Seriously Supernatural: The Hysterical Fangirls of the ‘Real Ghostbusters’

Smith 1

Starring James Van Der Beek as Himself: Celebrity, Camp and the “Meta-Role of a

Lifetime”

Presented by Jocelyn Smith, PhD Student

English & Cultural Studies, McMaster University

Third Annual Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC) Conference

Niagara Falls, Ontario

May 11, 2013

In this paper, I suggest that, at the beginning of the 2010s, a shift has occurred in

the way celebrity culture is consumed in two separate, but undeniably related, ways.

First, as many have argued over the past few years, there has been a “democratization” of

celebrity culture through digital media platforms such as YouTube, where anyone can be

a star, and Twitter, where anyone can interact directly with stars. Second, audiences have

begun to show an appreciation for self-referentiality and the ability to laugh at the

constructedness of one’s own celebrity in a “meta” or “ironic” way. Audiences seem less

concerned with knowing the “real life” of the celebrity; instead, they are interested in

knowing how celebrities understand their own lives as a constructed performance.

Graeme Turner, in his book Understanding Celebrity, touches on this in his discussion of

the Spice Girls, arguing that their fame relied on their “cheekiness” and their ability “to

perform, convincingly, a knowing celebration of their own constructedness” (Turner 56),

and I argue that this is becoming more and more prevalent. Audiences respect celebrities

who don’t take themselves too seriously and are willing to laugh at themselves—and

Saturday Night Live has definitely capitalized on this idea. We don’t want Ashlee

Smith 2

Simpson trying to hide the constructedness of her performance; we want Daniel Radcliffe

mocking Harry Potter, and Betty White making jokes about her aging body and elderly

sexuality.

Most discussions about recent shifts in celebrity culture focus solely on the idea

that anyone can be a celebrity nowadays, but I want to discuss how “traditional”

celebrities (that is, actors who found fame on a network television show or in a

Hollywood film) can use this shift in celebrity culture to reinvigorate their own star

power, and potentially demonstrate that the Internet is not as “democratic” as we would

like to think, and that “real” celebrities still have more status and power. What I want to

specifically explore in this paper is how this shift in celebrity culture has drastically

altered the narrative of the teen soap star, using the example of James Van Der Beek.

James Van Der Beek was the quintessential teen soap star, defined by Graeme Turner as

a celebrity who “enjoy[s] a high level of visibility” for a short period of time, “but in

many cases find[s] that once they leave the serial they are unable to find other work”

(37). In short, they “are easily replaced and quickly forgotten” (Turner 37). Incredibly

popular for his role as Dawson Leery in the late 1990s teen soap Dawson’s Creek, Van

Der Beek disappeared into relative obscurity after the show’s demise in 2003, inhabiting

the celebrity graveyard of low-budget made-for-TV movies, guest-starring roles on crime

shows and voice-acting gigs.

However, I argue that over the past year or two, James Van Der Beek has been

able to (ironically) reclaim his celebrity status by parodying his teen stardom, his

portrayal of Dawson Leery, and his failed career through new, interactive digital media

platforms and through the “traditional” medium of network television. In the main

Smith 3

section of this paper, I want to look at Van Der Beek’s three videos that aired on the web

site Funny or Die over the course of one week in 2011, otherwise known as “Van Der

Week,” and, near the end of the paper, I will turn to what was called in GQ Van Der

Beek’s “meta-role of a lifetime” on the 2012 sitcom Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment

23. In both of these, Van Der Beek, now a 35-year-old husband and father, plays himself.

In the Funny or Die videos, he mocks Dawson’s do-gooder ways and creates the

character of “asshole Dawson Leery,” he refers to himself as a “DILF,” and he responds

to the Internet meme of Dawson crying by creating his own web site,

JamesVanDerMemes, where he supplies other facial expressions for the Internet-savvy

generation to co-opt for their own needs. On Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, Van

Der Beek sleeps with Dawson’s Creek fangirls (often dressing up in Dawson’s iconic

plaid shirts to seduce them), feuds with James Franco, designs a brand of jeans

suggestively called “BJs,” takes acting lessons from Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka, stars on

a fake version of Dancing with the Stars, and repeatedly attempts (unsuccessfully) to save

his failing career (which he is ironically saving by making fun of how it has failed).

