The Celebrity Crush

A few words about Dakota Johnson

“Materialists,” dir. Celine Song

One day, people will talk about Dakota Johnson the way they now talk about Kristen Stewart. I’m convinced of this. I remember when Panic Room hit, and even then, while most praised Stewart’s kid performance, there were murmurs about her being annoying and tic-y. The Twilight movies only furthered the impression that she didn’t have it going on. Ask me what my opinion was at the time, and I honestly couldn’t tell you. In my memory, I always had something like fond feelings toward Stewart as an actress. I’ll admit, the Twilight of it all may have clouded my vision, too, though she also starred in the great Adventureland between the first two movies in the vampire series, so I’m inclined to think I was always in the tank for her. Stewart’s made plenty of bad and forgettable films post-Twilight, but she’s also made excellent movies, including Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, Love Lies Bleeding, and Kelly Reichardt’s masterful Certain Women. In her good films (and many of her bad ones), Stewart has demonstrated a unique gift for turning her lack of range into an asset, each performance feeling born of pure impulse, and contained within the reality of her actual personality and presence. Having once interviewed Stewart, I can tell you, there’s little distance between her affect in-person and onscreen, which makes what she’s able to do onscreen, the emotions she’s able to convey and draw out of the audience, that much more impressive. There’s a reason she’s become a siren for cinephiles. She is one of the most talented and interesting stars we’ve got, even if the results can be a mixed bag (*cough*Spencer*cough*).

But this isn’t a Kristen Sterwart blog, it’s a Dakota Johnson blog. I first discovered Johnson (a nepo baby, but previously unknown) the way most people did: in The Social Network. She appears in one scene, as a college girl Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker slept with (under, actually) the night before. I remember my reaction to her appearance quite distinctly. First of all, she shows up wearing no pants. Hot. But instantly, she makes an impression beyond looks, delivering Aaron Sorkin’s ratatat dialogue with an ease and reality nobody else in the film manages. Not that they should, of course. The film has a style, with David Fincher’s cool, quick editing demanding theatrical delivery and tight precision from his core cast. Johnson might have done the same, but she didn’t. She didn’t need to. Her rhythms, while not theatrical, were quick and almost musical, while still being reserved, and cool, but in a more recognizable, real way.

See the way Johnson delivers the line, “I should just kick your ass,” flowing right through a semi-stifled laugh, and rising at the end in that playful but detached, Californian way. Later, when Parker calls himself an “entrepreneur,” Johnson aks, “What was your latest preneur.” The kind of line anyone deeply familiar with Sorkin will know is normally delivered by an Allison Janney type, or even a Rooney Mara type from earlier in The Social Network, with conviction, force. Sorkin’s idea of a Strong Woman being the woman who knows how to cleverly tell a man off. Only makes them hotter, isn’t that right, boys? But that’s not what Johnson does. I’m not even clear on whether she’d be capable of delivering the line that way. Instead, she handles it like a clever-but-tossed-off joke, where the real thing she’s communicating is how unimpressed she is. Looking unimpressed is one of Johnson’s talents.

I next clocked Johnson in 21 Jump Street, one of the 2010s’ great comedies, in which she plays one of the other undercover cops assigned to a different school. It’s almost a background performance, barely memorable to some, but at the time I was struck by the way she gives so much more than is required of the role, personality-wise. It’s not merely that she gives the main duo some shit on a couple occasions. She has her own thing going on, to the point that I’d have been down for a Johnson-centric spin-off. With her finger-poppin’ co-star Rye Rye, of course. It was at this point, noticing an actress in such a tiny role, after having previously become enamoured with her performance in another tiny role, that I started to realize I had a crush.

The crush was cemented later the same year, with the debut of the ill-fated Fox sitcom Ben and Kate, in which she starred alongside The Descendants co-writer Nat Faxon. I won’t get into that show too much, except to say that I loved it and wished it had gone on longer. It did nothing revolutionary. It was just a single-camera sitcom from 2012, but its stars were great, Johnson especially. As essentially the straight man in the show, Johnson managed to anchor its family comedy silliness with a down-to-earth realism. I recognized this woman, like she might be any number of my actual friends. Yet that realism and relatability didn’t stop her from finding the funniest possible way to deliver a line. If I’d bought Dakota stock back in 2010, now I was doubling my investment and holding it for the long haul.

Then Fifty Shades of Grey happened. There was stuff in between, but given the phenomenon of the books, her casting was an event all its own. I don’t think I ever saw the film. I may have tried to watch it and failed to get through it, but I’m not sure. Hardly matters. I don’t expect my favourite actors (or crushes) to appear in exclusively good work. It did make her a star, though, and that meant Johnson wasn’t about to disappear any time soon. It helped that the same year Fifty Shades came out, she appeared in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, a great film in which she delivers another electrically cool performance that doesn’t give a lot on the surface, but is impossible to look away from.

