Movie-A-Day: Dawson’s Creek – Seasons 1-6 – Or, why grown men should like Dawson’s Creek

Starring: James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson, Michelle Williams, Kerr Smith Director: Various Year Of Release: 1998-2003 Plot: Set in a small coastal, Massachusetts town named Capeside, Dawson’s Creek tells the story of a group of teenagers as they struggle through adolescence. Dawson and Joey are childhood friends, and while she’s aware of their burgeoning sexual maturity, initially he’s still blissfully ignorant, although soon changes and shapes up their lives forever. There’s also Pacey, the black sheep of his family who believes himself to be a screw-up, and Jen, who arrives in Capeside in the first episode after being banished by her parents from New York because of her wild child ways. In the second season they’re joined by brother and sister Jack and Andie McPhee, who have problems of their own.

Being a grown man who likes Dawson’s Creek is sort of like being in a furtive secret club. I’ve written before about the oddities of being an eight-year-old girl trapped in a grown man’s body, and I think it was with Dawson’s Creek that I first realised that’s what I was. The series didn’t first come on TV until I was 20, and when I first started watching and enjoying it, it seemed like a perfectly natural thing for me to like.

However I quickly began noticing that if I told other men my age it was one of my favourite programmes, you could immediately see that they thought that there something was rather wrong with this. It was a fairly predictable pattern. At first their lips would twitch because their initial reaction was that this must be some sort of joke – after all surely nobody older than 14 and lacking a vagina would watch Dawson’s Creek? Then there was a hint of confusion as they began to register that perhaps I was serious. After that the smile started to re-emerge as they wondered whether to laugh at me, before a slight look of fear took over, while they tried to figure out what sort of freak I was. All that would normally take about two seconds, before they managed to force out a slightly strained, ‘Oh, really?’, where they did their best to suggest it wasn’t as if I’d just suggested my favourite author was Judy Blume.

However at least there was my friend Dan, who was another post-pubescent male who watched Dawson’s Creek, and I think we quickly both realised we’d probably best keep our predilections to ourselves, because even women who watched the programme would look at you askance if they realised you were a fan too but had testicles.

The thing is though, that it was only later that I realised there were a lot more of us secret male Dawson’s Creek lover than I’d realised, all living in our own private hell of being fans of the adventures of Joey, Pacey, Jen and Jack (although not Dawson, who I think everyone agrees was a bit of an annoying sad sack), but not allowed to tell anyone.  Whenever the programme was on, we’d have to invent excuses as to why we couldn’t be anywhere other people were, so we could sit in darkened room satiating our furtive habits.

I realised this when I started subtly asking other guys about the programme. Finding out if they liked it was like a flirtation, because no  grown man would just come out and say ‘I like Dawson’s Creek’, in the same way they wouldn’t say ‘I collect Barbies’, or ‘I like searching the internet for pictures of fatal car crashes’.

You sort of had to sidle your way into it and feel out the territory, but after a few questions they’d open up and you could see their love of the programme pouring out of them with a rush of relief. It was as if they’d been holding it in for years, and were relieved to find someone who felt the same way. And like I say, over the years I’ve come across loads of blokes who were like this, most of them not realising just how many men liked the programme.

But that’s the problem with the ridiculous societal laws of what men and women are allowed to like, and at what ages you’re supposed to enjoy things. And the odd thing about it is, that watching Dawson’s Creek now I realise that actually it’s more a programme for grown men than anyone else. When it first came on TV, many ridiculed it for its love of teen characters who over-analysed everything and turned their lives into a series of movie references and postmodern ideas. I quite liked that, because when I was a teen me and my friends were quite like that, trying to work out what everything meant and sitting around analysing everything that was happening in our lives. However many felt that in Dawson’s Creek this wasn’t realistic.

Now when I watch the show though, I realise exactly what it’s doing. Unlike most teen series, which supposedly try to look at teen lives at the level of people that age, Dawson’s Creek doesn’t really do that. Instead what it really seems to be doing is looking at teen life from the perspective of an adult looking back at their teen years.

In a similar way to how The Wonder Years was someone remembering their own youth, although Dawson’s Creek doesn’t have an older narrator telling us what they now realise their youthful experiences meant, instead it gets the teen characters to do it themselves. All the time they spend talking about how their life relates to movies and deconstructing their existence, is in essence a way to allow the writers of the show to deconstruct the experiences many teens go through, which they may not realise the full meaning of at the time, but they can as an adult looking back. When you’re actually a teenager, it’s such a mess of hormones that the reality of what’s going on often eludes you, but Dawson’s Creek, while not exactly realistic, gives the characters the ability to explore their lives as if they were several years older looking back at it all through more mature eyes.

While it’s known as a show for a young adult audience, I think that actually it’s best to watch it once you’ve washed the pubescent hormones out of your system, as you can appreciate what it’s doing a lot better then, and see how it relates to your own youth in ways you didn’t realise when you were actually going through it. You can also appreciate there’s a lot more truth to the emotional centre of the show than it’s given credit for, and see that through the eyes of a grown up looking back, it all makes a lot of sense.

But whether that’s true or not, I am a grown man and a Dawson’s Creek fan – and I’m proud of it.

TIM ISAAC

PREVIOUS: Dawn Of The Dead (1978) – Or, where the hell did zombies come from?
NEXT: The Day After Tomorrow – Or, are we really headed for a new ice age?

CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter