Back in 1994, Party of Five gave us Neve Campbell, and Neve gave us Julia, the star orphan of the Salinger brood. Since then, the reliably wistful twenty-something has ascended the ranks of teen royalty, playing the Everygirl everybody wants to kill in Scream and Scream 2, before receiving a de facto coronation in the part of 54's dewy soap-opera queen -- a role whose Barthian depths of self-reference we can never wholly fathom.
It's easy to forget how revelatory Campbell seemed when Party of Five debuted, barely post-grunge, set to music by Live and REM. Her brothers just yelled a lot, and her colicky-phenom sister, Claudia, was the least likable TV kid since Small Wonder's Tiffany Brissette.
But Julia was casual and natural. No fussy method acting for her -- she was a minimalist. She squinted. With a smiley face, it meant she was happy. Without one, she was sad. Eventually she would speak, and during her effort to force out a few words amid the swelling chords of "Everybody Hurts," her inarticulateness passed for depth: Her pursed lips hinted that she was groping for the right word to say.
Along the way, her character has broken some barriers for American-TV sweethearts. Julia actually has sex, she's become pregnant (though a timely miscarriage helped her out of any tough choices), dropped out of college, and married. Ultimately, though, Julia, the patron saint of tortured words, still just squints in time to the soundtrack -- while the songs have changed, the plot remains the same. Now when she struggles for her words, we can readily anticipate her leaden maxim. Everybody hurts? What if God were one of us? I'm all out of faith, this is how I feel?
What we're left with is a legacy of flustered imitators. Ally McBeal tidily blurts out the show's moral after an hour of charmingly indecipherable mutterings. And once in every episode, and often more, the camera simply studies Calista Flockhart's face as the show's resident torch singer belts out Ally's true feelings. A supposedly smart character like Lindsay Dole on The Practice, who brings the tobacco industry to its knees in court, lapses into incoherence, Julia-style, when it turns to matters of the heart.
And in supposedly post-navel-gazing -- but midriff-revealing -- shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson's Creek, and That '70s Show -- where teens actually speak to one another in complete, and sometimes clever, sentences -- squinting still seems to be currency that's traded for thought. Maybe we should really be blaming Claire Danes for all of this, but her show got canceled.
Age: 26
Residence: Los Angeles
Total grant amount: First crack at every role Renée Zellweger turns down in the next two years.
