Brenda and Dylan Are Dead

“Things are happening too much, too fast.”

Jul 17, 2024

A few weeks ago, I drove the Million Dollar Highway in Colorado. This is one of the most dangerous roads in the US, a trek on sheer mountain cliffs without guardrails on a road twisting like a serpent’s tail.

I was in the passenger’s seat taking photos. I didn’t look at them until the white-knuckle ride was over, and we were in Montrose, eating at a diner that greets patrons with a paean to God, country, and fried jalapenos.

My photos are beautiful and terrifying, like America. One stood out.

I thought I had captured a singular mountain. But I had photographed two: one through the side mirror looking behind us, and one looming ahead. They weave together in a seamless curve. The shades of blue in the sky — deep in the mirror, pale on the road — are the only giveaway of a breach in time.

The future and the past met, and I almost deleted it.

I keep staring at this photo. It’s a serendipitous shot, but that’s not why. I analyze it like there’s a secret message, a clue to how to process this juncture in my life.

Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis. I should be, because Brenda and Dylan are dead.

* * *

R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” is the most Gen X of songs. It is a profound anthem of existential angst, and it is also Brenda and Dylan’s breakup song.

When I woke on July 13 to the news that Shannen Doherty, the actress who played Brenda Walsh on Beverly Hills, 90210, had died of cancer at age 53, I put on “Losing My Religion” and cried, the way Brenda did when she broke up with Dylan.

Dylan was played by Luke Perry, who died of a stroke at 52 in 2019. I have never gotten over it.

Everyone knows you never get over Dylan McKay.

I’m not being flip. Doherty and Perry were talented actors who died far too young and had friends and families who loved them. Their passing is sad by definition.

But that’s not why my heart aches. Something about Doherty dying hits me hard. There is a chance that I am mourning other things, too, events I cannot yet process in words. Things deemed more important than the premature deaths of stars from my youth.

But tears feel like a sacrifice, and I’ve given more than my share. I save my tears for people who deserve them, like Brenda and Dylan.

I was twelve when Beverly Hills, 90210 debuted. I was its target audience, and they hooked me along with my ten-year-old sister. We watched every week with my mom, eating popcorn together on the couch, and those are some of my happiest childhood memories. My father would vanish, proclaiming it trash TV, but he had suspiciously strong opinions on “Kelly versus Brenda” for someone who said he’d never seen an episode.

Everybody watched Beverly Hills, 90210 in the 1990s, even if they thought they were too cool. In the 1990s, you could watch 90210 “ironically”. Not real ironically, but fake “ironically”, like wearing a mask of your own face. Layers and layers of quote marks, to mark all those quotes you memorized, watching it in syndication.

It’s OK to admit you loved Beverly Hills, 90210. Teenage angst has paid off not particularly well, and now we’re old. Not bored — oh how luxurious to be bored — just old.

Beverly Hills, 90210 aired between the end of the Cold War and 9/11: a period so calm it feels in retrospect like a contemptuous ruse, a mocking preparation for a peaceful future no powerbroker intended to give.

Now politics is our soap opera, and they will not cancel the show, no matter how much we hate it, no matter how many audience members they lose. Every day is sweeps for a country turning to ashes.

Hours after Shannen Doherty died, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was allegedly the target of an assassin. This happened two weeks after Trump was granted kinglike status by the Supreme Court, despite committing a multitude of severe offenses, including storing top secret classified documents in his Florida golf resort, a case now dropped like the bullet said to have grazed his ear. The march to American autocracy proceeds as it has for the past nine years, flagrant and preventable, with a money trail few dare to trace, for it leads to institutional corruption in which both parties participated, and they would rather destroy America than tell the truth.

* * *

If I had read that paragraph in 1991, I would have been shocked, but not surprised.

Trump’s criminality wouldn’t have fazed me. Everyone knew he was a crook. His dirty finances were plot points on 1990s TV shows, including children’s programs, and they were considered so well-known they required no explanation.

If you wanted the details, you could read SPY or Vanity Fair or any publication covering in depth what is now covered up by selective amnesia.

The shock would lie in learning that American officials would not only let a career criminal whose nefarious deeds I knew of as a child be the leading presidential contender, but that they would do it twice, once after an attempted coup.

By 1991, I expected little good to come from American politicians — I ruined a third-grade sleepover party by ranting about Iran-Contra — but even I would have expected more than feeble, repetitive surrender. A uniformly weak reaction to a recurring national security threat implies bipartisan betrayal and a foregone conclusion. Not an election, but a reinstallation.

It would be exciting to be proven wrong.

