The Film Wasn't Supposed To End This Way
James Van Der Beek's death today feels like watching a reflection in a mirror disappear.
I was sixteen years old when Dawson’s Creek sprang onto our televisions, and James Van Der Beek, with all of that glorious hair and a fashion sense I slowly adopted over the subsequent year, became a household name as the budding film director Dawson Leery, navigating the high school years and a best friendship with Katie Holmes’ Joey Potter that veered into attraction, love, and complicated relationships. But, outside of Dawson’s wardrobe, I didn’t pay much attention to the show, or Van Der Beek, for that matter. That changed a year later, when Varsity Blues, his first star turn in a film (and I’m pretty positive the first theatre film release from MTV Studios), and a story that I related to pretty hard. I was in the midst of a very challenging senior year of high school, having missed my second consecutive homecoming game due to injury, and our team collapsing under the weight of too many injuries and too few players.
As most of us were at the time of release in early 1999, I was writing my college applications, trying to finish strong in school, get to prom and graduation and face a future that didn’t involve training for football again. Or playing football again. I was too short, too injury-prone, and not on a team that had any attention to where even a smaller college would take me on. I was making my peace with it, because I had my sights set on the University of Michigan, and I was determined to keep my grades up and be admitted.
I went to the theatre to see it one afternoon with an old friend of mine, Mike, and what I didn’t expect from it was to identify so closely with JVDB’s character, Mox. Mox was the backup quarterback, playing football because that’s what you did in west Texas (Friday Night Lights, anyone?), and desperately hoping to get into Brown University in Rhode Island so he could escape the smallness of his hometown. There were teammates of his that somewhat resembled the ones I’d just suffered through a terrible final season with. Tweeder reminded me of one of my favorite teammates, Geoff, who always had me in stitches. Lance was like our own quarterback, Garry, who suffered his own horrific leg injury to end his football days. I could even relate Miss Davis, the health teacher who moonlighted as a stripper at night, to one of my own teachers who will definitely remain unnamed because I don’t feel like being sued.
I actually had a few tears in my eyes at the end of it. It felt odd to have that reaction, but he was where I was, that point in life where you are letting go of the final vestiges of childhood and moving into an adult life, where you control your decisions and don’t answer to a curfew or parents, but also leave behind the same friends group that you had before. You might go to the same college or university as many of them, but it’s a big place, and before we all had cell phones, it was harder to coordinate hanging out or meeting up. With a few exceptions, the friendships that had marked high school slipped away as spring turned to summer, prom and graduation in the rearview mirror, and an uncertain future ahead. It’s a very bittersweet time for most of us, and also a time where anxiety really kicks in—because the years of saying “I can’t wait to grow up” are over, and now you actually have to be grown, with all of the responsibilities and decisions and work that comes with it.
James Van Der Beek was lucky, though, because he got to leave Varsity Blues and return to high school as Dawson Leery for another two seasons. He got to manage that with friends that he wouldn’t leave behind when the college years started, because they were on the same show (and yes, he is…was….four years older than me, which meant he was already an adult, but you get the point). He even made another film before the last season of Dawson’s Creek, the underrated The Rules of Attraction, where he starred as the younger brother of Christian Bale’s maniacal Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Van Der Beek’s Sean Bateman was only half-mad and not completely off the rails as Bale’s Patrick was, but it was still a very intriguing turn. He was not playing an idealistic character, but rather a drug-dealing, skirt-chasing, thrill-seeking narcissist who just happens to be a college student, almost as an afterthought.
The younger Bateman is surprised, though. He meets Shannyn Sossamyn’s Lauren, and falls in love with her, even though she denies him the one thing he’s usually chasing: sex. She was saving her virginity, and Bateman says he respects it, but because he’s unable to stop his self-destructive nature, he ends up sleeping with another girl at a house party, and wrecks the relationship completely. There’s a lot more in between and after, but I saw it when it came out and loved it, and it foreshadowed some extremely bad decisions I’d make two years later—which would, in turn, completely change the trajectory of my life for years after that.
Much later, after marrying and doing all of the grown-up things, my wife and I binge-watched Dawson’s Creek start to finish, and suddenly Dawson Leery mirrored many of my high school and college experiences, adding to the ways that Varsity Blues and The Rules of Attraction reflected seasons of my life, or predicted a future I was completely unaware of at the time. By that point in his own life, Van Der Beek was gleefully parodying himself in the show Don’t Trust The B in Apartment 23, where he was the main characters’ neighbor, James Van Der Beek. It was delightful and a real shame that the show did not get to go on longer.
Fast forward another decade, and the news that James Van Der Beek was struggling with cancer and having to auction off items from Varsity Blues to pay for treatment hit me like a brick wall. A table read of a Dawson’s Creek episode in a theater was organized by his former co-stars and lifelong friends Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams to raise money for him—an event he was unable to attend himself. Photos of him appeared where that broad-shouldered, charming, good-looking man had shrunk to a shell of the guy that had decorated the walls of countless high school girls in the late 90s and early 2000s. I feared that he wasn’t going to make it much longer, and found myself sad in a way which resembled that moment in a theater 26 years prior. I had related to JVDB far more than I’d comprehended as my younger self, that his most well-known characters intertwined with my own life deeply. It was like watching a reflection of myself fade in a mirror.
Today the reflection disappeared entirely.
James Van Der Beek will probably not receive much in the way of laudatory writings in the obituaries that appear in the coming days. After all, he didn’t create the characters he was most known for, right? I would argue, though, that he brought them to life and gave them a resonance that persisted long after they left the big screen and he was known more as an answer to trivia questions than as the shining star he’d been. I mean, after all, I’m sitting here writing this piece about him. The characters don’t play the actor, the actor plays the characters, and if they do it right, they get to be remembered forever. If they’re also good people, the actors they share the screen or stage with become friends long after the production is over. James Van Der Beek turned all of his co-stars into friends that were behind him when the end came this morning, and played his character of Dawson Leery so well that headlines ran across every major news outlet that the star of the 90s breakout show, Dawson’s Creek, had died today.
He’ll always be Mox to me, though. Rest in peace, James.