Illustration by Stephanie Monohan.
Kirsten Dunst has played a pageant contestant not once, but twice: famously, in the cult classic Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), then, in a self-reflexive turn in Showtime’s short-lived satire of predatory capitalism, On Becoming a God in Central Florida (2019). In the latter, Dunst plays Krystal Stubbs, a pageant queen turned widow turned cunning representative of the Founders American Merchandise corporation. In one scene, she instructs a goth teen on a stratagem of competition: “Dazzle by any means necessary. If you want better lightin’ than the other girls, give yourself better lightin’ than the other girls.”
Dunst has built a career around this principle. Having started as a child star, she has supported superhero franchises, starred in teen movies and art films alike, and worked in both film and television. In each project, she follows Krystal’s advice, juggling each character’s interiority with bigger-picture concerns. She moves through each shot as a figure in the diegesis, representative of her moment, her setting, but also distinct. She’s the one you pick out from the crowd; she finds her lighting, and she dazzles.
In March of this year, Dunst sounded off, explaining that she’d been working less because she was only being offered “sad mom roles,” lesser incarnations of her Academy Award–nominated part in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021). Dunst’s Rose Gordon is a remarried widow, haunted by her brother-in-law’s cruelty and his queer desire, which hint at an unspoken trauma. The Power of the Dog is loud on some fronts—its heavy-handed homoeroticism a rare example of humorless camp—yet mysterious and quiet on others. Rose’s character falls into the latter category. Dunst’s performance only works as a Lillian Gish redux, a silent-film rendering of primal suffering too deep to find language. A master of evincing multiple emotions at once, Dunst is hindered by the way Rose is written as a one-note avatar of agony. She is inhabiting a familiar archetype—a damsel in distress, to be frank—more recognizable as a product of our entertainment industry than anything else.
Dunst’s gift for encapsulating contradiction in her performances—dumb but smart, tough but vulnerable, worthy of both sympathy and scorn—invites us to bear witness to the complexities of her characters’ milieux. In following her career, from childhood to adolescence through to adulthood, a grander arc emerges, one that transcends genre or form: the bratty little sister par excellence in Little Women (1994); a depressive teen in The Virgin Suicides (1999); a steely coed in Mona Lisa Smile (2003); a self-involved suburban wife seeking thrills and empowerment in the second season of Fargo (2015). They are period pieces, the first one set in the 1950s, the latter two set in the 1970s. Dunst is not simply a woman out of time, not a sad mom or a pageant girl, but a subject in history, being blown around or attempting to stand still as the winds of time whirl around her.
Dunst’s most intimate co-star, maybe apart from Jesse Plemons, is whatever chronotope she is dropped into and forced to navigate. Her performances interrogate the images and myths that make up our shared history: What have we gotten wrong? What do we continue to get wrong? In Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), Dunst likewise plays photojournalist Lee Miller as an object of history and historical memory.
Dick (Andrew Fleming, 1999).
Dunst’s body of work teaches us that all period pieces are anachronisms, and all histories are revisionist. No film—especially one set in the past—can resist the presentist impulse to assess another time through the lens of our own. Why bother to retell a story that has no bearing or interest to people today? After all, every historical anecdote and piece of lore has been translated, in their making, into an ideological narrative. In Dick (1999) and Marie Antoinette (2006), two films more alike than they initially seem, Dunst plays stereotypically silly women and finds the secret—or sidelined—intelligence in each, exposing what historical narratives (written by male victors, typically) rarely accommodate.
In 1999, Dunst had the long, straight locks and charmingly imperfect teeth of a ’70s flower child, which she played in two films that year: The Virgin Suicides and Dick. In the former, her character carries the weight of the moment on her narrow shoulders; in Dick, as Betsy Jobs, she moves through the world as a bouncing incarnation of sunshine and cheer. Betsy, the best and only friend of fellow fifteen-year-old Arlene (Michelle Williams), is a loyal confidante, pro-dog, and anti-war—though not radically anti-war, or radically anything. When Arlene tells Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya), on first meeting, that war is bad, Betsy echoes, seriously, earnestly, “Yeah.”
