Frank or Just Plain Exploitative?

Can’t we be spared the inevitable hype about another movie claiming to deal with what’s “real and truthful” in teenagers’ lives (“The Real Deal,” by Patrick Goldstein, Aug. 13)? How many “real” 13-year-old girls do you know who are actively seducing their 24-year-old neighbors?

I’ll buy that teenage girls (and boys) are often lonely, alienated and living in a culture with a lot of sexual hang-ups. However, I also observe that “real” teenagers lead complex lives and occasionally think about issues other than sex (funny how movies like “Thirteen” seldom focus on those issues).

The line between “truth-telling” and exploitation is often difficult to draw; it would be wrong to expect that kind of insight from 14-year-old girls. However, that’s what the adults in their lives are supposed to be doing.

BONNIE SLOANE

Los Angeles

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What will girls take from a film that makes a vivid show of (rather than a discreet allusion to) their 14-year-old peers lap-dancing a grown man?

The director of “Thirteen” clearly means to be on the side of girls pressured by a constant barrage of “messages we send them [about] body consciousness.” She may mean to be making a cautionary tale, but I suspect that such imagery will simply become part of the same media barrage of images of glamorous, “willowy” teens being daring and adult.

Mainly, though, it will just up the ante for Hollywood’s portrayal of teen sex, encouraging ever more “frank” (i.e., titillating, gratuitous) imagery for the sake of ticket sales.

Whenever Hollywood says it will present a story that is “frank” and “challenging,” it ends up just raising the bar of exploitation.

CAROLYN KRASNOW

Los Angeles

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Viva the double standard. On Sunday, plus-size director Neil LaBute was described in The Times as “burly” (“A Repertory Company of One,” by Hugh Hart, Aug. 11).

Just one day later, Anna Nicole Smith was slammed with this sentence: “Seemingly at peace with the tonnage she added since her cover-girl glory, our heroine carried herself like Moby-Dick in drag

The message is clear: Large-size man OK, large-size woman shameful.

No wonder so many women starve themselves.

SUEBOB DAVIS

Thousand Oaks

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With all due respect to Howard Rosenberg, his appraisal of the new Anna Nicole Smith series is almost shockingly off-base. While I and my friends saw a deeply depressed and clearly drug-addled woman acting out a pattern of self-destruction, Rosenberg sees a buffoon.

His ridicule of Anna Nicole seems misplaced, given her state of physical and emotional ill health. He would do better to aim his attack at the people responsible for this sad and exploitative spectacle. At least they presumably have the clarity to make responsible choices, and they have chosen to make a laughingstock of a woman whose misery is hard to watch, though just as with a train wreck, it’s hard to look away.

JOANNE WOLF

Venice