Kirsten Dunst Deep Dive
- Misa Mascovich
- Nov 19, 2024
- 5 min read
If you were to name an actor who has a career spanning over 30 years, worked with some of the most varied filmmakers from Lars Von Trier to Jane Campion, and has received awards at Cannes for their work, it would be a short list of some of the most recognized names. Maybe Willem Dafoe? Maybe Isabella Rossalini?
On the list probably wouldn’t be Kirsten Dunst - and it’s a true shame that she isn’t included on the Hollywood greats even though she has proven throughout her career that she has not only a point of view on her work, but also great taste.
Dunst’s most recent film Civil War is her 88th (!!) acting credit and with this film, she is entering an era of her career I call “Hardened Woman Making Harder Choices.” Because she has been acting since the early nineties, Dunst has gone through many eras. Looking at her evolution as an actress, I’m struck by not only what interesting projects she takes on, but how she continues to be part of the cultural zeitgeist through the decades.
Still skeptical? Take a walk with me down the Dunst Road of Fame:
Even from a young age, Dunst had star-making qualities. It’s a tall order to hold your own against Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as an 11 year old, but Dunst imbues Claudia in Interview With a Vampire with youthfulness, cruelty, and melacholy. Just a year later, Dunst continued to make her presence known against large on-screen personalities - and who’s a larger presence than Robin Williams? Even though Williams’ is the true star of Jumanji, Dunst acts as his foil against Williams’ natural childlike style. Then, in Wag the Dog, while not a big part of the movie itself, it does mark the start of her choosing biting satirical projects with great actors involved (in this case, Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro). From her jumpstarting her early career in the nineties, she moves from child star to to the new millennium, but not without making a dent in 1999 with some standout films.
Just an absolute BANGER of a year for Dunst and indie girl cinema. Iconic in her role as Lux Lison in The Virgin Suicides, and is there a better quote than “ Mom still cries every time she sees a tilt-a-whirl or a fat lady in a tube top” from Drop Dead Gorgeous? Once again, Dunst revisits the genre of political farce with DICK, where Kirsten Dunst and Michelle WIlliams inadvertently become the infamous “Deep Throat” from the Watergate scandal.
With the 90’s behind her, I like to think Dunst woke up in 2000 and thought, “What if I
owned cultural references for the next few years?” And then she did just that.
I could write a dissertation on the cultural impact Dunst had between 2000 and 2005. Through her roles she left an imprint on teens and media discourse for the next decade because:
She’s the main (white) character Bring It On and in the end, her all white choreo-stealing team lose to the more deserving Clovers! The movie subverts the teen sports genre in an intersectional way and it’s not talked about enough!
Upside down Spiderman kiss!!
Any teen in 2004 was obsessed with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and if they haven’t had therapy they probably still are!!!
Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown is the origin of the “manic pixie dream girl” trope where a female character who is quirky, positive, and always beautiful, exists within the male-gaze to free the male lead from his angsty burden (usually against the soundtrack of a Shins song)!!!!!
Side note: the original author of the “manic pixie dream girl” has issued an apology on the trope and how its overuse in describing female characters has watered down the original description to a lazy sexist label.
She was the moment in the early 2000’s and doesn’t get enough credit for it.
We can’t talk about Dunst’s work without taking a Sophia Coppola Detour. Coppola and Dunst have collaborated over two decades to give us the untold stories of girlhood. Stories of the weight of being thirteen, including the objectification, loneliness, control and sisterhood that comes with it. The weight of being a girl with the future of France on your eventually headless shoulders. The weight of consumerism, shallowness, and consequences of real harm in a seeming “fake” world of celebrity. The weight of just existing as a woman during the Civil War. The plot of each Coppola movie is completely different, but there is a throughline of untold perspectives.
No one does girlhood like Coppola, and no one represents girlhood better than Dunst.
While Sophia Coppola may have been Kirsten Dunst’s gateway indie director, she went full throttle indie darling in the 2010’s starting with Lars Von Trier Melancholia. In what could be the best work she has ever done, Dunst takes us on a journey of planetary proportions. Dunst plays Justine, whose personal and literal world are thrown into chaos on the eve of her wedding. Justine falls into a depression, fights with her family and guests, all while a rogue planet hurdles toward earth.
Dunst won Best Actress as Cannes for Melancholia, but any more praise for her performance was overshadowed by Lars Von Trier being psycho and calling himself a Nazi. Shocking and also very on brand. Dunst followed up Melancholia with a smaller part in On the Road, going back to her roots of independent cinema. She continued with Midnight Special and is part of an absolutely STACKED cast of men who all embody creepy/hot including: Michael Shannon, Adam Driver, Joel Edgerton, and Sam Shepard.
Luckily Dunst continued also choosing interesting projects with female directors and gave a subtle, affecting, and memorable performance in The Power of the Dog. In the Jane Campion film, Dunst plays an alcoholic mother struggling to raise her son and keep her sanity in 1920’s Montana.
The balance between her disaffected attitude toward motherhood and true love for her son plays as a backdrop to the men in the film, who act out urges that destroy. In Civil War, Dunst plays a war journalist in an alternative US in the midst of a modern civil war.
From her humble beginnings as a poor vampire child to a jaded war correspondent, Dunst has continually pushed beyond stereotypes of character and story throughout her thirty year career. What is the next phase of Dunst? It might be too early to tell yet, but fingers crossed it involves another Spiderman kiss.
I've been espousing Kirsten Dunst's legacy ever since you brought this to my attention. I made sure that anyone who I told - usually quoting your opening line almost verbatim- was under the impression that it was my original thought. Thanks for the cool points!