The Teen Idol Vanishes

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,230 words)
Dylan McKay was never quite there. In the physical sense — he would kind of just turn up out of nowhere on Beverly Hills, 90210, in random staircases or under random cars, and disappear just as fast — but also, like, existentially. He was supposed to be a high schooler, but you could never imagine him in class, getting bored, learning. He seemed to know everything there was to know anyway, even though he was only 17 — but he wasn’t really 17. He had this sort of aged face, with the eyebrow scar, the never-ending stacks of lines on his forehead, the throwback pompadour, the Homeric sideburns, and seemed to have the sexual history of a middle-aged playboy. Depending on the circumstances, he exuded the hard-partying past of a retired rock star or the bodhisattva-like wisdom of an ancient yogi. Even though he had supposedly hit puberty only four years ago.
All of this resulted in an otherworldly, ageless icon of adolescence that was impossible to grasp completely because of the way it constantly vacillated between poles — old and young, violent and gentle, smart and goofy, rich and poor, public and private. But Dylan McKay’s was the kind of mythic narrative that could only float along on a dearth of details, the holes filled in by our imaginations. By a pubescent girl, for instance, who thought the “Dylan” in her new class would be something like the Dylan at West Beverly only to find he was as acne-ridden and awkward as she was because he was an actual teenager. As opposed to Luke Perry, a 24-year-old actor whose biography was so elusive that Dylan McKay stood in for him, turning both of them into this perennial abstract symbol of romantic teenage-hood. Read more…
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