Going On 13's credits are rolling and I’m grooving to the closing song. I’ve just written myself a mental note to “look up Queen Latifah songs and find this” when a young woman goes to the front and introduces herself as Myariah Nikole from BUMP Records, the artist in question.
The song is filled with the kind of raw, sassy, and poignant honesty about women’s lives and concerns we’re currently missing in mainstream pop and hip-hop. Its chorus beams, “This is the life of a little girl.” Its content is true—changing body image, learning how to love yourself as you are, weighing what other people say about you against what you know about yourself—and none of it easy.
It’s all there when Myariah (Ryah) sings for us, leading this relatively staid audience in clapping and swaying in our cushy seats. Myariah, it turns out, wrote, recorded, and produced the song with minimal guidance from BUMP, the Bay Unity Music Project, a youth organization in California that produces and promotes young artists’ work.
Myariah’s performance encompasses the full joyousness of this whole event. Throughout the film, the mostly female audience of all ages has been laughing, groaning, nodding, and in truth, reliving all those painful and hilarious (in retrospect) moments of our pre-teen youth. We are being reminded of ages nine through 13, during which all of the beliefs we hold about ourselves are in many ways carved like tattoos upon our fleshy minds, never to be entirely erased. Hence the groaning.
The directors and their subjects move to the front for a Q+A. There is a rabidity in the audience’s demeanor as we all surge our hands upward like aggressive A-students vying for the attention of a favorite teacher.
One of the recurring questions is whether or not the girls felt their behavior and choices changed as a result of the constant presence of cameras in their lives. The answer is consistently “no” from both Ariana and Rosie.
“Chrissy and Dawn (the directors) are like family. We talked all the time off camera about our lives,” says Ariana matter-of-factly. Harolina, her mother, has a different answer “I believe they had an influence," she says. "Dawn and Christy were always encouraging Ariana in everything she did. Now she’s more confident and not afraid to allow people to see who she is.”
On the experience of watching themselves on screen, the two girls have different reactions. “I’m just glad things are better now,” says Rosie, finding it painful to relive a few stressful and depressing years. Ariana says, “I don’t care. I didn’t care at the beginning of filming or at the end. I’m just me.” Dawn chimes in, “Ariana is the most un-self-conscious person I’ve ever encountered on film.” Throughout the Q+A, they interrupt and complete each other’s sentences the way a close-knit gang of rockin’ chicks should.
After the Q+A, I ask Ariana and Rosie what major changes they felt happen to themselves during filming. “It was just transforming from a little girl to a woman, when I realized I didn’t want to wear baggy clothes and play basketball anymore. When I got into that girly stuff,” says Ariana. “There really wasn’t a major change so much as I started to let them and everyone else see my life more, whether it was good or bad,” reflects Rosie.
They both say the film shows what girls are really like, and what they go through every day. “If you want to know anything about girls, you have to watch this film,” says Ariana definitively.
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