The Best-Dressed Pervert in the Room
by Lydia Pudzianowski
I have no idea how James Spader came into my life.
Actually, as I type this, I have to assume that it was via Boston Legal. It premiered in October 2004, when Spader was 44 years old, and it paired him with William Shatner at a fictional law firm called Crane, Poole & Schmidt. (Shatner’s character’s gag was confidently repeating his own name multiple times per episode.)
Actually, I forgot until just now that Boston Legal was a spinoff of The Practice. Both were created by David E. Kelley; when The Practice ended in May 2004, several characters continued on to Boston Legal, which ran until 2008.
At any rate, I was intrigued.
The reason that I’m having to piece this all together now is that when Boston Legal premiered in October 2004—when I became deeply and irreversibly drawn to James Spader—I was 17 years old. Or, if I saw him on The Practice first, when he joined the main cast as Alan Shore in its eighth season, which premiered in September 2003, I am sorry to report that I was freshly 16.
In 2017, Kelley was on a panel talking about casting Spader. He said, “I was told that no one would ever welcome James Spader into their living room.” I agree. I would not have picked the living room because that’s where my parents usually were. Any other room would have made more sense. Our house was a split-level, though, which meant that everyone could hear anyone’s business at any given time.
My parents had enough to worry about. I had installed a gallery next to my bed using pictures I’d printed using the family computer. It was composed of deceased musicians like Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. It also featured James Dean and Brandon Lee as Eric Draven in The Crow (during which Lee infamously became a deceased actor while portraying a deceased musician—I could not have been more into this). My mom and dad tried to laugh it off, christening it the Wall of Dead Men. Really, they only had themselves to blame; the musicians were pulled straight from my dad’s rotating CD tower (he even had a couple of volumes of Morrison’s poetry, which…why), and he went out of his way to make sure that my sister and I watched Great American Cinema, which naturally included Rebel Without a Cause.
So when Boston Legal, a show that they likely had on just because the TV was usually on, became appointment television for me—when I sat on the couch grinning like an idiot whenever Alan Shore appeared—was that more or less concerning, I wonder, than my obsession with dead rock stars?
Clearly I was able to recognize talent when I saw it. Spader won an Emmy for his work on The Practice and two more over the course of Boston Legal. So I ventured into his film catalog, obviously to appreciate his acting as an art form. I quickly learned that his art form was being a total pervert who was also the best-dressed person in the room—a sexual deviant in an expensive suit. And even when he wasn’t playing that, like in Stargate, he still was. You can’t separate him from his swagger. Putting the nerd glasses on it makes it worse, and by worse, I mean better.
I was already watching John Hughes movies, which were experiencing a renaissance 20 years after their original release at that point in the mid-aughts. My bookbag was adorned with a Breakfast Club pin that I purchased at Hot Topic, where I also bought one featuring Beavis and Butt-Head despite having little to no access to MTV because we didn’t have cable. In reality, I was a TGIF devotee who worshipped at the altar of Sabrina and Corey and Topanga. So when James Spader popped up on network TV in the middle of my living room, equal parts sexy and strange and funny and solidly in his 40s, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
It was one thing to be inundated with heartthrobs via Teen People and Seventeen when I was, uh, 17. Freddie Prinze Jr. and Mark McGrath and Justin Timberlake were too old to be hanging out with actual teen people (especially McGrath, Jesus Christ), but they were sanitized and approved and folded into two-page spreads for me to enjoy appropriately. The problem was that I didn’t care. I tried putting those milquetoast dudes on my bedroom wall. I really did. I felt nothing.
I am almost positive I watched Pretty in Pink during my Hughes era (it was directed by Howard Deutch but written by Hughes). In it, Spader plays Steff, possibly the douchiest douche to have ever douched in an ‘80s movie:
- His name is Steff.
- He is in high school but appears to be 30 years old.
- His girlfriend is named Benny. She also looks 30.
- Both seem to have started drinking 20 years ago. I can smell the Bartles and Jaymes coming off the TV.
- He wears loafers with no socks and hangs around leaning on Molly Ringwald’s character’s car and bullying Andrew McCarthy’s character instead of, like, going to class or work or rehab. There’s something to be said for someone who skips school but still shows up at the physical building wandering the halls and waiting to get yelled at.