A series of unlikely events—their being present for the Watergate break-in, their class trip to the White House in which they are appointed by the President himself as “secret youth liaisons,” even their prank call to Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCullough)—leads them to unwittingly discover corruption that goes all the way to the top. Their scrambled knowledge, albeit incomplete, puts them directly in the Executive Branch’s sinister crosshairs.
“They think we’re stupid teenage girls!” Arlene fumes in response to the looming threats. “We are stupid teenage girls!” Betsy replies. A girl-power precursor to Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000), complete with penis jokes galore and plenty of weed humor, these “stupid teenage girls” are underestimated from sea to shining sea, as evidenced by Arlene’s semi-articulate response: “No, Betsy. We’re human beings, and we’re American citizens.” Although H. R. Haldeman informs Nixon, “Sir, I have met yams with more going on upstairs than those two,” what he fails to realize is the even wilder, more outlandish idiocy of the supposedly competent people around him.
Nixon himself is far from an astute mind. John Dean (Jim Breuer) has the emotional intelligence of a toddler. Perhaps the dumbest of them all are Woodward and Bernstein, two stooges missing a third, swatting at each other like children, bickering and vying for credit. (Henry Kissinger, played by Saul Rubinek, comes across as one of the sharpest tools in the White House shed, for what it’s worth.) When Nixon tells Arlene and Betsy, “Don’t worry your pretty little heads. I think I know what we’re doing,” the joke is that he doesn’t.
Dunst performs without any wink or condescension. As committed as Betsy is to justice and the power of female friendship, so too is Dunst dedicated to playing the character honestly. Betsy is usually pretty happy, but ripples of woundedness cross her face when she discovers Arlene is keeping a secret (her crush on “Dick,” courtesy of some deep-seated Daddy issues). At this moment, Dunst was a bigger star than Williams, who was known mainly for her role on Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003). Though Dunst is cast here as the supporting player, with a subtler arc, she offers her own, if not complexity, then certainly depth to the role, paired with the character’s abiding sweetness. And as the more vivacious and outgoing of the two, Betsy brings confidence to the pair, by which they are able to seduce a local teen (a young but still recognizable Ryan Reynolds) and get the incriminating recordings they need.
Shortly after their appointment as Secret Youth Liaisons (and walkers of Nixon’s dog, Checkers), Betsy lays out the details of her White House visit in her Current Events class, interspersing classified information with instructions for making Hello Dollies, the cookies that she brings to the Oval Office (unbeknownst to her, that batch contains a very special, period-appropriate ingredient). “I really dug the way you used fantasy, current events, and cooking in a kind of tapestry of storytelling,” her hippie teacher says. Betsy beams with pride.
What is Dick if not a movie that uses fantasy, current events, and cooking to generate a tapestry of storytelling? Andrew Fleming’s teen historical spoof is, clearly, not how things really went down in 1973; in 2005, FBI Special Agent Mark Felt revealed that he, in fact, was the obscenely-named informant. But Great Men, hero-and-villain-coded histories are skewed too, as the film slyly argues, circulating as fantasies in their own right. Dunst treats her own consequential role lightly, Betsy being a character who can’t see the big picture but who knows her worth regardless.
But vapid girls are rarely allowed to age into women of valor, at least in the official annals of history. Woodward and Bernstein decide to keep secret the identity of their teenybopper “Deep Throat,” not for the girls’ protection but because, Woodward admits, “it’s just too embarrassing.” But despite being surrounded by liars, who constantly accuse them of lying, Arlene and Betsy always tell the truth. Is it their fault if no one believes them?
The famously missing minutes from Nixon’s tapes turn out to be Arlene’s confessions of love, deleted in a hurry. “Watergate, my ass!” Hedaya’s Nixon blusters. “They’ll crucify me if they hear this… Erase this shit!”
Top: Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006). Bottom: Olympia (Edouard Manet, 1890).
Seven years after Dick, following her first turns as Spider-Man’s Mary Jane Watson (2002 and ’04) and her haunting performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Dunst was crowned the Queen of France. In the opening shot of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), a decked-out Dunst reclines on a chaise longue, tasting frosting from one of the nearby cakes while a faceless maid adjusts her shoe. The very picture of luxury and privilege, so often the object of looks and judgment, Marie Antoinette looks down the barrel of the camera and returns our gaze.
