Going Crazy Over Girls

Wha

t are little girls made of? Well, you can pretty much forget sugar and spice or anything remotely hinting at nice nowadays. If we are to believe the movie Thirteen (and why shouldn't we, since co-star Nikki Reed, 15, co-wrote the film?), we would have to think navel rings, tongue studs and multiple forms of self-abuse, ranging from girls' cutting themselves with knives to getting their girlfriends to kayo them with roundhouse punches. Even Annabell (Lindsay Lohan), the teen queen of Freaky Friday, an agreeable sitcom masquerading as a movie, sports a pierced tummy button.

These are kids with enough disposable income and not too much parental dominance. They ought to be loose and happy, listening to bubble-gum pop, painting their toenails outrageous colors and mooning over clueless boys. Instead they are tense and miserable, brooding, whining and flirting with self-immolation in the hormonal fire storm that rages in all of them.

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Hollywood, having served teenage boys with decades' worth of action movies, is now making something of a play for their sisters. It has been, sort of, the summer of the girls, with pictures ranging from Bend It Like Beckham (Indian girl in London satisfies her dream of soccer stardom) to Whale Rider (Maori girl becomes the spiritual leader of her tribe) to I Capture the Castle (British teen comes to grips with her emerging sexuality). All these movies have hung on for weeks in theaters, attracting not just young girls but their parents too.

This is a big change from as little as a decade ago. "When I first went around with the script for Clueless, everybody passed on it because it was from a young girl's point of view," says director Amy Heckerling. "They thought maybe it would be O.K. on Nickelodeon, but young guys were who you wanted to get into theaters." Now the girl-centric movie is proving to be as popular an entertainment as the boys' big-bucks shoot-'em-ups. The newest chicklet flick, Freaky Friday, opened to surprisingly strong reviews and box-office numbers last week. Up next is the rather more grim Thirteen, directed with passionate intensity by Catherine Hardwicke, who had a mentoring relationship with Reed, the daughter of an ex-boyfriend.

Both films take up a topic currently agitating academics — female bullying — which is central to Thirteen and a somewhat underdeveloped subplot in Freaky Friday. In the former, Reed plays Evie, who moves in on a slightly disheveled but still functioning family and leads the daughter Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) to the brink of disaster. It contains a nice, dithering performance by Holly Hunter as a mom making a living by hairdressing at home while trying to sustain a relationship with an unpromising guy (Jeremy Sisto). In the latter, the mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her kid are magically obliged to switch roles, with Mom enduring a day as a teenager and the teenager taking over the woman's psychology practice.

You know, naturally, where that's heading — toward a better understanding of each other's problems. The gimmick is cleverly, weightlessly played out. Thirteen is quite a different proposition. You get the impression that Hardwicke, who is single and childless, got shocked to her socks trying to help raise a girl in a culture full of bad-assed music, shopaholic mall life and loony peer pressure for the right clothes and attitude. Yet there's a welcome roughness and passion to Thirteen. To see the essentially innocent Tracy taken over by her scheming, psychopathic friend because everyone else — parents, teachers, cliquey friends (another big topic in academia)--is too distracted to see how lost and yearning she has become is inevitably touching.

Different in intent as they are, these pictures leave two strong impressions. One is that the destructive patterns of teenagers are gender driven. Boys damage others along with themselves in their car crashes; girls often turn harmfully, secretively on themselves. The other is that girls, more so than guys, tend to mourn lost (Freaky Friday) or emotionally distant (Thirteen) fathers. Is it possible that the absence of fathers, a subject touched on in Whale Rider and Castle as well, is what's driving these girls nuts? That's a question some movie should tackle with the kind of head-on fervor often seen in teenage girls.