In 1991, back in America’s “sole superpower” days, I would have expected aggressive retaliation, like the kind I saw from an asshole Delaware Senator on TV. Adults complained about 90210 being too racy for my generation, but it was nothing compared to what we watched on the news.

That Senator was in charge of a panel of other asshole Senators badgering law professor Anita Hill, who was testifying about a pervert judge who talked about putting pubic hair on coke cans and wanted to join the Supreme Court. The Senator was a Democrat, but he seemed to want to protect the pervert, and his panel enjoyed humiliating the victim.

Now that Senator is the President and Donald Trump has returned with billionaire backers with a stated intent to destroy US democracy. Some backers also fund the pervert judge, Clarence Thomas, and his fellow rigged court lackeys, and no one does a damn thing about it. Aggressive retaliation is reserved for victims, not perpetrators.

President Biden, when questioned about the survival of the US, said that what matters is that he tried his best. That statement scares me as much as anything Trump says.

I put on “Losing My Religion” again.

“I think I thought I saw you try,” Michael Stipe wails. “But that was just a dream. That was just a dream. That was just a dream, dream…”

* * *

No one can watch Brenda and Dylan break up properly anymore. “Losing My Religion” is trapped in a copyright dispute, and the critical scene now plays to a generic tune.

Another scene, years later, when Brenda explains to Brandon why she is listening to “Losing My Religion” again, is missing entirely. If I recall right, Brenda says she wishes she could feel the pain of the initial breakup, because it pales to the agony of Dylan and Kelly dating behind her back. Listening to “Losing My Religion” on repeat returns her to simpler days of lesser betrayals.

I would like to watch this scene again, because it seems apt for our times, but I can’t find it.

I did, however, find Brenda and Dylan’s breakup scene in its original VCR form. They are arguing in Dylan’s black Porsche. Brenda is upset about a pregnancy scare she had after she lost her virginity to Dylan at prom.

The breakup was contrived by FOX executives outraged that Brenda was thrilled to have had sex with Luke Perry — like anyone wouldn’t be — and was meant to serve as a moral directive for impressionable youth like me, when we weren’t watching sexual predators get appointed to the courts.

“It just feels like we crossed this imaginary line. It all feels too much right now,” Brenda says, her voice breaking.

“Is it getting too scary?” asks Dylan, worried.

“I just don’t know what we’re about,” Brenda says tearfully. “Things are happening too much too fast.”

Dylan, shaken, tells Brenda that being afraid is not enough of a reason to give up. But Brenda has made up her mind. She breaks up with Dylan, pointlessly, devastatingly, as “Losing My Religion” plays.

This is a classic Beverly Hills, 90210 moment, up there with “Donna Martin Graduates”, which was my generation’s introduction to civic activism, and possibly why we accomplished so little for so long.

Dylan and Brenda’s breakup is melodrama of the highest order. But it feels raw and vulnerable and real. This is to the credit of Doherty and Perry, who elevated the show beyond the material, and to the credit of the writers, who captured the emotional terror of being a teenager and feeling like the world is ending.

And here I am watching it again, a mother of two teenagers of my own, with the world actually ending, and Brenda and Dylan are dead, and “things are happening too much too fast” and too soon — because there never is enough time, not for me and not for my children, not for my generation and not for theirs. Not for our country to process the rapid loss of life since 2020 and the promise of more death to come, because officials are codifying human sacrifice into law. Not enough time to regain rights stolen by a plutocrat political predator class that’s been at it since before I was born.

I don’t know how many futures they threw away, but I know that one of them was supposed to be mine.

I try to remember all the terrible things that happened to America over the last thirty days, but I can’t. It’s impossible to keep them straight: the losses and lies and capitulation and complicity and rulings and retribution against ordinary Americans just trying to survive.

But I know that July 13 will always be the day Shannen Doherty died.

I ignore what seems to be some Republican festival of ignominy and turn on Beverly Hills, 90210. 1991 crashes into 2024, like my photo of the Colorado mountains. It was always one story, one ever-twisting tale. One long road at the edge of a cliff without guardrails, driven by people who love the scenery despite the risks.

I retreat into the reruns of my childhood, retrieving the memories the tech lords tried to take, watching the world’s most real fake teenagers weep to an existential anthem they turned into their love song.

I cry with them, because Brenda and Dylan are dead, and I’ve said too much, and I haven’t said enough.

* * *

Thank you for reading! This newsletter is funded entirely by voluntary paying subscribers. That allows me to keep it open to everyone, and I don’t want to paywall in times of peril. If you like what I do, please subscribe!