On Dakota Fanning
The summer I was ten years old my grandfather passed away from pancreatic cancer. He’d learned he was sick a year before, and now as he neared his end he lay recumbent in bed, with my father and grandmother and aunts and uncles at his side. During his life, he’d been a professor of economics and a supporter of Ronald Reagan. My principle memories of him are below-the-waist, from my childhood eye-level: tan slacks, penny loafers and a warm scent that I still associate with Townhouse crackers and cheese platters. My very last memory of this man is of him in bed, drawn in the face and weak.
He died the day after my grandmother’s birthday. I remember learning that the last movie he ever saw — with my cousins, who were in town from Iowa — was National Treasure. I remember that I was glad of that fact, because I loved that movie.
Exactly one month prior to the date of his death, the new movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds hit theaters. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Tom Cruise and the eleven-year-old Dakota Fanning. I remember watching the Today Show one morning around the time of its release; Miss Fanning was making an appearance to promote the film. As the girl smiled and joked, my mother (who was watching with me) remarked on how grown-up she was.
Just before the segment ended, interviewer Matt Lauer asked the little girl if she would scream for America. The idea was to replicate something she’d done in the film, in a scene where her character had been threatened by an encroaching alien.
The child obliged. She screamed, smiling.
Mr. Lauer smiled back. “That was bone-chilling,” he cooed.
Dakota Fanning made her feature film debut at the age of seven, playing a bit part in a Jerry O’Connell sex comedy titled Tomcats. She rose to prominence later that year in I Am Sam, which was released three months after 9/11. After that, she became the token child movie actor of her generation; while other children were famous for their work on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, Fanning was known for playing roles in adult movies. In other words, she was respected. Admired for her maturity.
I first saw her in a movie geared more towards her/my/our age demographic: The Cat in the Hat. She played a fastidious control-freak who spent all her time keeping her brother in line and managing a PalmPilot. I think I related in the role. While I would go on to see her other work in following years (Charlotte’s Web, The Secret Life of Bees), I did not go to see War of the Worlds that summer. I’ve still not seen it. The teaser trailer for the movie frightened me: it depicted an alien spaceship making touchdown on a suburban street, with families stepping out of their homes to face the horror that had made itself known. There were kids on that street. Would they survive, I wondered. Would their parents be able to protect them? I didn’t want to risk learning the answer, and the street in that trailer reminded me of the one on which my grandparents lived.
Nonetheless, Dakota Fanning appeared in that film — screaming for the delight of people all over the world, posing in precarious positions for the benefit of Hollywood. In spite of the fact that she and I were only a year apart in age, Miss Fanning was made to shoulder formidably adult concepts at a time in life when many people are sheltered from such material. But, of course, she was so grown-up. She appeared on television and handled interviews like a pro. She acted like an adult. How reassuring for us adults, who are so uncertain of our own adulthood. The danger in identifying children as “mature” is that it ignores the reality that some children are simply very good at mimicking maturity. There is still an eleven-year-old behind the smiling face and cheeky conversation, as impressionable as that ten-year-old boy, standing at his dying grandfather’s bedside.
I recently watched another interview with Miss Fanning, this one for her work in Man on Fire. She was nine when she made that movie, and in it she plays a girl who is kidnapped by a drug cartel and who, for much of the movie, is thought to have been raped and murdered by her abductors. In the interview, she is fresh-faced and chipper, recounting how she was introduced to director Tony Scott “at Mel’s Diner in California on Sunset” (a meeting for which he “drove up in his Porsche Carrera”). She speaks with the flair of a fifty-year-old socialite, uttering things no nine-year-old would think to say — unless that nine-year-old happened to like the attention she’d get for remembering and repeating such things.
The conversation turns to how Miss Fanning managed to cry during her more emotional scenes in the film. The child launches into a story about her goldfish, Flounder. It was one of the few pets she’d ever had, one “that died… the day before Christmas Eve.” She tells the story the way a grown-up would tell it: with alacrity, drawing out key, shocking details with a nearly Southern inflection (Fanning was raised in Georgia). She’s giving us this tale of childhood heartbreak as if she were her own mother, relating the incident to a friend over the phone.
But then there’s a break in the little girl's veneer. She looks off, away from her interviewer. She raises a finger, and winds it through the air in a somersaulting motion. “And then it flipped out of its bowl… and it died on the counter.”
A beat, and then the girl laughs. Uneasily. Suddenly, she’s nine again. And her goldfish is dead.
Children are required to be many things: adorable, well-behaved, attentive, diverting. Pleasant and pleasing, capable and resilient. They are expected to be everything that we want to be: accomplished, yes, and also utterly dependent. In the first decade of this millennium, Dakota Fanning was posed to be all those things — pure, fragile, spunky, strong. She was emblematic of a nation that saw itself as victim in a world suddenly at war, a world on fire. Death comes to us all, and it is queer how closely we hold fair-haired girls towards the toothy mouth of annihilation. It is society’s self-inflicted nightmare, our perverted daydream: the imperiled youth, the ending world.
