Kirsten and Natalie #4: Kirsten Dunst, 1999-2001

(Kirsten and Natalie is a series tracing American womanhood as portrayed through the films of Kirsten Dunst and Natalie Portman. Read the introductory post here.)

In The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola shoots the 16-year-old Kirsten Dunst like she's the most beautiful woman to have ever existed.

The film's story necessitates this to some degree. Lux Lisbon is one of five sisters who become the fascination of some teenage boys who live in the same 1970s-era Detroit-area suburb as the girls. Where Jeffrey Eugenides's book of the same name often flattens the girls into a single unit, Coppola takes pains to differentiate them as much as she can in a movie frame from the perspective of the boys watching them. As a result, Lux, who has a brief, doomed love affair with the school's hot jock, becomes the closest thing the film has to a protagonist. As such, Lux needs to be stuck in the memories of these teenage boys as adults. And as such, Coppola shoots Dunst like she is the epitome of adolescent girlhood, trapped forever in a past one cannot reach.

In 1999, 2000, and 2001, when she was between 16 and 19, Kirsten Dunst made 13 movies, including Bring It On, which made her a movie star. Most of these movies were barely seen at the time and have been all but completely forgotten, but several of them are fondly remembered today. At least one (the 2001 Peter Bogdanovich film The Cat's Meow) deserves to be better known. In one of them, she played a Jewish girl living through the Holocaust, which strikes me as a strange casting choice, but what do I know?

I watched 12 of these 13 films over the past month. (I could never track down the 2000 indie film Luckytown, but it doesn't sound like it was all that great.) It was far more daunting than I had anticipated, but at least I got this newsletter and a viral tweet out of the whole deal. That's all you can ask for.

What's striking is how many of these films cast Dunst as a kind of approachable, cute girl next door type, the one that the guy realizes is the right girl for him after pining for the "hotter" girl most of the movie. Even in Bring It On, where she plays a cheerleading captain, and in Drop Dead Gorgeous, where she plays a beauty queen, Dunst is forthrightly framed as the more down-to-earth hot girl, compared to some of the other girls in her orbit.

That's perhaps most evident in the justifiably forgotten 2001 gross-out teen comedy Get Over It. A bare-bones pseudo-adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the comedy casts Dunst as sort of Hermia and sort of Helena. She ends the film with the Lysander stand-in (as Hermia does in the play) but spends most of the story feeling outside the movie's romantic entanglements (which is more of a Helena vibe). Also, she plays Helena in the film's musical Midsummer Night's Dream adaptation within the Midsummer Night's Dream adaptation.

The whole deal with Helena is that when Lysander falls for her, she becomes convinced everybody is making fun of her. Both boys pursue Hermia, and poor Helena is kind of the second choice for both, even if she ends up with Demetrius as the play wraps. The role of the "cute, not hot girl" is the one this movie casts Dunst in, somewhat bafflingly, but when you watch as many of these movies as I have, you sort of get it. Dunst is gorgeous, but there's something about her that feels like you would be able to walk up to her at a party and start a conversation. She exudes that fundamental star quality of seeming like she would be an amazing girlfriend but perhaps an even better friend. Better yet, she mixes that approachability with a prickliness that makes her so fun to watch.

It's no wonder, then, that Coppola so naturally gravitated toward her. Dunst later played significant roles in Coppola's 2006 film Marie Antoinette (which will pop up in this series down the line) and her 2017 film The Beguiled (which will not), and the two form a director-actor connection similar to, say, Scorsese and De Niro. Fundamentally, Coppola knows that Dunst has dimensions other than "girl next door," while Dunst understands exactly the dreamy aesthetic Coppola is going for from the word go.

The main thing Coppola understands about Dunst's girl next door quality is that for as good as she is at playing those characters, there's a fundamental flattening effect of that archetype. The girl next door type is filtered by its very nature through a masculine gaze. This girl lives next door to someone, and it's probably not another woman or a non-binary person. No, she lives next door to the boy, and he is probably the protagonist. The Virgin Suicides opens up depths within that archetype without leaving the gaze of the boys across the street. Coppola's great trick is that she suggests the complexities of Lux without having the character spell those complexities out. She's a mystery only because her parents have made her so. Coppola makes clear that if the camera were situated inside the Lisbon house after the sisters are imprisoned (as it is in the 2015 Turkish film Mustang, which feels like it's eerily in conversation with this movie), we would see all of their nuances as humans. But the camera is stuck next door. The girl doesn't live in this house, after all.

