A LOVE LETTER TO DAWSON’S CREEK

Screenshot: Dawson’s Creek, opening credits, Sony Pictures Television.

I’ve been wanting to write this for quite some time. Sometimes as a love letter to Jen Lindley or Capeside, but always for the sum of its parts. Tragically, earlier this month, James Van Der Beek lost his battle with cancer, and it was a peculiar grief.

I don’t want to speak on the loss of James. I don’t know James, and the immeasurable pain his family has to endure evades words. That is not my space. I hope they can eventually find some comfort in how much James’ legacy meant to so many of us.

I would, however, like to speak on the strange and unsettlingly hopeless grief we possess by way of memory; a grief for a future as seen from the past.

Dawson’s Creek is one of the true loves of my life. I first watched it when I was 12. By the time I went to university, I could recite dialogue alongside the characters. Dawson’s Creek is deeply charming, a time before cell phones and the internet, it’s just a girl climbing through her friend’s bedroom window on a ladder. I can’t tell you how fundamentally that ladder impacted me. Combined, all six series of Dawson’s Creek are coming of age and the end of an era. Today, there’s a nostalgia for everything we lost, corruption is absent, and there’s all the hope and unknown of kids with dreams, just like we had when we first fell in love with Capeside.

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Pacey bought Joey a wall. Pacey brought Joey a wall, and I’m out here in the club pretending something matters, but I’ve never known community like Grams’ Thanksgiving dinner.

I think any show you habitually watch between the ages of 12-18 creeps into your bones. A comfort at first, a numb ache as the years stretch on and it can’t save you from time passing, things changing, aspirations giving way to taxes. Dawson’s Creek just so happened to sit in that pre-9-11 shift, before the internet grew up and collapsed the world into a tiny box.

With James Van Der Beek’s recent passing, I see myself back then, at 13, (maybe she’ll be an artist, maybe she’ll be an author, maybe she’ll write movies but, even then, she knew that didn’t happen to working-class English kids), watching Dawson show Jen all the Spielberg posters in his room. And I see it knowing the future. I see it knowing an ending, and none of it was like what we dreamed of back then.

That first time watch has been irreversibly altered.

The world has changed so much in the last 25 years, in many ways unrecognisable to itself. It felt like it was happening slowly, but we fell into it and, as oil became data and data became AI, we’ve entered somewhere with no return. Dawson’s Creek now stands as more than it ever was; it’s a time capsule for a place we yearn for but can never have back, even though it was just there, yesterday.

All my life I have thought about Capeside, about Jen, Joey, Pacey, and Dawson. Compared my teenage years to theirs, changed my perspectives and values to align with their experiences, and as I grew older than I had ever seen them, I felt a little empty. As weird as it is to say, I couldn’t imagine them where I was, in the banal reality of office work and finance bros. It’s hard to identify, but I felt surrounded by people who just didn’t seem to be living with a similar discomfort. I suspected it was a me issue. Too nostalgic, too unwilling to let go of how life felt like it could be when I was a kid. But now, now I’m not so sure. I think today’s social, political, and economic climate has transformed that silly little late 90s show into something sacred.

I think about what I want in life, what we’re supposed to want, a big-dick salary, a yacht, a huge house to host, I don’t know, wine nights and yap about the Dow… all I want is to climb up a ladder to watch movies with a friend who knows I’ll be there without us saying a word.