Non-canonical Bonus Letter: Dawson's Creek
I Want to Be Your Boy Adventure
Normally, I’d be reading one of the approx. 850 works and authors of the Western canon as enumerated by the late Yale critic Harold Bloom, but I happen to be traveling this Thanksgiving and have to take a break from the normal format, so instead I thought I’d share some thoughts of mine on the surprisingly good teen drama Dawson’s Creek. As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, there’ll occasionally be a week where I won’t be able to write up a normal post, so I’m experimenting with prewriting pieces on cultural topics unrelated to Bloom’s Western canon, to make it up to my readers that way. Please tell me whether you like or dislike this solution, or if you have any ideas on how I should approach this issue. Whatever the case, this is the first time in the six-month history of this newsletter that I haven’t been able to deliver an on-brand post to you, and I don’t anticipate taking recourse to a prewritten non-canonical article often; you can look forward to a newsletter about the Second Book of the Kings next week, on December 4.
I was too young to have any interest in watching Dawson’s Creek when it originally aired on the WB between 1998 and 2004; it only came to my attention much later, as a show that, in its home-video releases, had been pretty well mangled due to quirks of intellectual-property law. Popular music plays an important role on Dawson’s Creek; in later seasons, an episode might have as many as a dozen snippets of different songs, usually from contemporary musicians. When the producers of the show licensed this music, they neglected to get licensing for home video, and in many cases couldn’t go back and get permission to use these same tracks for the VHS or DVD editions, meaning replacements for the unlicenseable tracks had to be found; unless you were to come across a recording of the broadcast version of the show that someone had taped at home, this re-edited version of Dawson’s Creek is the only version you’ll be able to see, whether on home video or on a streaming platform.
Most notoriously, Sony did not want to pay to license the show’s theme song, “I Don’t Want to Wait” by Paula Cole, replacing it with “Run Like Mad” by Jann Arden. “Run Like Mad” is currently used as the theme song for the Hulu version of the show, but when Dawson’s Creek was on Netflix a couple of years ago the theme package did feature “I Don’t Want to Wait,” not the original version of the track, but a version that Cole rerecorded! Oddly, a Belgian box set of Dawson’s Creek that I bought does use the original Paula Cole track as the opening theme, at least for the first two seasons. However, even watching this version won’t allow you to hear the theme song in its original form.
You see, American and European televisions use different color-encoding formats: in North America, we use NTSC, which displays 60 interlaced fields, or 30 frames, per second; in Europe, they use PAL, which displays 50 interlaced fields, or 25 frames, per second. The only important difference for us is the way NTSC and PAL each convert 24-frame-per-second film to 30- or 25-frames per second. NTSC uses a process called “3:2 pulldown,” whereby, of every third frame, half is interlaced with one half of the second frame and half is interlaced with one half of the fourth frame. Since the first, second, and fourth frames are still displayed normally but the third frame is split in two, five new frames are made out of the original four, creating thirty NTSC frames for every twenty-four original frames. In PAL, the 24-fps film is simply sped up so that it displays at 25 frames per second. Speeding the picture up has the advantage of not interlacing different frames with each other and adding visual artifacts that weren’t present when the film was edited, but it does have the drawback of raising the pitch of the audio. If you were to search “Dawson’s Creek theme song” on YouTube, you might come across this video, where you can hear for yourself the results of the PAL speedup. Compare the official music video of “I Don’t Want to Wait”, where you can hear what the theme song is supposed to sound like and notice that Cole’s voice is noticeably deeper. Careful listeners will also notice that, in the first video, the pause between the lines “Will it be ‘Yes’ or will it be…” and “‘Sorry?’” is ever so slightly shorter than in the official version of the song. My first experience watching Dawson’s Creek was on the Belgian DVD set, before I was aware of the PAL speedup, and I remember remarking upon how squeaky Katie Holmes sounded.
The butchered home-video edition of the Dawson’s Creek is a disgrace not only for fans of Paula Cole, but for fans of music in general; there are some songs used in the original airing of the show that have not been publicly released anywhere else. And licensing issues have caused some scenes, featuring song covers, to be removed completely from the video and streaming versions of Dawson’s Creek. Fortunately, the first season, by far the best, came out of this brutal edit mostly unscathed. Other than the shenanigans with the theme song, the only track from the original airing that did not make it into the video release is “I’m the Only One,” by Melissa Etheridge, which is heard in the eleventh episode when Pacey is watching Joey change out of her wet clothes via his truck’s sideview mirror; it was replaced by Bryan Adams’s “I Wanna Be Your Underwear.” In the third season and later, the producers of the show were using a bespoke cover of the Monkees song “Daydream Believer” by one Mary Beth Maziarz as a sort of leitmotif representing Dawson and Joey’s relationship, but, amusingly, most uses of this track had to be removed because Sony didn’t want to pay for the licensing.
I’m generally not a big fan of the music on the show; a lot of it belongs to the genre of sentimental songs sung by female voices and accompanied by piano or acoustic guitar that is sometimes called “vagina music.” This stuff was very popular in the 90s. And some of the track selections are rather trite. In the very first episode we see Jen glamorously step out of a taxi to “Hey Pretty Girl” by BoDeans, effectively but needlessly conveying the fact that Michelle Williams is a pretty girl. But even the songs I don’t particularly care for can be used to great effect; also in the first episode, “I’ll Stand by You” by The Pretenders, heard during Dawson’s “Usually in the morning, with Katie Couric” line, perfectly covers what would otherwise be an awkward gag about masturbation and conveys the emotional intimacy, tinged with loss, we’re supposed to imagine Dawson and Joey feel at this moment1.
And I appreciate the obvious care that Kevin Williamson and his fellow producers put into selecting the music and editing it into the show: in the twelfth episode of the first season, Joey, competing in the Miss Windjammer pageant, sings “On My Own” from Les Misérables, aptly chosen because of how closely the situation in the song resembles what’s going on between her and Dawson, whom she loves but who seems ignorant of how she feels about him. In editing, it would have been tempting to cut the song down to its essential parts to make room for more dialogue in other scenes, but allowing Joey to sing the number in its entirety gives proper place to the emotional heart of the show, Dawson and Joey’s relationship, and fully commits to the idea that music is at least as important to understanding the characters’ emotional states as the dialogue. I also like that Katie Holmes was made to sing “On My Own” herself, instead of the producers hiring a ringer to sing over her. There is a lot on Dawson’s Creek that isn’t especially realistic, but when you hear Holmes, no Lea Salonga, sing, you believe this is a moderately talented fifteen-year-old girl from Cape Cod singing.
The legal quagmire in which Dawson’s Creek has found itself is why I initially became interested in the show, but when I finally did get around to watching it I was surprised by its quality. I had no idea what the show was about except for the vague impression that it was a teen soap opera about kids playing around in a creek, so I was a little shocked by its establishing premise: Dawson Leery, played by James van der Beek, and Josephine Potter, played by Katie Holmes, are fifteen-year-olds living on Cape Cod who are such close friends that Dawson has been letting Joey sleep in his bed since they were seven, and now it's become a weekly ritual that Joey will come over on Saturday night to watch movies in his room and then sleep over. We're given to understand that there's been no hugging, kissing, or any kind of sexual contact involved with these sleepovers, but the series begins with Joey telling Dawson that they're getting too old to share a bed and she doesn't want to spend the night at his house anymore.
Of course, it's common in our culture for children to have chaste friendships with other children of the contrary gender, even through adolescence. And the average age of sexual debut in the United States, while trending upward since 1998 when Dawson’s Creek first aired, has stayed steadily around seventeen years, so fifteen would be a little young to be having sex, but nonetheless around 30% of Dawson and Joey's age group would have already experienced intercourse2, so if they had been having intimate contact this would not be so scandalous, at least as far as their peers were concerned. But our hero and heroine have shown a disregard for all social expectations both from their peers and from their authority figures and taken their chaste but physically intimate friendship in a direction bound to confuse anyone who finds out exactly how far it has gone and exactly how little things have progressed.
