Although Harriet the Spy was once classifiable as a piece of “baby boomer history,” the adaptation of Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 novel into a Nickelodeon movie released in 1996 re-rendered it into an instant classic of millennial childhood. And yes, it was typical of the generation that, in order for a book to be “received,” it had to be a film (e.g., Matilda, Jumanji, The Iron Giant, Babe, The Secret Garden). And oh, how Harriet the Spy was received. That is, considering it was a kids’ movie released by an entity that had only just started dabbling in film production, Harriet was a solid box office hit, respectfully recouping more than its fair share of a twelve-million-dollar budget.
A large part of its success was due to the charismatic performance of Michelle Trachtenberg, who imbued a difficult a.k.a. not necessarily “likable” character with humanity and empathy. And it all begins with Harriet hiding behind a stack of crates in front of the local grocer (called Hong Fat’s) as she scribbles down various observations of the people passing by in her notebook. Among the earliest of her voiceover dialogue is, thus, “I learn everything I can and I write down everything I see.” Announcing who she is to the viewer, Harriet made it immediately cool—chicly mysterious—to want to be a writer. To exist as some ivory tower-dwelling, holier-than-thou being who could sit on the sidelines and pass judgment on others while calling it art. And, of course, if most people are being honest with themselves, the majority of all writing is driven by a desire to judge others, to speak freely about how one sees them—de facto, the world.
With the encouragement of her nanny, “Ole” Golly (Rosie O’Donnell), Harriet feels the freedom to do just that, told that if she wants to become a writer, then, yes, she should write down what she observes regularly (it’s all practice, after all). In this regard, the title of the book/movie makes it clear that writers are, indeed, spies. Constantly-lurking freakshows among the rest of humanity, which goes about its business “as usual.” Actually “living.” Which is why Harriet the Spy also underlyingly highlighted to budding millennial writers that to pursue this as a profession was to live a life as an outcast, often offending those that one wrote candidly about (for all good writing should be candid, should lay something or someone bare).
But Harriet’s unbridled commitment to writing down the unvarnished truth only intensifies after Golly is, at first, fired by Harriet’s mother, Violetta (J. Smith-Cameron, long before her Succession days), and then agrees that she should leave after Violetta calms down and retracts the firing. While, in the book, Golly leaves the position because the man she’s seeing proposes to her (one of the ways in which the novel is more entrenched in mid-twentieth century “values” than late-twentieth century ones), in the movie, she leaves merely because she’s realized “it’s time.” Not just for Harriet to stand on her own without Golly as a crutch, but for Golly to break out and see a bit of the world. Needless to say, this reasoning doesn’t go over all that well with Harriet, who starts to emotionally flail without her second mother figure.
And, although it’s clear that Harriet is privileged, and that perhaps her parents could get a replacement nanny, they opt not to. But that appears to stem more from their overall emotional negligence (in keeping with the general style of baby boomer parenting) than anything resembling doing it “out of respect” for the relationship that Harriet has with Golly, making the latter effectively irreplaceable anyway. Nonetheless, the implication of Harriet’s privileged background becomes an important point in the movie, especially between her and one of her best friends, Sport (Gregory Smith), whose father is a struggling writer (again, Harriet the Spy makes no bones about the social and financial instability of the medium). As such, Sport’s poverty is glaring to Harriet, particularly one afternoon when she catches him unable to pay for basic groceries like milk and bread. Observing him from afar, she walks into the shop and pretends like she saw him drop a dollar outside so that he can afford to pay for all the items that have been rung up. Although Sport pretends to go along with Harriet’s charade, it’s obvious that his embarrassment has taken hold, prompting him to leave quickly without inviting Harriet to accompany him.
Harriet writes coldly and judgmentally about the incident in her notebook, which is discovered by prying eyes later on in the movie when the requisite mean girl of the school, Marion Hawthorne (Charlotte Sullivan), picks it up after Harriet drops it during a game of tag. Then, like Lisa (Angelina Jolie) in Girl, Interrupted reading Susanna’s (Winona Ryder) diary to all the other mental patients, Marion does the same with Harriet’s notebook to all the other kids in their class. And, naturally, there’s something unflattering to read about everyone, which seals Harriet’s doom as a social pariah. Ostracized and bullied for her audacity in speaking the truth. Something that, of course, is always deemed especially “audacious” for a girl to do.