The making of the Funny or Die videos, I argue, was a necessary step in the

reclaiming of James Van Der Beek’s celebrity status, and enabled him to get the part on

Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Van Der Beek said in an interview with Us Weekly

that the show “needed somebody to ... play James Van Der Beek [and] [l]uckily I was the

only James Van Der Beek with a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] card, so by default I got the

job” (Van Der Beek qtd. in Johnson 2012), but I honestly don’t think, despite his obvious

credentials, that Van Der Beek would’ve got the job without these videos. As Paolo

Lorenzana from GQ claims in an article about Van Der Beek from April 2012:

Smith 4

Before James Van Der Beek could become James Van Der Beek, he had to stick it

to that chump Dawson Leery.... Luckily, the Crying Dawson mega-meme turned

out to be a great opportunity to beat down lil' ol' Leery once and for all. A “Van

Der Week” of Funny or Die videos followed, which showed, by way of DILF-

dom and being an “asshole for hire,” that he was more than the creek geek he

once played. The career douche-over has made for a Van Der streak of good

fortune since then. (emphasis added; Lorenzana 2012)

So while Richard Dyer, in his seminal text Stars, does not use terms such as “career

douche-over,” I think that Dyer’s work helps us understand what Van Der Beek is doing

here, despite the fact that Dyer was writing decades before “mega-memes” and viral

videos. Dyer explores the relationship between the “screen/‘fiction’ appearances” of stars

and the “real” lives of stars off-screen (20), and he argues that “[s]tars are ...

representations of people” (emphasis added; 20). That is, a star’s image is as much a

constructed character as the characters stars play in film and television. Dyer considers

stars’ public appearances as “serials,” like novels that are published in small parts over a

long period of time (98). The star’s “character” or image needs to be somewhat consistent

to remain popular with and believable to audiences and consumers. Dyer argues:

[j]ust as Charles Dickens found in publishing his novels in serial form, and as

contemporary soap opera also finds, changes in character are hard to handle in

this form since they ... rather than plot, are the form’s anchors. Because stars are

always appearing in different stories and settings, they must stay broadly the same

in order to permit recognition and identification. (98)

Smith 5

And this identification, he argues, “is achieved principally through the star’s relation to

social types (and hence norms)” (Dyer 99). So, going back to Graeme Turner’s argument

about teen soap stars’ images being defined and contained by the teen character they

play, Van Der Beek’s star “character” or image, could not be separated from Dawson

Leery, and thus his “social type” has been, for over a decade, confined to that of the “nice

guy” teen heartthrob.

Although Van Der Beek tried to break into more serious film acting, his

performances were always judged against this teen heartthrob image. Ultimately his

attempts to diversify were unsuccessful because they interfered with the consistency of

his star character. Nevertheless, there is obviously room to change, but it needs to be

done carefully. Dyer argues that “[i]n some cases the star’s image’s career has been

centrally about attempts to overthrow the type to which [she or he] belongs” (100). But

Dyer argues that a consequence of this is that the “new” star image created by

overthrowing the “old” star image is always one inextricably tied to the struggle for

individualism, and I don’t think that’s what’s happened here with Van Der Beek. His

“career douche-over” was not about seriously fighting against celebrity culture’s pigeon-

holing of stars’ personalities, but instead it was a campy resistance against celebrity

culture’s tendency to take stars and their images too seriously. And when I say a “campy”

resistance, I am drawing on Susan Sontag’s seminal work “Notes on Camp,” in which she

defines camp loosely as “a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into

the frivolous” (276). Sontag argues that “[c]amp sees everything in quotation marks. It's

not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and

persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in

Smith 6

sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater” (280). To be clear here, I am arguing that

Van Der Beek’s career is campy, and specifically his “career douche-over” can be read

as a “camping” of his star text—I am not necessarily arguing that these Funny or Die

videos or Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 are “campy” texts in and of themselves,

although perhaps they can be read this way. Van Der Beek uses these videos to “camp”

his image and perform publicly the change in his star text. He doesn’t deny the artifice of

celebrity; instead, he embraces it. So let’s look at what a campy career douche-over looks

like. Let’s take a look at the Funny or Die video “Van Der Memes.”

Here are a few of the new faces on the Van Der Memes web site—there’s the Lilo

eye roll, for responding to the latest Lindsay Lohan scandal; the “deal with it” face; the

“J-time” face; and the “I’m married” face. So what is Van Der Beek doing here? He takes

a joke that was made at his expense and turns it around, showing that he’s in on the joke

and is willing to play ball. Someone who takes himself “seriously” would, arguably,

object to this mockery of a scene where he makes himself vulnerable as an actor. And

here he is in all his vulnerable glory.

