{"id":17295,"date":"2021-10-25T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-25T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17295"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:56","slug":"a-celebration-of-leonardo-dicaprio-vulnerable-teen-heartthrob-extraordinaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/a-celebration-of-leonardo-dicaprio-vulnerable-teen-heartthrob-extraordinaire\/","title":{"rendered":"A Celebration of Leonardo DiCaprio, Vulnerable Teen Heartthrob Extraordinaire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Before Leonardo DiCaprio was the exclusive property of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, and before he began his quest for an Academy Award that would remain elusive until his Best Actor win for The Revenant<\/em>, he belonged to the girls. A reluctant but perpetual cover boy for magazines like \u201cTeen Beat,\u201d he reached the peak of stardom in the late 1990s, when he was the male lead in Titanic<\/em> and Romeo + Juliet<\/em>. DiCaprio was famous, to be sure, but not quite taken seriously. After all, whatever teenage girls like can\u2019t actually be good<\/em>: they have long been denied status as arbiters of taste, despite being the first to recognize the talents of many a now-revered actor or singer. But what was it specifically about an actor like Leonardo DiCaprio that caught all of our attention in the 1990s?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a recurring sight gag in The Simpsons<\/em>, where Lisa reads from a magazine called \u201cNon-Threatening Boys.\u201d The punchline is that young girls aim their first crushes at gentle, youthful-looking figures rather than men who look like fully-grown adults. And to some extent, that\u2019s probably true. But too much of the focus is placed on a tone of derision for these young stars, subtly mocking them for coming across as childish, or worse, feminine<\/em>. And as usual, there\u2019s a fundamental misunderstanding as to why those qualities would be appealing to teenage girls: they liked Leonardo DiCaprio in the late 1990s not because he seemed like someone who would make them feel safe, but because the vulnerability he brought to his performances offered them a sense of agency and power that is so often denied young women. In films like Titanic <\/em>and Romeo + Juliet<\/em>, he never comes across as weak, but rather someone who feels things deeply, and is exceptionally unguarded with his emotions. This allows his female co-stars, and by extension young female audiences, a rare opportunity to take the upper hand in emotional matters that is normally reserved for men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Titanic<\/em>, Jack (DiCaprio) is a man of the world, who has confidently traveled among all walks of life, even spending time sketching prostitutes in Paris. By contrast, Rose (Kate Winslet) is incredibly sheltered: an upper-class girl whose world has been limited to just a small group of socially acceptable acquaintances and permitted activities. In this type of romance, the male character often facilitates the sexual awakening of his less experienced female love interest. But in Titanic<\/em>, there\u2019s a notable role reversal. It\u2019s Rose\u2019s idea for Jack to paint her portrait, and she\u2019s the one who famously suggests that he draw her like one of his French girls — in the sparkling blue diamond necklace, and nothing else. When he looks at her after she takes her robe off, he\u2019s clearly attracted to her, but his gaze isn\u2019t purely lustful. He\u2019s awkward, unsure of himself. He clears his throat and gestures for her to lie on the sofa, but make no mistake: Rose is in control, dictating every turn that this scene takes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When Jack and Rose sneak into the cargo part of the ship, he sits in the driver\u2019s seat of a 1912 Renault on its way to the New World, miming the role of a chauffeur. She, again, controls the flow of the scene, pulling him into the backseat, where they make love. He is left shaken, clearly emotionally affected by their intimate act. \u201cYou\u2019re trembling,\u201d Rose notices. She kisses his forehead and pulls him to her chest, where he rests his head against her: the exact reverse of most cinematic post-coital imagery. Teenage girls spend their entire lives being told that boys are going to push them to have sex before they\u2019re ready, that even the ones who are polite about it are secretly just waiting for the moment that the girl consents and they\u2019re morally allowed to go to town. Is it any wonder that they watched Titanic<\/em>, saw Rose in complete ownership of her first sexual experience, and fell in love with the man whose entire role in the film is to stand in support of her character\u2019s development?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Romeo + Juliet<\/em> follows this role reversal, albeit with tragic consequences. In depicting the famous suicides of the teen lovers, director Baz Luhrmann makes a choice that furthers the concept of DiCaprio and his female co-star playing the opposite of what would be expected for their respective genders, even in their deaths. Claire Danes as Juliet kills herself not with a dagger, as the character does in the original play, but with a gun: a violent, emphatic, traditionally masculine death. DiCaprio\u2019s Romeo, by contrast, takes poison, a delivery method of death that has been relegated to women since time immemorial. The character of Romeo is generally a perfect match for the qualities in Leonardo DiCaprio that were so attractive to young female audiences of the 1990s, and the very same that would see him derided for a supposed lack of masculinity. His Romeo is a dramatic, hopeless romantic with his emotions on his sleeve, eager to fall into and be in love. Their relationship has all the hallmarks of two crazy kids who did not think any of this through, but Romeo + Juliet<\/em> is made for audiences of the same age, with a unique understanding of the powerful underlying emotions that drive the narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are obvious visual explanations for Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s immense popularity among teenage girls in the 1990s. But he was far from the only actor with great cheekbones, perfectly floppy hair, and a devil-may-care smile to grace the cover of \u201cBop.\u201d So his looks can\u2019t be the only explanation. We can point to his chance involvement in James Cameron\u2019s mega-hit Titanic<\/em>, giving him a platform that few actors could dream of. But Sam Worthington was also a lead in a Cameron film that to this day holds the record for the highest grossing movie ever made, and when\u2019s the last time you saw that guy? There was clearly something different about DiCaprio during the height of his teen heartthrob fame, and it has to do with the powerful effect he had on his young fans. By making himself vulnerable in a way that few male leads were able to, he offered teen girls a vision of a romantic relationship where they could feel empowered. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When \u201cRomeo + Juliet\u201d hit screens 25 years ago (and \u2018Titanic\u2019 followed the following year), Leonardo DiCaprio was cemented as a hyper-specific, of-his-moment young male star. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":566,"featured_media":17297,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-17295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22150,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17295\/revisions\/22150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}