The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Home Movies
This episode makes me angry, though not for the reasons you might think. As I alluded to last time, “Home Movies” is a middling episode of Dawson’s Creek—a slight step up from the disastrous opening triptych of season three, but it’s still not making anybody’s top 10 (or top 25). Part of me admires it for not really having an A-plot, as it treats the leads as a true ensemble and gives everybody equal time (though a bulk of the action does center around Jack making his debut as Capeside High’s great gay football hope, I wouldn’t really call this a Jack episode). But it has the same character problems that have plagued the third season and contains one of the more ridiculous sequences the show ever laid out.
All that is more or less forgivable, the still-tentative missteps of a show under new leadership and searching for a second wave of identity. The reason I walk away angry is because the final few minutes are emotionally manipulative in a way that speaks so specifically to me that it feels personal and punitive. During the cold open, Dawson is sorting through a box of old tapes as he gathers footage for the documentary piece commissioned by his mother about Jack. He somehow runs across footage of the day he met Joey when they were both little kids (who was rolling film on two children being introduced for the first time?), and it’s as sickly sweet and gauzily melancholy as you would expect. Dawson doesn’t mention the tape, but he does make a copy for Joey who watches it in the show’s closing moments. Pair that with Mitch’s monologue about the heavy joy of fathering a son and score it all with a minimalist swoon of an acoustic ballad by Jude and you’ve got a recipe for an instant lump in my throat. I don’t mind a good cry while I’m watching something (it’s one of the reasons The Wild Robot was one of my top films of last year), but the 40 minutes leading up to that were so scattershot and empty that I didn’t so much feel the emotional weight of the moment as I felt manipulated by a skilled editor, and that fiction is sometimes too much to bear.
As I said, nobody really has a dominant story in this hour. Dawson works on his film about Jack, and Mitch tries to discourage him because he’d rather Jack just concentrate on football. Jen quits the cheerleading squad but then gets pulled back into their orbit because Henry paid $500 in a charity auction for the right to kiss her (he sold Doug Flutie’s lucky mouthguard, his prized possession, to raise the scratch). Joey and Pacey have a weird unresolved misadventure that involves Principal Green picking them up while they hitchhike and a tandem mascot costume. Andie struggles with the guilt of cheating on the PSAT and spends the whole episode thinking she’s been caught. And, as ever, nobody really acts like themselves.
It all just kind of ping-pongs around until the dual climaxes, one not horrible and one profoundly bad. The former is a nice bit of flag-planting for the rest of the season, as Pacey reveals to Joey that he bought a cheap wreck of a boat that he’s going to salvage, and he has named the vessel True Love. (Spoilers for the end of a TV season that aired a quarter century ago, but the finale finds Pacey and Joey leaving Capeside on that boat together.)
The awful apex of “Home Movies” is the football game, which finds the Henry-to-Jack connection dominant early until the other team starts to hound Jack (and hit him with a heaping portion of homophobic hate speech to boot). With the team down big at halftime, Mitch struggles to rally the troops with quotes from Sun Tzu but then Dawson dreams up the idea for them to hit back: They rub mud on their jerseys so the opposing defense has a harder time clocking Jack, and then Dawson convinces Jen to get the cheerleaders to put make-up on the rest of the team so they all look “gay”? It’s a total hare-brained scheme that (I speculate) was meant to play out as a parody of James Van Der Beek’s hit movie Varsity Blues but mostly seems to be the ramblings of a mental patient who does not understand football, make-up, television, or life itself. Jack does manage to get a heroic game-winning touchdown and Mitch and Dawson bury the hatchet in a nice scene (that nonetheless resolves a really goofy conflict), but otherwise it that whole sequence (and the rest of this episode) feels like leftovers from a more self-consciously nutty teen show from a different era entirely.
That was especially troubling when the episode first aired in the fall of 1999. I very vividly remember having a discussion with my fellow Creek Freaks about how the growing pains of the early episodes did not seem to be abating, and maybe this—a normal run-of-the-mill episode that didn’t have any larger arc behind it—was going to be the new norm. I was perturbed that this was the new baseline for Dawson’s Creek. Luckily I was wrong, but we’re still a few weeks away from finding our second golden age.
Also:
-This episode aired October 20, 1999, and was written by Jeffrey Stepakoff. He was new to the Dawson’s Creek writers room and served as a producer for seasons three, four and five. This is his first byline, and he would go on to write nine more (including at least two truly exceptional hours).
-In music that week, former Organized Konfusion member Pharoahe Monch dropped his explosive solo debut Internal Affairs (that’s the one with the Godzilla-sampling bulldozer “Simon Says”) and Handsome Boy Modeling School (the collaboration between Prince Paul and Dan “The Automator” Nakamura) arrived with the effervescent beat bonanza So…How’s Your Girl?
-The top movie at the box office the weekend after “Home Movies” aired was the Spike Lee-produced romcom The Best Man, starring a veritable all-star team of people who weren’t that famous yet: Nia Long, Taye Diggs, Terrence Howard, Sanaa Lathan, Harold Perrineau, Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall (making her film debut!). In a quiet weekend, it handily beat out the other wide release: Martin Scorsese’s surreal Nic Cage vehicle Bringing Out the Dead, as strange and kinetic and hallucinatory as anything in either of their filmographies. That’s a great movie but a pretty big box office bust, and it’s kind of insane to think that was released on nearly 2,000 screens. Sure Cage was a big star and Scorsese already had legendary cache, but that is a weird movie that is absolutely not for everyone.
-I don’t know if this makes me a prude or a creep, but both Katie Holmes and Meredith Monroe are styled entirely too sexy in these first few episodes and in this one in particular. I know both actresses were into their 20s (Monroe was damn near 30 by the time this bad boy aired) but they are supposed to be playing high school students. Plus they’re both supposed to be self-conscious over-achievers, so there’s no way Andie McPhee would allow herself to look as juggy as she does in several scenes. Something definitely shifted between seasons, and I get the performers don’t want to be perceived as children while they look for other work, but I got distracted (and that might be because I’m a creep).
-There’s this weird bit of slap bass that accompanies the cold open, as though they’re riffing on the old weird theme music to Seinfeld.
-Speaking of music: The closing song that puts a lump in my throat is Jude’s “I Do,” from his major label debut No One Is Really Beautiful. Another song from that album, “I’m Sorry Now,” shows up earlier in the episode. For reasons that are beyond me, “I Do” is preserved for streaming but “I’m Sorry Now” is replaced. Confounding! There’s another song I liked in this episode called “Static,” which is the title track from the breakout ’98 album of a band called Bleach who I was devastated to discover are a Christian rock group. Good song, though!
-Jen ends up being charmed by Henry’s charitable donation and ends up giving him the kiss he bought while the assembled football crowd chant “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” at them and Principal Green fist pumps because he is so thrilled.
-Also after Green finds Pacey and Joey ditching school he hands them a box and says it’s their punishment; we take it to mean they have to be both ends of a mule costume that serves as a mascot (even though Capeside High are the Minutemen; maybe the mule is a secondary mascot?). But at the end of the episode it’s revealed they’re not in the costume and they just fuck off to see Pacey’s boat. What a weird waste of time for everybody!
-Eve is entirely absent from this episode, and it’s a testament to her impact on my life that I haven’t brought that up before now. Dawson has a hand-waving line about how they’re not on speaking terms, but she otherwise might as well not have ever existed. (She’s back next week when Dawson realizes it’s strange that this woman who insinuated herself into his life is suddenly AWOL.)
-Next week Eve is back and the vibes improve slightly but not really.