But Joey is correct: her almost unclassifiable relationship with Dawson can't continue as it is without consequences for their other relationships, as Dawson quickly finds out when he reunites with Jen Linley, played by Michelle Williams, a girl from New York who occasionally came to visit her grandparents who live nextdoor to Dawson, but has now come to stay long-term, ostensibly because her grandfather has had a stroke and her grandmother can't care for him all by herself. Dawson is captivated by Jen, yes, because she's a bombshell blonde, but also because she represents a richer array of experiences than he's accustomed to, especially romantic experiences: though Jen claims to be a virgin, Dawson is aware that she easily attracts the attention of boys. For in the second episode of the series, after Dawson tries unsuccessfully to cut in on Jen's date at a school dance, Dawson says to her, “I feel like I'm becoming a friend you come over and tell all your boy adventures to. I don't want that to be the case. I want to be your boy adventure.”
The irony is that Dawson is unwittingly subjecting Joey to the same treatment he's complaining about in respect to Jen. Even if Dawson is oblivious to or in denial about the fact, Joey strongly dislikes Jen for how she's shown up and instantly redirected all his attention toward herself: no sooner is she stepping out of the taxi in front of her grandparents’ house than Dawson is trying to cast her in his movie (for Dawson is an amateur filmmaker, and, for his age, a very good one with strong mastery of the fundamentals of framing, lighting, and sound), and at school they make up their own game where they pick a random person in the cafeteria and invent absurd libels about their private lives. Dawson does have one close male friend, Pacey Witter, a boy his age played by Joshua Jackson, but that friendship stays within the normal boundaries of one between adolescent males; what Dawson has with Joey is a completely different animal, and she's used to being the one special person in Dawson's life, but now she has competition. Joey's problem is that she's close enough to Dawson that he wants to include her in everything he does, even when it comes to courting Jen, but not so close that she could justly claim exclusive right to his affections. Thus when Dawson is trying to arrange a date with Jen to the cinema, he recruits Pacey and Joey to come with them as a couple, making it a group date and thus less intimidating for the new girl. Joey, eager to please Dawson, agrees with some reluctance to be Pacey’s companion for the evening, but in the event finds Jen's presence too upsetting and is extremely rude to her, complimenting her blond hair as a pretext to ask her what “number” it is, asking her if she's a size queen, and generally insinuating that Jen is a whore.
Joey wants Dawson all to herself but can't explain their relationship in a way that romantic rivals would understand. Jen does Joey the courtesy of asking her if she and Dawson are an item, but all Joey can answer is that they're just friends, leaving her doomed to bite her tongue as Dawson makes his best friend privy to all the details of his adventures with Jen. Dawson suffers less than Joey from the ambiguity of their relationship, but he does have to cope with the fact that Joey’s very presence is bound to sabotage any relationship with another girl he might try to form. Jen is smart enough to figure out that she has to get on Joey's good side if she wants to date Dawson, but she is never very successful in placating her. At the same time, our male and female leads are not offering each other the experiences one could reasonably expect from a romantic partner: Dawson and Joey's shared activities consist of watching movies and shooting movies of their own, and I surmise that they got into filmmaking as an evolved form of the imaginative play that children under twelve or so normally take part in. In the episode where they're taking shelter from the hurricane, Joey and Dawson reminisce about how they used to sit in his closet and reenact the ending of Jaws, and it's not a very big leap from that activity to shooting a pastiche of Creature from the Black Lagoon on the Leerys’ camcorder. Overall, they're like a cross between stepsiblings who, in the manner so frequently satirized in pornography, are unsure where the line between a normal familial relationship and an inappropriate level of intimacy is drawn, and a married couple sleeping in a dead bedroom, shackled to a passionless relationship that demands exclusivity. Dawson would like to branch out and experiment with a more adult kind of relationship with a girl, while keeping Joey by his side to provide the comfort he's used to; Joey seems to be hoping that their chaste yet physically intimate friendship can be a stepping-stone to a relationship that involves hugging, kissing, the kind of emotionally vulnerable conversation that adult couples engage in, and, eventually, sexual experiences, and maybe she brings up the fact that she and Dawson are getting too old for sleepovers as part of a strategy to remind him that she is now a young woman who would be open to becoming more than friends with the boy who has meant so much to her these past eight years. “I have breasts! And you have genitalia!,” Joey exclaims by way of illustrating why they can't sleep in the same bed anymore.
