In “Harriet the Spy,” Michelle Trachtenberg was the sleuth who understood how hard it is to be a kid

I don’t have any tomatoes and it’s a crisis. 

Well, that’s not exactly true — at least the former part isn’t. I’m specifically out of red globe tomatoes. In a frantic search through my kitchen and cupboards, I find several cans of Trader Joe’s tomato paste, and some cherry tomatoes are sitting on my counter. But neither of those will do. On a normal day, a tomatoless household wouldn’t be a problem. But in a grief-stricken panic, trying to use the 20 remaining minutes before a meeting to make myself a tomato sandwich for lunch in honor of Harriet M. Welsch, not having any juicy, red fruits on my counter is a disaster.

After hearing of actress and millennial icon Michelle Trachtenberg’s untimely passing Wednesday afternoon, a tomato sandwich was one of the first things that popped into my mind. In Trachtenberg’s 1996 film debut, “Harriet the Spy,” the titular character fixes herself a nasty-looking sandwich for lunch. The camera holds on a tight shot of a tomato being butchered by a dull kitchen knife, juice and seeds spilling out as the fruit splits down its sides. “Just give me the big knife and this will all be over!” Harriet protests to her mother. But Harriet can’t be trusted with the big knife. She can barely be trusted with her composition notebook, which she uses on spy missions where she stalks unsuspecting characters around the city and writes down her thoughts about each and every one.

I had a lot of hyperfixations as a child: Lindsay Lohan’s British accent in “The Parent Trap,” the board game Pretty Pretty Princess and the things that my older sister was allowed to do that I wasn’t. But none came close to “Harriet the Spy.” It was the first movie I ever saw in theaters. My father took off work in the middle of the day to take me to the multiplex, where it must’ve been playing as a special matinee selection for kids, given that I would’ve been two years old when it was originally released in the summer of ’96. Plenty of movies have changed my life, but “Harriet the Spy” opened my world. Seeing it on the big screen was a revelation, the closest I had ever come to religion despite attending Lutheran Sunday School every week. 

But it wasn’t just the enormity of the theater screen that dazzled me, it was the movie itself. “Harriet the Spy” is unlike any other children’s movie I’ve seen to this day. It’s brutally honest in the way that so much media made for kids is not. The film never once talks down to its young viewers, or believes that they can’t understand complex themes and difficult scenarios. Harriet herself is as three-dimensional as it gets. Some early reviews described her as a brat. Others thought the movie — which deals with divorce, loss, poverty, depression, child psychoanalysis, you name it! — was too progressive. But what those adult critics failed to see was that, no matter how much a parent tries to shield their kid from the world’s hardships, they will inevitably experience them anyway. And when viewers met Trachtenberg’s steely, prying gaze, millions of children and their parents learned an invaluable lesson: Just because kids are young doesn’t mean that they don’t see and feel everything that adults do.

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When I heard that Trachtenberg had passed, Harriet M. Welsch was my first thought; the defiant, headstrong kid with a precocious sense of humor to match. Those traits, paired with her knack for snooping, made Harriet just like I was as a child: too curious for my own good, and prone to making mistakes because of it. After I saw “Harriet the Spy” in theaters, I became obsessed with the movie, watching it as often as I could until I threatened to wear out the bright, Nickelodeon-orange VHS tape, itself a standout memory from my childhood. For Christmas, “Santa” brought me a spy belt with toy binoculars and other silly, plastic gear. You’ve got to hand it to my parents, for as many times as they were forced to watch and hear “Harriet the Spy” playing in our house, they never perceived Harriet’s questionable antics as a detriment to their son’s spongy mind.

Michelle Trachtenberg at the premiere of “Harriet the Spy” July 9, 1996 in New York City. (Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

But for other households, that wasn’t the case. In a 1996 piece in the Tampa Bay Times, one mother called the movie vindictive, saying it was filled with revenge. (That’s not totally untrue, but more on that in a second.) Debby Beece, the former president of Nickelodeon Movies, argued otherwise. “We wanted something that families could see and talk about and that would spark some interest, not just be a mindless movie that had a lot of toilet humor and violence in it,” Beece said in the same article. “It doesn’t pander in the same way a lot of entertainment does. It shows what really goes on with kids . . . these are kids fighting with other kids, and it may not be real physical violence, but it’s emotional violence, which in some ways is worse and can be more damaging.”

Beece is completely correct, “Harriet the Spy” doesn’t pander to kids one bit. In fact, this is a kids movie written and shot like any film made for adults. The film is stylish and intelligent, but what’s most impressive is that it trusts its audience; there’s no hand-holding, or overexplanations of its narrative to water down its themes into palatable baby food. “Harriet the Spy” is a film that believes kids will recognize themselves, their peers and their parents. Maybe that’s what some parents were so afraid of. 

