Which Kirsten Dunst movie are you?
A tribute to our most millennial actress.
At the turn of the millennium, Kirsten Dunst was an icon, she was a legend, and she was the moment. She’s the centerpiece of so many iconic millennial moments, both on-screen (the upside-down in the rain Spider-Man kiss!) and off (eating a salad with such gusto that it stunned Jake Gyllenhaal speechless). She was cool but earnest, sarcastic but bubbly, unaffected but moody. Across two decades, she was everywhere and everything. So much so that this prompt from Holden Seidlitz feels like rings true for a (specific part of) a generation:
But I wanted to take this prompt a step further, mostly because I absolutely adore Kirsten Dunst. If she has a million fans, I am one. If she has one fan, it is me. And if she has no fans, I have fallen into shadow. She’s been famous and talented just about as long as I’ve been paying attention to movies, and there aren’t too many of her peers who can say that. So, instead of just picking a favourite movie, I wanted to create a matrix of 16 of the movies from her multiple peak eras, along two axes: happy/moody, and earnest/ironic.
Before I fill it in, though, a little something on the movies themselves, which I have divided into four eras:
Child Star
Interview with a Vampire (1994)
Little Women (1994)
Jumanji (1995)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1997)
Kiki burst onto the scene with Interview with a Vampire, a performance that netted her a Golden Globe nomination at the tender age of 12. That same year, she brought such feisty brat energy to Little Women as everyone’s most hated Little Woman that nobody even remembers who plays her older version. (In 1995, we hadn’t yet reached the apex of bangs technology—that would come with the 2020 adaptation—so we had to cast different actors to play different ages. Ah, the 1900s!)
The next year was the culturally unavoidable juggernaut Jumanji, and she rounded out her child star era with some choice voice acting gigs—young Anastasia in the extremely likable, pro-Tsarist cartoon Anastasia; and Kiki in the English-language dub of Kiki’s Delivery Service.
Indie Darling
Dick (1999)
Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Bring It On (2000)
Get Over It (2001)
To me, Kiki’s most eye-popping run happened in perfect tandem with the Willennium. 1999 brought cult classics Dick and Drop Dead Gorgeous (a movie I quote weekly at minimum), as well as the seminal Sad Girl masterpiece The Virgin Suicides. Nobody captured rich suburban teen angst like Sofia Coppola, and nobody embodied it better than Kirsten. Even now, hearing Air’s score gives me the most morbidly nostalgic goosebumps. A year later, we got the logical opposite of The Virgin Suicides with Bring It On, the most bisexual film that’s not The Mummy and a formative film for my own budding bisexual panic. I entered the theatre already in love with Kirsten, and left also in love with the Pantone siblings Missy and Cliff; and wanting to be Gabrielle Union’s Isis.
The last movie I’m putting in this era is Get Over It because it is so purely 2001. Like, Vitamin C lip syncs to “Love Will Keep Us Together” in the opening musical number. Kirsten clips her bangs into a mini-bouffant. Sisqo has a whole supporting role. It’s doing essentially the same thing as Lil Kim’s role in She’s All That, but he gets more lines and the chance to do some of his signature dance moves. This is also the first time Kiki gets to do her own singing, given that Lacey Chabert sang for her in Anastasia, and we love a multi-talented queen!
Mainstream Maven
Spider-Man (2002)
Mona Lisa Smile (2003)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Elizabethtown (2005)
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Kirsten’s cultural dominance doesn’t let up post-Willennium, but it does change significantly thanks to being cast as nerds’ ultimate girl next door, Mary Jane Watson. She brings all of her characteristic contradictory Kiki-ness to this iconic role—May Jane is as cool, flirtatious, and charming as she is sad and insecure. She switches most of that off to go full bratty mean girl for her role as Betty Warren in Mona Lisa Smile. This movie is on this list largely because it put my undergrad alma mater on my radar in the first place. (Sorry Hillary, but Kirsten really is that much more important to me.) And then she goes full heartbreak kid on us with her supporting role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the single most important movies of my life. There’s an argument to be made that her Mary, with her tragic recurring pining for an unworthy man, is the heart of the whole picture. She also gets to date Mark Ruffalo in his peak Indie Darling era. Get after it, girl!
The end of Kiki’s mainstream maven era came with her two most controversial roles—Elizabethtown, and Marie Antoinette. I personally think the critical vitriol directed at Marie Antoinette when it came out was largely misogynist bullshit, a refusal to engage with Coppola’s hyper-femme aesthetic and anachronistic soundtrack as artistic choices rather than limitations. The vitriol directed at Elizabethtown, however, is both artistically and morally sound. It’s the definition of a Blank Check movie—thanks to his previous critical and box office successes, Cameron Crowe was allowed to run amok with seemingly no restraints. What he made, in the face of an extremely cynical and mean-spirited cultural zeitgeist post-9/11, was a profoundly earnest, heart-on-its-sleeve, navel-gazing monstrosity with one of the worst-cast leads in American film history. (I was in love with Orlando Bloom from 2001-2005 just like every other horny teen who was also terrified of sex. But I would never accuse him of having the kind of wry comedic touch that would have grounded this movie in something relatably human.) Our poor Kirsten is stuck playing a toothache-inducing fever dream of a female character, and thus, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was born.
The Blue Period
All Good Things (2010)
Melancholia (2011)
Outside of the Spider-Man sequels, our girl laid low for a while, returning to the indie scene in 2010 with the Robert Durst-“inspired”All Good Things. But at this point, though she is undeniably a movie star, she doesn’t have quite the same grip on the culture as she did in the 2000s. It’s not that she stops being in good movies. It’s that she stops being in movies that anyone would call their favourite Kirsten Dunst movie. Like, if you tell me your fave is The Beguiled, I strongly suspect you’re there for Colin Farrell reasons. If you tell me your fave is The Power of the Dog, I strongly suspect you are imaginary, and I don’t need imaginary opps. So for me, the final movie that belongs on this list is Melancholia, the movie that dares to ask: what if your depression was the exact superpower you needed to be ready for the end of the world? It is an extremely validating depression watch, is what I’m saying.
I believe Kirsten Dunst is to millennials as Winona Ryder is to Gen Xers. She looms in our minds as this unassailably cool but somehow approachable icon of the era. Some part of us believes that, if we met her in real life, we could make her laugh. And at least one of her movies is central to our adolescence/early adulthood.
So, all of that being said: where do you gravitate towards on the Kirsten Dunst movie matrix?
It’s Drop Dead Gorgeous and Bring It On for me. Also, DDG might be the best thing Kirstie Allie and Allison Janney have done, too.
ALSO: just wait until you see Civil War. I’m writing a piece on it today. Our Kiki shows up and shows down!!