‎Both Dunst's best role in this period (Lux) and her most significant role (Torrance in Bring It On) are products of women behind the camera. Bring It On is directed by the wonderful Peyton Reed, but its screenwriter, Jessica Bendinger, based much of its story about cultural appropriation on her work as a music journalist covering the uneasy encroachment of white people into the hip-hop world. What's odd about Bring It On is that it isn't really Torrance's story. Most versions of it would be framed through the perspective of Missy (Eliza Dushku), the surly gymnast who joins the cheer squad for lack of other options, and the story with the most weight belongs to Isis (Gabrielle Union), who is working against all odds to get her Compton-based squad, the Clovers, to nationals. Torrance's story amounts to "Will this pretty blonde girl regain her confidence and get the boy of her dreams?" more or less. By the film's climax, the viewer isn't just rooting for the Clovers to win nationals; Torrance herself seems to be too.

What Reed and Bendinger accomplish here is giving Torrance just enough of a story arc to let the other, more interesting stories run through her. It's up to Dunst to keep Torrance compelling, and she's more than up to the task. (Also, like, this movie should be about Torrance and Missy falling in love, but that's neither here nor there.) That's true of many of Dunst's best roles in this period. She might not have the best story arc in the film, but the film needs her near its center to hold together.

Also: Keeping Torrance as the film's point-of-view character is mildly subversive. A blonde, pretty white woman learning that she has benefited from years of racist appropriation and oppression, then trying to find small ways to break free of that cycle isn't what you expect a movie from 2000 to be about, but Bring It On is. Whether it's wholly successful is a question I'll leave to individual viewers. Still, I love that the movie never comes up with a reason for Torrance to assuage her white guilt by offering a simple, one-time monetary payout to the Clovers. Instead, she has to learn a deeper, more challenging lesson, and she does, even as her teammates are all too happy to continue cutting corners and reaping the benefits. (That said, Bring It On has a bunch of homophobic gags and a couple of jokey mentions of sexual assault, a thing that was more common in 2000 but has aged less well than the movie's main storyline.)

I wonder if her willingness to play characters who gladly ceded ground to more immediately compelling supporting players is why these incredibly fruitful three years for Dunst took so long to be recognized as the birth of a tremendous movie star. Certainly, her work in Bring It On was hailed at the time, and there was a minor groundswell of support for her role as a senator's wild-child daughter in 2001's teen romantic drama Crazy/Beautiful. But her work in 1999's savage Watergate satire Dick deserved more notice than it received, as did her pitch-perfect Marion Davies in The Cat's Meow. This period also features Dunst's single worst onscreen performance (that I've seen, at least) in 2000's The Crow: Salvation, and she's still giving maybe the best performance in that hideous, misbegotten movie.

(Brief The Crow: Salvation sidebar: It's one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and it's too bad that you can't easily watch it because it's fun bad. Most clips on YouTube are screen captures of someone watching a Bandicam copy of the film, which might be the ideal way to watch it. Check out this clip, and tell me you don't want to see more. Also, when I expressed bafflement at how full of all-stars the video for Filter's "The Best Things" was a few weeks ago, I had no idea that the video was a marketing tie-in to this film. Huh!)

In every movie from this era, Dunst seems more aware than ever of her ability to draw the camera's attention. Crazy/Beautiful is probably the film from this period that features the most ACTING on her part, but it's also a film that seems intent on leering at her. She's terrific, but the movie seems unwilling to consider her character Nicole as anything other than the product of the choices various men in her life make. Whether it's her father's pseudo abandonment of her or her boyfriend's endless devotion to her, Nicole never seems defined in her own terms.

Plenty of actresses fall into the trap of playing roles where their girl next door qualities are so defined by men that they lose themselves a bit once those roles dry up. Dunst survived, I think, because of her spikiness. When you watch Drop Dead Gorgeous, her willingness to stay one step ahead of the movie's dark streak is remarkable. She maintains her relative sunniness, but just enough of the movie's acid-black comedy attaches itself to her that she doesn't seem as bland as many other performers might have made her.

I enjoyed but didn't love Drop Dead Gorgeous, the most beloved movie out of her three-year run that I had never seen before. But in watching it, I zeroed in on something else, closer to the heart of this project: Drop Dead Gorgeous was almost certainly the favorite movie of Emily Rogers, my alternate universe cis doppelganger.

I started watching Dunst and Natalie Portman's movies to figure out what lessons I internalized about womanhood across my teens and 20s since both are around my age. At the time I'm writing about, Portman was seen as a considerable talent and Dunst as an enjoyable ingenue, but the more time that passes, the more the talents of both women have been celebrated. (Dunst just received her first Oscar nomination this year.)

But in the 1990s and 2000s, Portman starred in many movies with an assumed audience of mostly men. She made a movie with a presumed female audience here and there, but she was drawn to material with more prestige, and material with more perceived importance was almost always aimed at men. Most of Dunst's 13 movies from 1999 to 2001 assume that their audience will primarily consist of women. The cult audience that attached itself to Drop Dead Gorgeous mainly arose because the film became a sensation on VHS and DVD with older millennials teen girls. Crazy/Beautiful might be framed through a boy's POV, but its primary audience ended up being teen girls who needed a good cry. And do I need to say more about girls my age loving Bring It On?