In the film, Harriet’s mother and father (played by J. Smith-Cameron and Robert Joy, respectively), are largely absent from her life. They’re both wealthy psychologists who spend all day at the office and all night at swanky dinners with their colleagues. In their place, Harriet is left with her beloved nanny, Golly (Rosie O’Donnell, in the role of a lifetime), who knows Harriet’s interests and tastes far better than her parents, a sad reality that inevitably comes between them when Golly accidentally leverages the truth against Harriet’s folks. Harriet’s spying is partly the product of her parents’ truancy and partly a result of her deep affection for the world around her and all those who inhabit it. In her notebook, she jots down suspicions about strange people on her spy route between observations about her two closest friends, Janie (Vanessa Chester) and Sport (Gregory Smith). 

This unusual hobby makes Harriet a target of the popular kids at her elementary school, where she’s vying against Queen Bee Marion Hawthorne (Charlotte Sullivan) for the coveted role of editor of the sixth-grade newspaper. Spying is Harriet’s gateway to journalism, and it’s here where I can once again connect all of the dots between Harriet and myself. How could I not fall head over heels for this character and this movie? Not only am I a journalist, but I’m a film critic, and I’m both of those things because I’m extremely nosy and because I want to make the world a better, more beautiful place. As Golly tells Harriet in the film: “Knowing everything won’t do you a bit of good unless you use it to put beauty into this world.” That’s a line everyone should get to hear, and a dream that every child should grow up to fulfill. 

Of course, being a kid is full of trial and error, especially when you’re a know-it-all. When Harriet loses her notebook and Marion reads it in front of their entire class, Harriet’s life as she knows it falls apart. Her friends don’t just abandon her, but team up with the popular kids to make Harriet’s life a living hell. Harriet’s sadness is compounded by Golly’s recent departure — a scene that has made me weep ever since I was five and has got my chin quivering right this moment — and without anyone to rely on, Harriet has to face the consequences of her actions. She exacts her revenge, yes, but it only makes her feel hollow. She’s become someone just as cruel, self-possessed and inconsiderate as Marion. Suddenly, Harriet understands that the people she spies on act the way that they do because they’re all struggling. In real-time, we watch as Harriet learns she isn’t the center of the world, but just one small part of it, and that knowledge instills in her a critical empathy that all kids need to learn as they grow up.

But despite the clever plotting and the beautifully written characters, Trachtenberg holds the entire film together. She was just nine years old when she filmed the movie, but Trachtenberg’s Harriet has visible wisdom well beyond her years. There is immense depth behind her sparkling eyes, which she can turn sullen in a second. “Harriet” was one of her very first roles, but onscreen, Trachtenberg displayed the talent of an industry veteran. She held the camera and demanded its attention. Even as a child, nobody could steal a scene from her. She knew what it was like to be a kid who wants to be seen, who is aching to be understood. And in “Harriet the Spy,” she gave a voice to every single child who felt the same way. 

Talk show host Rosie O”Donnell embraces Michelle Trachtenberg at the premiere of “Harriet the Spy” July 9, 1996 in New York City. (Evan Agostini/Liaison/Getty Images)Because of my childhood obsession with “Harriet the Spy,” I followed Trachtenberg’s work closely throughout my life, admiring the humanity she gracefully instilled in all of her characters — even the devilish ones like Georgina Sparks, who turned “Gossip Girl” from a teen soap into a must-watch drama. Watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for the first time as a teenager was like catching up with an old friend. I always loved seeing Trachtenberg pop up in something, and I hoped she would again soon. 

And yet, the legacy she’s left behind is indelible, something that was confirmed to me when I attended a repertory screening of “Harriet the Spy” in the summer of 2023. The matinee was just a few days before my birthday, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend it than watching Harriet on the big screen, just like I did when I was a kid. To my delight, it wasn’t just nostalgic millennials who showed up; there were kids there with their parents, too. In the middle of the movie, one randomly asked, out of nowhere, “How old do you have to be to drink wine?” No one in the movie was drinking any wine, but mature kids have mature questions on their minds when they see this film!

On the way out of the theater, as James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing” played over the end credits, I remembered what it was like seeing the movie for the first time when I was a kid. Everyone else had left the theater, but my dad and I stayed until the lights went up, dancing in the aisle while the music filled the room. It’s one of the earliest, fondest memories I have. 

After the screening a couple of years back, I looked around the room to see kids holding hands with their parents, jiving to the music and talking about the movie as they made their way to the exit. They were connected to the film, and they forged that connection together, perhaps even able to understand each other a little better after seeing it. If that’s not a sign that Michelle Trachtenberg and Harriet put beauty into this world, exactly like Golly said, then I don’t know what is.