As ripe for psychoanalysis as the close yet sterile relationship of Dawson and Joey is, their sleepovers are strangely downplayed after the opening scene of the series. Even after Joey decides they’re too old for it, she does sleep in Dawson's bed again in the episode where he organizes a séance and other spooky activities for Friday the Thirteenth, and Joey does so in large part because she is too scared to row home across the creek after all that has happened that evening. And they share a bed at the motel in the last episode when they go to visit her father in prison for his birthday; in the same episode Jen, having broken up with Dawson but wanting him back, asks in a moment of desperation if she can sleep in his bed like Joey always does, though I don't know how she found out about the sleepovers3. Those are the only other direct references to this unusual feature of Joey and Dawson's friendship. For Dawson's Creek is not to be mistaken for a prestige drama, even though the first season’s short thirteen-episode length makes it superficially resemble one of those “slow burns” that air on HBO. A seemingly important event will be the focal point of an episode or string of episodes and thereafter never mentioned again, for example Jen's long-lost half-sister Eve who spends enough time in Capeside in the third season to mess with Dawson's head, and then disappears forever. If the unfocused writing of later seasons seems less forgivable than the episodic approach of the first season, that’s only because there’s so little of the first season, giving it the illusion of naturalistic cinema. But I think it actually makes sense for Dawson and Joey’s sleepovers to sit in the background of the story and rarely be mentioned. I’ve said before in this newsletter that one effective way to add depth to characters in a work of fiction is to strategically introduce incoherencies that require the reader to harmonize the contradictions with vague ideas of their own. And there are big contradictions between how the other characters perceive Dawson and Joey, even how they perceive themselves, and what the viewers know about their private lives. When Dawson finds out that not only is Jen lying about being a virgin, but that she was sent to Capeside by her parents because she was caught having sex in their bed, Dawson is understandably upset, but as he continues to needle her about her promiscuous past it never occurs to either him or Joey, who eavesdrops on some of these arguments, that he is being a hypocrite, for if Jen were aware of how Dawson used to spend his Saturday nights with his best friend she might also feel betrayed.
In a media culture where all writers seem to be imitating Joss Whedon and his snarky one-liners and ironic feigned stupidity, Dawson’s Creek, which aired during the same period as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, offers of a glimpse of what could have been had the industry instead imitated Kevin Williamson’s literary, somewhat stilted dialogue where the characters speak in complete, grammatical sentences and almost never interrupt each other. I won’t claim it’s realistic to have teenagers say “alter” when “change” would do, say “in lieu of” when “instead of” is available, or even be aware what is meant by “virile,” “trite,” or “intrepid,” but this lexically rich dialogue adds a sense of grandeur to the show and it’s sometimes a genuine pleasure to hear the characters speak, as when Pacey has a knack for detecting another character’s insecurities and ruthlessly harping on them, like he does when he relentlessly mocks his older brother for his latent homosexuality and when he rebukes his English teacher Tamara Jacobs, played by Leann Hunley, a middle-aged woman seeking the thrill of turning the heads of teenaged boys, for playing off her flirtations as innocent interactions misinterpreted. Joey’s favorite rhetorical move is to create extended metaphors, as she does when, talking with Dawson who is mad at her for keeping his mother’s affair from him, she seizes on her previous use of the word “evolve” to refer to how their friendship has changed as they’ve grown older, and suggests that their relationship will survive if it is fit enough to do so, or, if not, will become an exhibit at a science museum, cleverly drawing a connection between scientists’ interest in long-dead organisms unfit for today’s environment and an individual’s nostalgic inclination to reflect on old friendships that ceased to be viable long ago. I also have to admire Joey’s way with words when, giving a presentation in class on Japanese warlords in the Edo period, she deals with a boy named Grant, played by Mati Moralejo, who is heckling her by making light of her description of the shogun’s harem:
GRANT: Now, did these concubines, did they have to doink a shogun, [the class laughs while the teacher chides him] or could they say, like, “No dice”?
