“Year by year, as [70s TV series] Family went on, they had me gradually grow up. But it was like they didn’t really want me to.” ~ Kristy McNichol (qtd. in Andrea Darvi, Pretty Babies, 181)
Kristy McNichol’s performances in the 80s’ horror films White Dog and Dream Lover mirror the anxieties the actress faced in her own life transitioning from child star to adult actress. In each film, she plays an artist (struggling actress; jazz musician) whose safe world is shattered by an unwelcome intrusion that threatens her innocence. In Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, the intrusion takes the form of a new pet dog that she must reluctantly acknowledge was trained to be racist, and in Alan J. Pakula’s Dream Lover, the intrusion is a recurring nightmare of a sexual predator that forces her to delve into repressed childhood memories of her father’s domination. The struggles and epiphanies of the films’ protagonists mirror McNichol’s attempts at the time to work through depression and identity crises, to “gradually grow up” as an actress when people “didn’t really want me to.” Although she deliberately plays adult women in the films to break away from her adolescent screen persona, her protagonists’ struggles reinforce McNichol’s status as a childlike understudy on the stage of her own unreachable adulthood.
About the presenterRon DePeter
Ron DePeter is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Delaware Valley University. Previous Popular Culture presentations include the use of voyeur characters in Beach Party, Hayley Mills and Disney’s That Darn Cat, and the portrayal of women in Godzilla films.