13 Going on Serpent

And then the serpent came upon me. It was beautiful, and it said unto me: “leave your fiance. Be with me.” 

And I said “No.” 

And thus said the serpent: “your answer matters not. It shall be otherwise.” 

This is basically the plot of 13 Going on 30 from the perspective of Mark Ruffalo’s character, Matt. You’re 13-years-old and madly in love with Jenna, the girl who lives next door– but what matters to her is fitting in with the popular kids. You can’t really begrudge her for this, especially because those things don’t really seem mutually exclusive. 

But things didn’t work out between your muse and the popular kids and somehow that was your fault so now you’ve been ostracized. 17-years-later you’re a cool photographer-dude living in the village and about to get married.

There’s nothing in the film to suggest that Matt had spent any amount of his adult life pining after Jenna, but then all of the sudden she appears at your doorstep. 

Matt has no way of knowing this, but Jenna’s 13-year-old consciousness has been magicked from 1987 to 2004. She has no idea of the woman she’s become or what she had to do to become her. It would be really easy to impeach the character of adult Jenna before she was supplanted by her middle-school self, but the movie does enough of that on its own. If anything, the film goes further than it needs to, indicting her for doing what she felt she had to do to get ahead. 

I loved this movie but I’m being told that I’ve somehow missed the point because I didn’t see this as a film about how love will always find a way if you stay true to yourself. That reading, which I imagine is the intended one, turns Matt and his fiance into furniture, existing only to be arranged. 

If Matt becomes your main character, this becomes a story about temptation, about a man being punished for the sin of moving on and moving on well. The film doesn’t really interrogate whether or not he cares about Jenna before she shows up. It’s 2004 and he’s a photographer living downtown with a fiance. Matt is not a guy with nothing going on– he’s a whole adult. 

Then Jenna shows back up, and she’s just like he remembered her, except grown-up. She can’t leave Matt alone– and it’s not her fault because he’s all she’s got tying her back to the world she came from. Matt pulls back, but Jenna has resources and she uses them, compulsively, to bring him back in. She introduces not only romantic temptation into his life, but also fiscal stakes when she hires him for her magazine. 

Matt almost folds. Maybe when he went to Jenna’s office he was going to profess his love for her. But when he doesn’t find her he gets with the program and goes through with marrying his fiance, who he loves. And when Jenna goes at the last second to try and stop the wedding, he doesn’t hesitate– he says no. 

But none of that matters because Jenna’s consciousness is hurled once more through time to the great inflection point– her 13th birthday party. She kisses Matt, and suddenly they’re 30 again, having the same backyard wedding Matt was meant to share with his original fiance.

You see, the serpent isn’t Jenna. The serpent is the rules.

This was the life Jenna wanted for herself– and maybe, it was what Matt would have wanted too. 

But since nobody ever bothered to ask him, we’ll never know for sure.