JOEY: Well, it was a great privilege to be chosen by the shogun, so they—
GRANT [talking over her]: So the shogun was kind of like the school stud: every chick wanted a piece of him, right? [a boy sitting next to him gives him a high five]
JOEY: But you know what? They didn’t want “a piece of him.”
GRANT: It sounds like they did to me.
JOEY: Well, that’s because you have a low IQ.
It wouldn’t have been easy to find a retort that was succinct, blunt, and insulting, while maintaining her dignity by using formal speech and refusing to endorse the slang that Grant is trying to use to hijack her presentation, but Joey has done it.
My favorite piece of dialogue in the whole show, however, is when Dawson’s mother Gail Leery, played by Mary-Margaret Humes, confesses to her husband Mitch, played by John Wesley Shipp, that she’s having an affair:
MRS. LEERY: Mitch, there’s something that you— I mean, there’s something that I have to tell you.
DAWSON: I’m going to leave you two alone.
MRS. LEERY: Uh, no, Dawson. We’re family; this falls on all ears.
MR. LEERY: Hon, what is it?
MRS. LEERY: Uh…Well, where do I begin? Um…You know that I love what I do4, that I’ve always wanted to be a Diane Sawyer or a Barbara Walters. Um…Mitch, it’s…it’s twenty years later, and…I’m never going to be Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters, I know that. I mean, I gave up that dream. It-It’s OK, I’ve accepted it. I mean, I still would like to be like a…Jenny Jones or a Sally Jessy Raphael…
MR. LEERY: What’s wrong, Gail?
MRS. LEERY: Oh, God, I’m digressing…Uh…I mean, who watches those shows anyway? I mean, they’re all the same: somebody does somebody wrong, and then they go on TV with their IQ of 3 and bitch and moan about it for the whole world to see and, now I know this is a judgment, but…I have always prided myself in not being that kind of person, you know, the kind of person that would wind up on a panel of cheaters and lowlifes and…and…[MR. LEERY is trying to cut her off with “Gail.”]…and liars, I mean—
MR. LEERY [losing his patience]: What are you saying?
MRS. LEERY: What I am saying is, for the past two months, for the past sixty-two days, every time that I’ve come home late, every time that I’ve made an excuse to leave this house, every time that I haven’t been with you, I have been with someone else, another man, having sex with another man. [she pauses for a few seconds as it goes to MR. LEERY, who looks stunned, and then to DAWSON who looks unhappy to be listening to this conversation] Now I won’t be so insulting as to offer an apology: this is, after all, on the other side of forgiveness. [now almost whispering] I just thought you should know, Mitch.
Learning that your spouse has been cheating on you, is, I imagine, a horrific experience, and I can feel some of this horror as Mrs. Leery confesses her infidelity in such an alienating way. In her three monologues, separated by Mr. Leery’s interruptions, she makes three attempts to obliquely apologize for the affair, first by alluding to her dissatisfaction with her career, second by distancing herself from the genre of trashy talk show where guests come on to humiliate themselves by talking publicly about personal dramas that ought to remain private, and finally by confessing to cheating, but describing the affair from Mr. Leery’s point of view, not going into any detail about who this other man is, under what circumstances the affair began, or what made her want to sleep with him.
