As the star of Dawson’s Creek, James Van Der Beek was the golden boy of the pre-internet teenage drama, and with his death at the age of just 48, it feels that some essential part of the 1990s has gone with him. Playing the “Dawson” in Dawson’s Creek, he had the near-impossible task of being the boring do-gooder main character in a show that gave the most interesting storylines to his darker, wittier, more dysfunctional friendship group.
And yet, Van Der Beek’s blend of matinee idol charisma and sheer, down-to-earth likability – the floppy hair helped too – was the glue that bound this generational-defining series together from its start in 1998 to its conclusion in 2003.
Dawson embodied decency and optimism, and for teenagers coming of age in the late 1990s, that affability was hugely significant. Old-fashioned civility was out of fashion as the decade came to an end, and yet Dawson and Van Der Beek very nearly made it cool again. He made being a stand-up guy feel like a radical departure. Along the way, he invented the art of “ugly crying” – as the tears rolled, nobody’s face creased up quite so magnificently as Van Der Beek’s. He was the Michelangelo of over-the-top blubbing, and the image of him letting it all out would go on to fuel a zillion social media memes.
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Dawson’s Creek existed in a heightened reality where teenagers expressed their feelings with wit and wisdom, and without a hair ever out of place. In that regard, it was the very opposite of British dramas such as The Inbetweeners, which understood that the journey to adulthood was paved with a series of ever more cringeworthy rites of passage. Yet even though everyone on screen was beautiful and articulate, Dawson’s Creek nonetheless captured the bittersweet reality of growing up – what you gain but also what you lose – in a way that spoke to audiences far beyond its fairytale setting of (fictional) Capeside, Massachusetts.
Portraying 15-year-old Dawson Leery, Van Der Beek’s character gave the show its name. But, by design, he was the dull yet reliable centre of the story – a stodgy anchor in the chaos. In his love triangle with witty best friend Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson) and the unattainable “Joey” Potter (Katie Holmes), Dawson was the good-looking blank space. He was a surrogate for the audience and never, ever got the best lines.
Yet it was testament to Van Der Beek’s cheeriness and humility that he made the part work. Despite his good looks, Dawson was a humble dreamer who hoped to one day become a filmmaker. A less wholesome show would have had him obsessed with an edgy director such as Martin Scorsese. But Dawson wanted to be Steven Spielberg – the feel-good chronicler of the great American childhood. The message was that it was okay to be cheesy and emotional – a rejection of the trend in the 1990s (and beyond) to portray adolescence as a nihilistic hellscape.
Almost everyone on Dawson’s Creek went on to bigger things aside from Dawson. Michelle Williams, who played rebellious newcomer Jen Lindley, became a five-time Oscar nominee. Holmes went on to star in the first of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies before her marriage to Tom Cruise turned her into rage-bait for the online gossip industry. Jackson has had a solid career as a character actor – the cheeky charm he brought to Pacey serving him well in middle age.
Van Der Beek never had that second act. He mocked his upbeat Dawson persona in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and demonstrated his range as an emotionally hollowed-out drug dealer in a 2002 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction. But he was forever typecast as Dawson – a fate he accepted with good grace as he poured his energies into his marriage and raising his six kids.
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He was always in on the joke and never came across as bitter about his career peaking in his early 20s. Far from it – he counted his blessings and looked back with a mixture of wryness on the golden youth which will live forever so long as people watch Dawson’s Creek. It is telling that nobody was more amused by the Dawson crying meme than Van Der Beek. “It’s hilarious to me that you can work for six years on a show, 120-something hours, and it gets boiled down to three seconds,” he said. The tragic irony is that today, the tears many Dawson’s Creek fans will shed will be all too real.
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