People have claimed that Johnson can’t act. I don’t think they know what acting is. There’s no way to look at those early performances, even in tiny roles, and not see someone with a particular gift, not unlike Stewart’s, though different. While Stewart can often bring a distant, detached affect, it’s always wrapped up in her general anxious energy. She has a nervousness about her that pulls you closer (or repels you, I suppose, for some people), and reveals the interior workings of her characters. She is a woman always trying to hold it together in some way or another, and the variations are what’s interesting. Johnson evokes no such nervousness. Instead, she allows her very real detached affect (see: any interview) to define her mode of expression. She is not always detached onscreen, ironically or otherwise, but she wears it like an armour, sometimes for an entire role, and sometimes as an element of her character to endure chinks and eventually wear down. She’s also a surprisingly physical actress, and not just in Suspiria, with all that wild dancing. Johnson is impressively attuned to elements of performance like posture. Watch any scene with her, and look at how she stands, or sits, using the way her body occupies the frame to convey as much about her inner experience as anything she speaks in dialogue.

It’s the sense of interiority, I think, that draws me to Johnson more than anything. She’s appeared in better and worse films since A Bigger Splash, and she’s quite unique in the way she seems to drop any pretense of trying the moment she realizes she’s making a bad movie—check out Madame Web for the most incredible iteration of this sort of non-performance from Johnson—but when she’s working well, and fitting the material, with a solid filmmaker who knows what it is she can do, Johnson is magnetic. The Lost Daughter is a movie that never got its proper due. Nominated for Oscars, sure, but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Elena Ferrante adaptation remains, in my opinion, one of the very best films this decade. Olivia Colman is unbelievably great in it, of course, as a very not normal woman on vacation in Greece. Dakota Johnson is the woman whose life she ends up invading, and she’s similarly great. Going toe-to-toe with Colman in many scenes, Johnson’s great skill in the movie is showing you, right there on her face, all the calculations she’s making about the woman she’s dealing with. She does this while maintaining her detached persona, indicating to the audience a level of intelligence that is clear and real, but also mysterious, and even dangerous.

The celebrity crush is a beautiful thing. One of the great joys in life. Real crushes are terrible, anxiety-inducing, often heartbreaking affairs. Celebrity crushes, though, exist as pure, intangible fantasy. There are no stakes. Nothing is ever going to happen. It’s just simple attraction and mild (or sometimes not so mild) obsession. Watch Johnson on Hot Ones and just try not to develop a crush.

Some celebrity crushes, though, evaporate over time as the reality of the star’s work—good or bad—begins to outweigh any superficial attraction. Others can judge where I am on that timeline, but in truth, I was always attracted first to Johnson’s screen presence rather than her persona, though I’ve since discovered the two are practically inseparable. Her flat affect, in interviews and in movies, is cool and charming, but also intriguing, and when deployed well, makes for some of my favourite performances in recent years.

Case in point: Materialists, a film that has elicited many groans from the cooler headed critics among us, along with more questions about whether Johnson has the chops. I have no problem with people having an allergy to an actor, particularly one with a style so front-and-centre. Laura Linney, widely recognized as one of our great screen actresses, is someone I mostly cannot take. I probably can’t explain why, either. Something about her highly emotive style rubs wrong. Johnson is understandably like oil to water for many, but to watch her in Materialists, if you ask me, is to see a performer perfectly in sync with her material and the filmmaker behind the camera.

In the film, Johnson plays a matchmaker for high class clients. She believes love is real, but she’s detached herself from a sense of wanting it, preferring instead to think about romance the way she must for her job: as mathematics, or filling boxes on a checklist. Her cool attitude, certainly recognizable from interviews, in this case lacks easy charm, at least for the audience. In character, she wields warmth as a tool, a weapon, lulling her clients into a false sense of security in their superficial dating and marriage choices. Johnson has charisma in the part, but an arms-length sort that suggests she’s worked to crush some inner part of herself. The way she looks at her clients, the calculations she’s making about them visible on her face, grounds her character in a relatable dynamic of economic precarity, where emotional needs are made to line up with material desires, and in some cases material necessities. She’s just doing her job, after all, but that job has consumed her being. Or maybe her experiences led her to the job. Or both. Over the course of the film, Johnson lets the facade break more and more. She never does a full 180. It isn’t that kind of movie. Instead, she simply adds a more direct emotionality to her calculating air. If early in the movie you’re watching her face for subtle clues as to her true feelings and opinions, by the end, no guessing is necessary, even while the intelligence behind her eyes never abates. It’s a great performance by a great actress, and people will recognize it someday.