But Van Der Beek demonstrates that he understands the hilarity of Dawson’s

weakness, and also that he understands how the Internet “works.” It’s a space where

people mock themselves, each other and celebrities, not a space for creating or

maintaining a “serious” image. So, right off the bat, he acknowledges that he’s “old” and

out-of-date—if you’re under the age of 20, you basically have no clue who he is or why

he’s famous or why his face is a meme. Then he takes the joke one step further, and, in

the process, makes himself so un-Dawson that fans are left shocked. He makes fun of

Lindsay Lohan, he makes references to marijuana, and he’s sassy.

Smith 7

I want to look at another clip—this one from the video “Asshole for Hire.” In this

video, he does not comment so much on Internet celebrity culture, but focuses heavily on

disrupting the narrative of “James Van Der Beek as Dawson” and further explores the

new space he’s carved out for himself in the first video—James Van Der Beek as a

sexual, vulgar, grown man. Here, Van Der Beek rewrites his star text in a way that is

completely antithetical to the star text Dawson’s Creek fangirls fell in love with—and

actively enters their lives and relationships to disrupt their view of him as Dawson—and,

in doing so, is able to create a new star text that fits into this “meta” or “ironic” language

of the “new” self-referential and self-deprecating celebrity culture. But he doesn’t just

change his star image from Dawson to sassy, ironic asshole without maintaining some

sort of character continuity. He employs campy-ness to speak directly to Dawson in these

videos, and basically says, “Listen, we love you, Dawson, and you’ll always be in our

hearts, but it’s time to move on. You’re just not cool anymore—but, guess what? James

Van Der Beek still is. And, what’s more than that, James Van Der Beek is cooler than all

you ‘normal’ non-famous people mocking Dawson online.” This is quite an intriguing

dynamic—sort of an online post-emptive strike. He doesn’t try to deny Dawson, and thus

is able to appeal to Dawson’s Creek fangirls, but he goes beyond Dawson, and thus is

able to appeal to those who hated Dawson’s Creek, and those who are too young to have

watched it. But, ironically, while he is pointing out the artifice of celebrity, he is also

relying on his own celebrity status to do so. He relies on his own star power to present

himself as just an “ordinary” asshole of a guy, creating a sort of “hyper-ordinariness.” In

these videos, he demonstrates the he has the power and control in the situation and

reclaims his status and reasserts his power as the celebrity in the equation. The Internet,

Smith 8

he’s saying, is not a totally “democratic” space—Van Der Beek still has more influence

than anyone out there using, creating or adapting Dawson memes, and he’s not about to

let you forget it.

And this is why James Van Der Beek was able to score the role of James Van Der

Beek on Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. The show has been cancelled at the end

of its second season, but I still think that despite the show’s short run, it has been a great

vehicle for Van Der Beek’s return to “traditional” forms of media entertainment

following his online “career douche-over.” The sitcom still relies on a few of the

strategies employed in the Funny or Die videos, such as mocking Dawson’s Creek and

the god-like status of James-Van-Der-Beek-as-Dawson—and emphasizing the fact that

James Van Der Beek “not as Dawson” is just a regular, vulgar asshole of a guy. And, in

the season premiere of the second season, Van Der Beek and his friends participate in a

literal killing off of Dawson, pictured here. After a disastrous attempt at a Dawson’s

Creek reunion, Van Der Beek’s friend, the “B” in apartment 23, along with some help

from the actor who played Zack Morris on Saved By The Bell, encourages Van Der Beek

to burn his Dawson paraphernalia—and to push it in a rowboat into a creek, of course—

in order to, as she says, “move forward and never look back.” Even if your exploding

stuff is causing a forest fire.

