On My So-Called Life and Change

I have zero feelings about Claire Danes right now, at least the Claire Danes of right now: there’s a certain blandness to her flat hair and taut skin and angular shoulders that totally bores me (though at least she has good taste in husbands). But lately I’ve been watching My So-Called Life (that cult, super-influential ABC high-school show of the early ‘90s that launched the careers of Claire Danes and Jared Leto but got cancelled after one season) and it’s making me sad because back then she was a completely different person. Suddenly I’m remembering being 7 and watching our VHS of Romeo + Juliet in my living room and thinking that this person, this ‘Claire Danes,’ with her hair and those wings, was the prettiest girl in the whole world. And she was. Even her name sounded like she looked – ethereal, graceful, all those airy chiming vowels. What happened to that girl?



As Angela Chase in My So-Called Life she is phenomenally good – so radiant, so fresh and brave, she breaks your heart. For a first-time actress it’s incredible how real she makes that character. She says what I would have said at that age, if I had been smart enough; she cries when I would have cried and in the same embarrassing way I would have done it. You can almost feel her heart beating; it’s like her skin is too thin or something and everything she feels glows through to the surface. Like many others before me I wish that Angela was the real person and Claire Danes was the (so-called) illusion. It’s literally impossible to reconcile this shiny polished blonde woman with the throbbing, raw, brutally honest being in the show. The worst part is that since it was cancelled after just the one season, there really is… nothing. No way of witnessing Claire grow into the person she is now… just a gap where Angela Chase used to be. I know people are allowed to change, obviously, but I liked her teenage self so much that it's hard to not feel betrayed!

So basically while Desmond was watching Skins (probably as opposite a show to MSCL as could possibly exist), I was spending my precious Spring Break devouring all 19 episodes of MSCL. I thought I’d grown up a little from being a teenager, but it somehow put me right smack back into those years. The confusion, the giggly highs, the intensity – it portrays adolescence with a gravity that’s so true, while at the same time acknowledging the silliness of it all, and verging into melodrama surprisingly rarely. Despite the sappiness, it’s a really good, occasionally hilarious, really comforting show. And the clothes! All those bad ‘90s prints, floral maxi dresses, denim vests, plaid flannel, crushed velvet, Doc Martens! I love it.