I saw many of these movies at the time, but many took me years to catch up with. I wasn't letting myself enjoy movies like this, not in the way I might have if I had been more honest about my gender. And for the first time in my working on this project, I felt a strange sense of loss. Now, as America looks back at teen and 20something Kirsten Dunst, we are ever more aware of how her star qualities were present from the first. But as I look back on these films, I feel an intense melancholy around the idea that I did not pull out a VCR with some of my best friends and pop in a copy of Drop Dead Gorgeous or Bring It On.

I didn't see these movies because they weren't "for" me. That's a ridiculous idea, of course. Every movie is for everyone. Yet I kept myself from films that I probably would have enjoyed due to an imagined gender barrier I didn't want to cross. Perhaps the main lesson I learned about womanhood from these movies was that for as much as I might want to belong there, the culture insisted I didn't. Yet just as the world came to realize that Kirsten Dunst was doing fantastic work in these movies, I came to realize that the barrier I perceived was artificial and permeable. Everybody got where they needed to go eventually, but god, I wish it hadn't taken so long.

(Happy 40th birthday, Kirsten Dunst. Hope you had a good one.)

Next time: Natalie Portman didn't make many movies in this period, but one was Star Wars Episode I. And Kirsten Dunst's follow-up to this tremendously productive period was... Spider-man. Episode II and that first Spider-man movie both opened in May 2002, and that's where we're heading next.

Talk back to me: What's your favorite Kirsten Dunst movie from this period? Are you a True Heart stan? I didn't talk about that movie at all in this article, but it's kind of the last "kid Kirsten Dunst" movie. Maybe you love it! I don't know! Tell me in the comments or my email inbox.

What I've been up to: It's been a second since we checked in, right? I've written some great stuff at Vox in that time. In particular, I was pleased to take part in this roundtable on Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness books. (If you're wondering where the newsletter was last week, I wrote about two-thirds of one on those books, then chickened out because it was too personal. How the sausage gets made!) I also wrote this essay about the rise of movies about parents saying they're sorry, which was much more widely read than I expected.

Everything Everywhere takes that basic storytelling framework and stretches it to its absolute breaking point. In the process, it becomes likely the best example of this burgeoning subgenre, and one that points to the limitations of parental apology fantasy stories to talk about the actual damage intergenerational trauma can do to people. And all along, the movie understands that the fantasy of a parent who understands and accepts you as you are isn’t just a fantasy for the child. It’s one for the parent too.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: I loved Maya Capasso's take on four other international horror shows you should check out if you miss that Squid Game vibe. I've already watched one of them, and it was great!

Hellbound is all about religious apocalypse. In this series, demons are real, and everybody knows it. But nobody’s sure what to do about that fact. People worldwide begin to receive death prophecies from a mystic figure that appears out of thin air, then tells them how much time they have left. Once the timer runs out, burly demons seemingly made out of muscles and supernatural smoke appear and brutally murder them.

Read me: This newsletter is far too long, so we're going to enter the section where I just bark, loudly, "THIS PERSON IS VERY SMART!" Alex Pareene on the ways the right is twisting the media up in knots in the name of its political project — very smart!

It remains a sadly common belief among many journalists that “regular people” have misconceptions about journalism and the news gathering process that can be cleared up with greater transparency and better media literacy education. I think most people have essentially no opinion on the news gathering process. I imagine they think of journalists, when they think of journalists at all, as the people yelling questions at mayors, shouting over the din of exploding flash bulbs, while the mayors sort of wave their hands and say they have “total faith” in their police departments to, say, apprehend The Penguin, or investigate themselves for shooting an unarmed teenager.

Watch me: YouTube essayist Broey Deschanel on the ways in which "the cinema" seems like it's being completely wrung dry — very smart!

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And another thing... I don't have much to say about it beyond "Boys are neat," but I greatly enjoyed Robert Eggers's The Northman. As a fun bonus, you could watch it as really elaborate Arden season two fanfic. If you wanted.

Opening credits sequence of the week: I have always adored how fucking psyched the Phyllis opening credits are about Phyllis Lindstrom.

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A thing I had to look up: Watching Get Over It so thoroughly confused my sense of what happens in Midsummer Night's Dream —a play I have been thinking about a lot in the process of writing Arden season three — that I had to go and completely re-remind myself of what happens in it. Listen, weren't these Shakespeare retellings set in high school supposed to help you pass the test? I would have failed this one. Failed.

This week's reading music: "4 American Dollars" by U.S. Girls

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.