![]() ![]() Maya's classmates bully her with racist jokes and label her as the Ugliest Girl in School, making her obsess that she's not enough of anything – not wealthy enough, cool enough or white enough.Īnna's unflagging support and compliments push back against the shame this produces, but this best friend is only one girl standing against imposing mean girl cliques and a mom, Yuki (Mutosuko Erskine, the star's real mother) she's convinced doesn't get her. These closing chapters dive deeper into the loneliness and secret anguish under the show's skin, especially as that pain is experienced by Maya, whose childlike gawkiness is in an unspoken tug-of-war with her sprouting sexuality and a worsening case of attention deficit disorder. Functionally the pause helps to mark a personality shift in the series between the overtly comedic first season and the sweet and painful opening episodes of the second. The second half of the comedy's second season arrives a year after the first, another pandemic-interrupted production. "PEN15" lures us back on that hike and drops us into the wilds without warning, naked and afraid, while reassuring us that everything is going to be alright. Those movies are a window into our worst nightmares of navigating teen girldom. ![]() ![]() And that's where "PEN15" serves us in a way films like "Thirteen" strove to, but couldn't quite. This genius move let the audience in on the joke of adolescence with all its hormonal explosions and betrayals, and subsequent discoveries about the body's mysteries, from the safe remove of adulthood. They made us feel seen and, weirdly, exposed. Seeing this for the first time – and second, and third – provoked a bizarre somatic reaction landing somewhere between absolute hilarity and horror. In the first season they stepped into the skins of their 13-year-old selves as 31-year-old women, playing their alter egos Anna Kone and Maya Ishii-Peters beside actual 13-year-old seventh graders. Such sapience only fully blossoms with maturity and hindsight, which "PEN15" creators and stars Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine fully capitalize upon in the final descent of their series' arc. Much later we realize that everyone's a mess of confusion and hormones, even the kids who are playing it cool. Related: "Melodramatic representations of teenagers always bother me"Īll we want to do it is fit in and stand out for the right reasons, convinced everyone else is living a more glamorous life than we are. For them, and most of us, 13 is mainly synonymous with awkwardness, insecurity and yearning. Some of Reed's fellow teens resented its hysterical portraiture of adolescence as some dangerous slide into disaster. girls spinning out of control as they leap into a world of sex and drugs. Hardwicke collaborated on her script with her 15-year-old co-star Nikki Reed, whose input legitimized its raw and terrifying portrayal of L.A. But both invite us to tag along with pairs of seventh grade girls careening into the wilderness of adolescence in stories set in the early '00s.Įach was also written by the women who lived them. Despite the obvious parallels, the series and film couldn't be more unalike. Digesting the final seven episodes of " PEN15" inspired a bracing chaser of a rewatch: "Thirteen," Catherine Hardwicke's 2003 directorial debut. ![]()
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