Coppola’s tableau is reminiscent of Edouard Manet’s 1863 Olympia. Though here the woman is dressed, these images share a commitment to disrupting the tradition of who looks and who is looked at. In Olympia, the stakes were in many ways representational and political—what gives the courtesan in this painting the right to look back? For Coppola and Dunst, the aim is not just to challenge the status quo but to look back and dive deep in historical-audit mode.
If Dick is about women whose stories do not get told—silly women would make history, if even sillier men weren’t so insecure—Marie Antoinette is about the misunderstood female figure. Underneath a grand image of Versailles, a track of a peasant revolt plays, the crowd roaring as a disembodied voice asks, “Do you know what she says?” The film responds with a fantasy vision of a bizarro Marie Antoinette, wearing a dark lipstick, lounging in a bathtub. “Let them eat cake,” she purrs. The scene cuts back to Marie as we have come to know her: soft, natural, surrounded by friends. “That’s such nonsense!” she objects. “I would never say that!” When situated within Coppola’s auteurist preoccupations, the out-of-touch Marie is reinvented as sheltered but compassionate, above all keenly sensitive spirit. “That’s such nonsense” is two women speaking in one voice: Marie and Coppola, the muse and the maker. Yet, the fact that we only hear the peasant uprising at this point—do not yet see it—indicates how distant this threat seems to Marie, though Coppola and we know better.
Marie’s sorrows in the film’s first half stem in large part from King Louis’s (Jason Schwartzman) unwillingness to consummate their marriage. The entire court is abuzz with the scandal, and she escapes into an ornately decorated room, away from prying eyes, to weep into the walls. This scene quickly gives way to the memorable montage set to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy,” in which the Queen drinks champagne, eats elaborate sweets, tries on jewels and upholstered footwear, and plays card games with abandon. She is fitted for a wig filled with butterflies, birds, and feathers. “It’s not too much, is it?” she gushes.
Certainly, Marie wants to escape the shame and loneliness of her life with cheap thrills, but correlation is not causality. In this otherwise episodically organized film, these might just be the flavors of her life, the dark and the light, the ups and the downs, which map pretty neatly onto the ups and downs of the teenage girl throughout history—or, at least, as Lori Marso writes, onto the archive of the white girl that Coppola favors.
Marie’s move from her childhood home in Austria to her marital residence in France requires her to be torn down and reconstructed as a French queen. It is the “custom,” one courtier explains, that the Queen “retain nothing of a foreign court”: her lap dog is seized, her clothes removed, leaving her nude in silhouette. Dunst’s performance represents womanhood as a process of being razed and rebuilt. Much of the wide shots, especially in the film’s earlier scenes, are highly symmetrical, such that Marie and her home, the artifice of femininity and the artifice of architecture become interchangeable. Dunst straightens and takes up more space as her character accrues more power and confidence.
Toward the film’s end, Marie comes to the balcony to face the jeering, threatening crowd of peasants. She spreads her arms wide and hangs her head, a drooping artifice, a building threatening to collapse. The compelling mixture of strength and vulnerability in this moment makes the crowd fall silent. Shortly afterward, the Queen and her family must retreat from Versailles, and these final shots—the interiors of a ruined palace—presage Marie Antoinette’s eventual capture and execution. This represents a dramatic shift over the course of the movie, from Marie’s status as a kind of cute, consumable thing—“She looks like a little piece of cake. Wonder how long she’ll last,” one noble quips—to someone larger and more impressive, the stuff of legend, but still a fragile, mortal woman.
“You represent the future,” the Queen’s mother warns her in a letter, referring to the need to produce an heir. This is Coppola’s argument to a tee: anachronism is meaningless; the same stories play across bodies, people, and structures through time. Dunst’s performances fill the space between pure aesthetics and practiced politics with pure feeling. The woman in the palace, the woman in the roller rink, the woman in the rioting crowd is both a part of the whole and apart from it, offering a sliver of the past that hopes to stand in for all of it. It’s an impossible promise to keep, of course, but as a performer, Dunst invokes all of what has been, must be, lost to history.
Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011).
From Marie Antoinette to her latest role in Civil War, we can see Dunst shift from playing the image to the image-maker, a change in persona that may have been dictated by Hollywood’s attitude toward women as they age, or may have been an intentional move by the actress. In the years between, she has continued to star in period pieces: All Good Things (2010), Hidden Figures (2016), The Beguiled (2017). In the 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Dunst does not play the adventuress, the guy’s girl in the car: that honor goes to Kristen Stewart. She plays, instead, Camille, the wife who stays. The history-making Beats drive on without her, hard as it may be to accept Dunst as what Joyce Johnson would call a “minor character.”
Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) is set in a speculative present weighed down by all of history and the cosmos to boot. Dunst is Justine, a depressed, runaway bride of sorts, rendered nearly disabled by a melancholia that can only be cured by the literal destruction of the earth. She is convinced that “life is evil” and that moving through the world is—for her, at least—like “trudging through this gray, wooly yarn.” “It’s clinging to my legs,” she moans. “It’s really heavy to drag around.” What is the it, though? Her own emotional life? The pull of gravity from the foreign planet drawing near? The human existence whose obliteration she vows she will not grieve? Just as Marie Antoinette embodies the institution that stands, or sags, under the pressure of posterity, Justine tells a bleak story of mortality and suffering in her dead eyes, her naked body reclining by the river’s edge. The opposite of a relentless accumulation of the past is oblivion; the structures cannot hold.
Civil War professes to be about the end of the world, or, at least, of our world as American viewers. But it’s far more about the power of images to puncture the illusion of a seamless reality. In that sense, Melancholia is an apt interlocutor, as is the 1997 political satire Wag the Dog, in which Dunst plays an actress playing an Albanian refugee. Civil War is political, sort of, but about as devoid of humor as one might imagine, given its premise. It is a tight, gritty account of what would happen if America’s culture war became a military one (possible) when Texas and California joined forces to overthrow a fascist executive branch (implausible). The specifics are irrelevant, as the film is mostly invested in what such a war would look and feel like: dusty, banged-up, and shaky-cammed. At the heart of this storm, of this imagined future, there is a scarily calm photo-eye.
Enter Dunst as photographer Lee Smith. Her affect is flat, her expression often unreadable—not numb, as in Melancholia, but in a constant state of hyper-observation. In one of the film’s tenser interludes, Lee invites a vigilante to pose with the looters he has strung up and left to die. She wants to take a picture of the perpetrator with his trophies, but, really—does this woman have a death wish? Maybe she is just so committed to documenting history that she forgets that she is a part of it too, her camera a kind of “third limb,” as Dunst explained in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, that nearly obliterates her embodied subjecthood.
This moment stands in stark contrast with a quieter scene, in which Lee tries on clothing in a small town that time, and war, only seem to have forgotten. (They later discover snipers on the roof.) She looks at herself in the mirror, wearing a blue-green dress that brings out her eyes. In a flash, we see all the glamor that Dunst has brought to past roles and has no use for here, as an embattled professional in a war zone. She is plainly dressed, and she keeps her emotions under wraps—the inverse of her hysteric role in Power of the Dog, even as the deep wells of sorrow ripple across these two very different characters. Her mentee, little-sister-figure Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, another alum of Coppola’s work), snaps a picture, capturing her subdued happiness and exhaustion, presaging another, more dramatic photograph of Lee to come.
Dunst recently told British GQ: “I’ve been working since I was three. Most people who have worked this long are retired. I deserve to be picky.” It is telling that Dunst sees her career as another narrative arc to trace, another history to review. Civil War seems like an actorly turning point à la Winona Ryder’s in Black Swan (2010): an acknowledgement of time passing, a reckoning with persona, an opening up to new opportunities as opposed to a closing or cloistering.
In Ruben Östlund’s forthcoming The Entertainment System is Down, Dunst will play a woman who discovers her husband’s infidelity during a long-haul flight. The film seems in line with Dunst’s move from historical actor to historical vector, pointing at the foibles of our present, as her body of work turns toward a bleak, or darkly funny, future.