September 2003 | Passing the torch

So, people in your 30's or so, bear with me as I offer up the thesis that a certain pop culture icon from the 1990s has been lost in the vast shuffle of pop culture icons, and its even true that another icon grabbed the torch right from his departed hand and carried it across the millennial threshold, causing most of us to forget, for the most part, about his eerily similar predecessor in fame.

The realization about this forgotten star came to me as I was on a walk today listening to a Natalie Merchant song about his death, from the album Tigerlily. The first picture that came into my head from this person's career was the excellent What's Eating Gilbert Grape, one of less than a dozen films that I truly like. What a remarkable young talent this fellow was.

Except he wasn't in that film.

Which led me to believe, if River Phoenix hadn't overdosed on cocaine and heroin ten years ago this October, he might have found himself duking it out with Leonardo DiCaprio on Two Stars, One Slot, as The Squinty-Eyed, Floppy-Haired Megastars.

I mean no disrespect; my thesis here is merely that Leonardo DiCaprio picked up easily where River Phoenix left off, and walked away with his career-- almost to the point where none of us noticed. River's status as a 90's icon seems not to have the shelf life of other seminal 90's pop culture events, e.g., your Kurts, your O.J.s. And yet, he had a lock on all the brooding, critically acclaimed boy film roles of his day... sort of like... Leonardo DiCaprio does now (that is, before "The Beach" kind of messed up Leo's momentum).

In conclusion, I present irrefutable evidence of the seamless torch-passing of the actors' collective career: their photographs. Can you tell who is who? These were basically the first pictures of each actor I could find-- I didn't look for unusually similar ones.

Aside from my understandable mix up regarding What's Eating Gilbert Grape, are you even sure which of the above starred in which of their collective films? Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? The Basketball Diaries? Dogfight? Romeo and Juliet? Are you sure?

I wonder if all of us has an eerily similar understudy waiting in the wings in case of our demise. Say, if I were to die tomorrow, a cranky coffee addict would just pick right up where I left off, show up in my cubicle, and spend the day deleting e-mails announcing server outages and vague corporate strategy shifts. Really, I don't want to find out.

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