Alas, because Golly was the one who encouraged her to start writing in the notebooks in the first place, it becomes apparent that Harriet’s increased devotion to the daily ritual is at least, in part, her way of trying to stay connected to the close friend she’s lost. Unfortunately, Marion ruins this connection, this fervor. Because, soon after, her parents insist that she stop writing for a while “as an experiment.” As her father, Ben (Robert Joy), puts it, “This obsession you’ve developed, it’s not entirely healthy.” However, being that this ain’t no baby boomer kid, Harriet feels unabashed about talking back, calling out the hypocrisy of her parents with the retort, “No! Let’s see you experience things without your ‘unhealthy obsessions,’ huh? [to her father] Every day you come home and pour yourself a big martini. How come you don’t give that up? [to her mother] And how many days go by without you going to a stupid party, or buying some other piece of crappy jewelry? Like two?”
And even before this major flare-up, her reaction to the suggestion of ceasing to write is an incredulous, “Stop writing?” Almost as if to do so would be like losing one of her limbs. Regardless, Violetta assures, “Harriet, the world is filled with so many things a person like yourself could enjoy.” Ben chimes in, “And you’re going to find that sometimes just experiencing them can be enough” (here it must be said that one can’t help but think of how retroactively absurd it is to want to take a notebook away from a child because they’re not “in the moment,” when, currently, smartphones have all but “disappeared” Gen Z and those coming up after them). Harriet is not swayed, countering, “That’s how I experience things—with my notebook.” Undoubtedly, that is how writers are able to “participate” in life: by documenting it.
What comes next for Harriet is a trip to the child psychiatrist (which also happens in the book—a plot point that might seem ahead of its time to some, but bear in mind that Book Harriet is an Upper East Side kid). As was the fashion of the day, Dr. Wagner (Roger Clown) decides the best approach to psychologically assessing Harriet is to play a game with her. As he does, he jots something down in his own “secret notebook.” When Harriet asks, “What are you doing?” Dr. Wagner replies, “Just taking notes.” Harriet counter-questions, “Are they the mean, nasty kind or the regular kind?” Roger looks at her strangely and says, “Why?” Harriet warns, “Because. I’m just telling you, it’s tough getting away with the nasty kind these days.”
If it already was then, it certainly is now. With many a writer subject to the vagaries of what’s “too offensive” to say in the current moment. And while millennial writers have been a key contributor to the “vanilla-fication” of writing, Harriet was not one of them. As a matter of fact, she’s even told by Golly at one point, “You’re an individual, and you know something? That makes people nervous. And it’s gonna keep makin’ people nervous your whole life.”
Even so, Golly also makes it known to Harriet that there’s a unique responsibility to writing that some can’t handle (e.g., Truman Capote). When they start to maliciously throw people under the bus—even those they’re supposedly close to, like friends and family—it’s not a mark of “uncompromised” writing so much as cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
As for the now deceased Trachtenberg (whose death was shocking for many reasons), her own proximity, personality-wise, to the character she brought to life is, without question, what made Harriet so believable and relatable. The kind of heroine that would have a pronounced effect on the youth of the day. As Trachtenberg told Uproxx in 2016 (in honor of the film’s twentieth anniversary that year), “I had a very outgoing personality and my mom and I worked hard on rehearsing the scenes round the clock—my passion for the role won the producers’ hearts. I loved everything about Harriet, particularly that she was a writer because I had been writing stories from the second I learned how to write.” In this sense, too, Harriet was even helping to further draw out a millennial writer in Trachtenberg.
For those “of a certain age” who are writers (or at least still trying at being considered writers by way of being paid for it), there can be no denying the influence and inspiration that Harriet the Spy lent to their impressionable minds. If only more of them had taken her cue on being totally unfiltered in their observations. But it seems that many instead took Golly’s advice a little too far—the advice about how sparing someone’s feelings with a lie is what’s most important. What must take precedence over the prose itself. Hence, some of the “safe” writing that millennial audiences and beyond have come to know in the decades since 1996.