birthday Christa B. Allen. I hope it all went okay.
Originally published at https://theroyleline.blog on April 26, 2021.