However, because the videos did the majority of the necessary “douching over” of

Van Der Beek’s career, Don’t Trust the B---- is able to move away from that and focus

more on deconstructing celebrity culture as a whole, pointing out its ridiculousness, and

poking fun at celebrities who take themselves too seriously. Van Der Beek said himself

in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter:

Smith 9

When we were working on the pilot, we were very clear about how we're going to

move away from specific Dawson jokes—because you can only make so many of

those before they get old—and really flush out the character. Of course, the way

we flushed him out he became this bizarre human being. We might go to it in

passing for a joke here or there throughout the season but very seldom do we do

that; it's more about celebrity culture. (emphasis added; Van Der Beek qtd. in

Goldberg 2012)

In this still from the first season finale, Chloe—the “B,” played by Kristen Rytter—is

explaining why Van Der Beek is in a feud with Dean Cain over who gets the biggest

dressing room for Dancing with the Stars. She says: “Actors are very sensitive people so

they need the validation that comes from knowing that everyone else’s dressing room

sucks.” Every joke that Van Der Beek is the butt of in this show—and there is one

episode where his butt literally is the joke—stems from the fact that he takes himself and

his career too seriously. However, because of the work done in the Funny or Die videos,

the audience “in-the-know” knows that Van Der Beek does not take himself very

seriously. Thus the real James Van Der Beek is not the butt of the joke, but “traditional”

or “old fashioned” or even “pre-Internet-age-of-cynicism-and-irony” celebrity culture as

a whole is the butt of the joke.

To conclude this paper, I want to begin to think through why the cynical and

ironic star has become so popular. In an interview with GQ, Van Der Beek is asked,

“Why do you think Dawson is so ripe for the mocking these days?” Van Der Beek

responds, “I talk to my friend Bret Easton-Ellis a lot about how now we're in an age of

full disclosure. You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to

Smith 10

buy it” (Lorenzana 2012). Blatant name-dropping aside, Van Der Beek seems to be

suggesting here that interactive digital media platforms have increased our desire and our

ability to be in the know, to know the secrets behind the messages we receive from more

“traditional” media platforms. To use Marshall McLuhan’s over-cited and perhaps overly

simplistic terms, the Internet is the ultimate “hot” medium, and we are using it to

challenge and expose the constructedness of the messages we receive from “cold” media.

Here I want to return to Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” Sontag argues that “the

essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is

esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban

cliques” (275). If we replace the phrase “small urban cliques” with “Internet savvy young

people,” then, I would argue, Sontag’s statement made in 1964 still applies. However,

perhaps we can think about the “camping” that occurs with these mega-memes as a new

iteration of Sontag’s definition of camp—maybe, to use the most popular prefix of our

age, it is “meta”-camp. It is a camp that not only “incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over

‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy” (Sontag 287), but also is

aware of this history of camp, and interacts with camp in complex ways. The “campy-

ness” of the cynical or ironic celebrity, such as James Van Der Beek, crosses the

boundaries between different media, and allows for interaction not only between

celebrities and audiences, but also between different media platforms. The original

Dawson crying meme is arguably campy in and of itself. However, I have demonstrated

that Van Der Beek, due to his teen soap star fame, was able to intervene into this digital

space and to “play” himself, which allowed him to return to television acting. This campy

play between media, between star texts, and between stars and fans opens up a space to

Smith 11

theorize a new, interactive—but not necessarily democratic—doubly self-reflexive meta-

camp. Sontag argues that “Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’”

(288), but, as our conversations with and about stars rely more and more heavily on GIFs,

I want to continue to think through our relationship with the serious and how it may

become even more complex and obscure.

Smith 12

Works Cited

Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1979.

Goldberg, Lesley. “Apt. 23’s James Van Der Beek: You Can Only Make So Many

Dawson’s Creek References.” The Hollywood Reporter. 18 April 2012. Web.

Johnson, Zack. “James Van Der Beek: I Love Making Fun of Myself on Don’t Trust the

B---- in Apartment 23.” Us Weekly. 2 May 2012. Web.

Lorenzana, Paolo. “James Van Der Beek of Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 Talks

About Beating Lance Bass for the Meta-Role of a Lifetime and the Importance of

Having a Bitch for a Wingman.” GQ. 18 April 2012. Web.

“Shitagi Nashi...” Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23: Season One. Writ. Nahnatchka

Khan and Casey Johnson. Dir. Wendy Stanzler. ABC, 23 May 2012. Web.

Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp [1964].” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New

York: Dell, 1967. 275-292. Web.

Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. California: Sage Publications, 2004.

Van Der Beek, James. “Asshole for Hire.” Video. Funny or Die. January 2011. Web. 10

October 2012.

---. JamesVanDerMemes. James Van Der Memes, 2011. Web. 10 Ocotober 2012.

---. “Van Der Memes.” Video. Funny or Die. January 2011. Web. 10 October 2012.