Some teen crushes stay with you
Celebrity deaths will always do a number on that day’s internet, but Luke Perry’s death of a stroke last week at age 52, seemed to strum something in a lot of women I know, mostly of the Gen X persuasion, but also a few early millennials.
It turns out, according to my social-media feeds, that Dylan McKay, as played by Perry on Beverly Hills, 90210, was everyone’s first pretend boyfriend. Dylan was a bad boy, with a reputation, a trust fund and a heart of gold; as per the demands of the nighttime soap, he bounced back and forth between Brenda (Midwestern good-girl-goes-dramatic) and Kelly (Californian beach babe who generates feminist frisson by choosing herself over Dylan or Brandon). Luke Perry played Dylan bruised, slouching, squinting, removed, a Baja-hoodied anti-hero: a perfect crush.
Perry and Jason Priestley were 90210’s male leads, playing best friends and romantic competitors, and while Priestly was — is! — luridly beautiful, in the Brad Pitt mode, his Bran- don was a bowl of whole milk, not so much a nerd as a narc. Brandon is really there for you, but he doesn’t need you. (He has his dad!) Dylan is always somewhere else, smoking or surfing, but he needs you to save him. He was the one everyone liked, like, like-liked. The bad boy, made safe by distance, and finally knowable in fiction.
Dylan McKay articulated something about what girls of his generation, and some of the next, wanted from guys, and were supposed to want (even more than Kelly stood in for the dream girl they were supposed to want to be). It was in every detail, from the absent dad, to the vintage Porsche, to the way he talked, like he hated it, to the way he kept falling apart when he wasn’t rescuing other people.
The original 90210 aired at a time when the role and the actor playing the role (especially a teen role) were less distinct: Without social media or an indefatigable news cycle, where every minor turn in a celerity’s life generates a tide of blog and social-media posts, Luke Perry may as well have been his character. A crush on one was easily transferred to the other, making crushes on one or the other or both exponentially powerful, especially considering how everywhere, and how everything, 90210 was at the time.
I wasn’t allowed to watch the show, and so never developed the consuming crushes my slightly older friends did. Instead of Brandon or Dylan or anyone from Melrose Place, even more adult and verboten, I mostly crushed on the reedy, slight, smart-seeming boys of Brit-pop — your Damon Albarns, your Jarvis Cockers — even though I didn’t particular- ly care about the genre, and have no particular thing for British guys.
If a crush on the mysterious, unavailable, distant Dylan McKay was a classic choice for a teen girl, so was my thing, especially as a pre-emptive strike against the aggro-sportos that seemed to dominate my high school. The crush gives us more than a crush: It’s a portal, a way out, or a way toward something else.
At different times, less charged than adolescence but with their own heavy compli- cations, I’ve benefited from projecting parts of my own self and life onto familiar, fictional characters, not crushes, but portals all the same: I’ve needed Josh Lyman and Lorelai Gilmore and Juliette Barnes and Mickey Dobbs to act out heightened versions of my own stuff, to offer some kind of instruction-via-identification, or therapeutic role-play, or whatever.
The verisimilitude of a lot of current TV, and the emotional immersion of Netflix-era binge-watching means that the fictional characters of television and film start to seem as real as anything else, almost as real as you. (That 90210 isn’t available on Canadian Netflix is something that Justin Trudeau might want to turn his attention to.)
Losing someone you’ve crushed on is a much closer reminder of mortality than losing some distant star that you just appreciate. Those early crushes don’t end, and are still reverberating somewhere in your actual sex life, or sexual imagination. Nostalgia connection like that is potent, and losing the person it was about is painful, even if they never actually existed.