But this oblique confession doesn't make Mrs. Leery's husband any less angry, and that is a pattern with the eloquent dialogue on Dawson's Creek: it doesn't appear to avail the characters anything. Joey might have shut up Grant in class, but she still ends up punching him later in the cafeteria and getting detention, and Joey can't spin a metaphor that makes Dawson take pity on her, send Jen back to New York, and promise to love her and only her forever. As for Pacey, his closeted police-officer brother Doug, played by Dylan Neal, has more success with the ladies than he does, and it's only by telling Ms. Jacobs, the teacher he's furtively sleeping with, that Deputy Doug is gay that he's able keep him from stealing his secret girlfriend, and at any rate he soon learns that having sex with your English teacher isn't much fun if you can't be seen in public and can't even brag to your friends about it, and when word gets out he is forced to disgrace himself and tell the school board that he made it all up because he's a loser who doesn't have anything going on in his life except the fantasy of being with an unavailable woman. And when Jen first arrives in Capeside she likes to affect this objective, psychiatrist-like stance toward everyone, speaking in neutral and non-judgmental language, but when she tries using this routine to console Dawson after he finds out about his mother's affair all it does is send him running to Joey's house to seek comfort there. And, at the end of the first season, when Dawson and Joey aren't avoiding the question and directly confront their feelings for each other, all the big words and poetic language seem to disappear. While they're pretending only to like each other as friends, they collectively imagine their wedding and invent a scenario where Dawson brings Jen along as his date while Joey is being hit on by a sleazy rich man and needs rescuing. But on Friday the Thirteenth, after Joey gets back at Dawson, who is fond of scaring her with childish pranks, by falling out of a closet and pretending to be dead, she asks him sincerely if he would be sad if she died, and he replies bluntly, “Are you kidding? God, I would be inconsolable. Joey, if you died, God, I don't know what I would do. It’s the worst possible thing I can imagine,” a heartfelt statement to be sure, but clichéd and repetitious.
But this observation isn't so insightful, for Dawson and Joey say so much themselves in the last scene of the first season when they have their first proper kiss, not counting the one when Joey, in a drunken stupor, suddenly sits up from the sofa she's lying on and kisses Dawson who is looking after her. Joey, fed up with Dawson’s refusal to choose between her and Jen, and complaining that all his astute analyses of film and of social dynamics are vain if he doesn't express his feelings honestly, demands that he prepare himself to complicate their relationship by introducing romantic feelings into it, or else she's going to be an exchange student in Paris; Joey, seeing Dawson's hesitation, is just in the process of leaving when he calls out to her, they kiss, and the first season ends.
This kiss is covered with Beth Nielsen Chapman's sappy tune “Say Goodnight, Not Goodbye,” an apt choice of music because Dawson and Joey have made a decision to say goodnight, that is, tuck themselves back in under the comforter of Dawson's bed on Saturday nights and drift off to sleep knowing the other will be by their side in the morning just like has been the case these past eight years; not to say goodbye and move on to other kinds of relationship with new people. But is this really a happy ending? The last thirteen episodes have been difficult for Dawson: he found out his mother was having an affair and can reasonably suspect his parents will soon separate or divorce, and he had an acrimonious breakup with Jen; add that to the stress of knowing that his best friend has been slowly distancing herself from him through both these other personal crises, and it's understandable that he would be willing to do almost anything to keep her in his life, in order not to lose the one person he can still turn to for comfort. For Joey's part, she lives in the care of her older sister and her boyfriend, her mother being long dead from cancer and her father bring incarcerated for trafficking marijuana, Dawson is the only real friend she has, and she reasonably feels that, if she can't rely on Dawson not to abandon her next time Jen comes around wanting to give things another try, her life has nothing to offer her and she might as well go spend a semester or two in Paris. But she hasn't demonstrated much aptitude for getting along with any of her peers besides Dawson: Jen's friendly overtures have all been rejected, and Joey generally doesn't seem to connect with other girls; on the one pleasant day she has with Pacey hunting for snails he reads too much into it and tries to kiss her; and the other boys whom she might have dated have all either been cads or of such a different social background she felt unworthy of his attention. If she is self-aware at all, she would know that going to Paris is a desperate act that would be unlikely to result in many positive social encounters, if she can't even successfully socialize with the kids in her hometown5. So both Dawson and Joey have a lot to lose if they say goodbye, not goodnight, and their trying to restructure their relationship into a romantic one is more a retreat from the challenges of adolescence than evidence of personal growth.
The remaining five seasons of Dawson’s Creek elaborate on this flaw in Joey and Dawson’s plan to keep their most unusually tight bond intact: they repeatedly break up over petty disagreements and get back together again, and Joey comes to see that Pacey has more of a forward-looking vision than Dawson does: late in the third season, while Dawson and Joey are at his aunt’s house singing karaoke to “Daydream Believer,” which his Aunt Gwen, played by Julie Bowen, put in the setlist specifically because it was the best friends’ favorite song in their childhoods, Joey has been helping Pacey build a sailboat, christened the True Love,6 which they will use to sail to Florida after they’ve completed eleventh grade. Dawson has his own creative vision, but it’s one that strictly looks backward: by the series finale, where Pacey and Joey are twenty-five and are in a stable and loving relationship, Dawson has become a producer of a hit TV show called The Creek, essentially a reshoot of the first season of Dawson’s Creek. When Sammy tells her childhood friend Jack, “I don’t want to wait for our lives to be over, I want to know right now: What will it be?,” and Jack kisses her, we’re supposed to think that, while Pacey has won Joey’s love in reality, Dawson has gotten the girl in the fictional worlds he creates. The trouble is that, if The Creek is so closely following the trajectory of Dawson’s Creek, down to the climactic bedroom kiss, it would seem that Petey and Sammy will eventually sail off to Florida together and leave Jack sobbing on the dock.
I think it’s better not to articulate all these difficulties and let Dawson’s Creek end with the first season, and allow it to be a story of two teenagers failing to grow up. For the choices adolescents have to make in their transition from childhood to adulthood aren’t always as clear and distinct as fiction for young adults would lead us to believe: there are those who are late bloomers, and some who seem to retain a childish view of the world well into middle age, and this wouldn’t be so if adulthood were always more noble and beautiful than childhood. In Dawson and Joey’s case, viewers can understand how regressing back into their blissful childhood friendship would be more appealing than trying to thrive within their broken families, plus face the usual challenges of adolescence, alone. Yes, it’s a tragedy that these kids can’t try to cope with their hardships in a less self-defeating way, but Dawson’s Creek ends its first season by confronting the fact that even regressive feelings and experiences can be sublime, and that’s what I think makes Dawson’s Creek special.
This isn’t to the point, but I also like how Joey, docked in her rowboat about to push off and hearing Dawson yell out his masturbation routine from his bedroom window, looks puzzled for three seconds before suddenly understanding what he has said, mentally connecting it to the conversation they just had where she asked him, using a euphemism, how often he walks his dog, and finally bursting out laughing. In movies and TV shows the characters never seem to have trouble comprehending each other unless it’s essential to the story that they do, but in fact it’s realistic that an incomplete sentence shouted from a hundred feet or so away shouldn’t be immediately understood by its hearer, as is the delay in processing Dawson’s words that Katie Holmes effectively conveys. This detail humanizes Josephine Potter’s character by showing her behave in a way human beings do but TV characters normally do not.
Here are the numbers Dawson’s Creek itself cites, when Jen is complaining to her comatose grandfather that Dawson and her grandmother, now both aware of her promiscuous past in New York, see her as a slut: “You know, between you and me, I don’t even know what the big deal is. I mean, in two years,[ that is, by seventeen years of age,] nearly 55% of my peers will have had sex, and in five years it will be almost 100 and nobody will care when I did it.”
Dawson obviously wouldn’t have told Jen, because that would hurt his chances at a relationship with her. Dawson’s parents probably know that Joey sometimes sleeps in his bed, but they wouldn’t have embarrassed their son by telling his girlfriend about that. If Jen knows about the sleepovers, one would also expect Pacey to know, since he has known Dawson and Joey longer than Jen, but in Pacey’s three speeches trying to convince Dawson or Joey that they’re in love with each other he never brings it up, whereas the fact that they’re already practically roommates would be the strongest argument available to him. I can only conclude that Joey, who sees Jen as a romantic rival, told her in an attempt to intimidate her or get her to break up with Dawson. But I would have liked to have seen that conversation on camera.
Mrs. Leery is a television news reporter and she’s cheating on her husband with her co-anchor.
From what little evidence we have of Joey’s academic performance in the first season of Dawson’s Creek, her poise in the face of hostile questions during her presentation on Japanese warlords, and her desire to seek extra credit to bring a 98 on a biology test up to a 100, we can conclude that she is a smart cookie, but the local yacht club would be filled with alumni of the Phillips Academies and Harvards of the world: if she can’t find intellectual peers she can get along with at home, moving to Paris isn’t going to help her much.
As they say on the British sitcom Peep Show, “Do you think there could be a subtext?”