- He is obsessed with Andie (Molly Ringwald—also, this movie has the most nonbinary character names in the history of American cinema), who is also being pursued by rich kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy) AND Duckie (Jon Cryer), who lives on the same wrong side of the tracks as Andie does and has been friend-zoned harder than anyone I can think of right now.
- Andie picks Blane, who is Douche Lite and does not have enough spine to make a single decision one way or the other throughout this whole movie. He simply floats around wearing linen pants and not blinking. (Duckie’s assessment of Blane—“that’s a major appliance, that’s not a name”—is correct, albeit rich coming from someone who makes people call him Duckie.)
- Andie does not pick Duckie, which is good because this leaves him open to the advances of Kristy Swanson, a person now only notable for her terrible political opinions.
- If Andie were actually punk rock, she’d pick Steff, who definitely has foot warts, genital warts, or both but is the one person who expresses himself as confidently as she does and truly walks the line between social classes, whereas Blane just shows up at the punk hangouts (the school courtyard and the club where Andrew Dice Clay is the bouncer) a couple of times and gets weirded out. Blane is petrified of how he’s perceived. Steff doesn’t give a fuck. He trashes his parents’ house and plows through their liquor and loiters around Andie’s pink 1959 Karmann Ghia telling her he’s liked her for four years. They are twin flames, but somehow he’s not even in the conversation??? Someone remake this movie.
- Other viable options include 1) no one and 2) her friend from the club, played by Dweezil Zappa.
Do you know what the worst part is? I was also a writer for the teen section of my county paper. In retrospect, it’s incredible that this existed. Every year, the section allowed applications from student writers from area high schools. I applied, got in, and wrote for the newspaper for four years. My articles were delivered to my house, my neighbors’ houses, my teachers’ houses, my classmates’ houses. The September 30, 2004, edition of the paper included a piece of mine titled “Why I’m in Love with James Spader.” Props to my parents for not going into witness protection.
And you know where else I wrote about him? My online journal. You don’t need to know which one. Between the broken Photobucket links were earth-shattering entries like these:
Saturday, January 24, 2004: Quickly spiraling into a James Spader obsession. Very quickly. “The Practice” is on tomorrow night, and if I’m lucky I’ll get to stare at him for an hour and then sleep in due to excessive snow. We’ll see. I thought he was gay for a while but he’s married with 2 kids. He’ll be 44 the day before Seth Green’s (and James Dean’s) birthday. I am such a nerd.
This tracks. My type at this point was “men who might be gay and some who definitely are.” When I wasn’t talking about James Spader in this journal, I was talking about Rufus Wainwright, because there was a time when I was convinced he was into a) women and b) me. There’s more insight (using this word generously) on this idiosyncrasy several entries earlier:
Thursday, December 4, 2003: Am I the only moron who realized that Michael Stipe is gay about 5 years too late? I mean, it figures, but oh well. By the way, I’m not homophobic. Musicians being gay makes them more attractive to me, kind of like them being dead. The only actor who can get away with being gay and madly attractive is James Dean because he’s dead.
A therapist would’ve had a field day with this (and probably should have).
Sunday, June 13, 2004: I’m supposedly going to Boston after school ends for a couple of days. That should be cool. James Spader is from Boston.
Cool story, bro.
Monday, September 20, 2004: What’s that, Tony Soprano? James Spader won the Emmy over you last night? James Spader is the coolest guy on TV? Suck it, Gandolfini.
If 17-year-old me knew how many times 38-year-old me has rewatched the entirety of The Sopranos, she would be deeply, deeply disappointed.
Friday, October 15, 2004: I ordered the Pretty in Pink soundtrack and it has yet to come. It’s so good, really, and I just think about dancing with a 25-year-old James Spader when I listen to those songs. Yeah I’m creepy.
No one can say I lacked self-awareness. (It is a great soundtrack.)
One entry links to another journal-hosting site where I apparently created a whole community dedicated to James Spader. Look at me on the internet fangirl vanguard over here. (Actually, that honor probably goes to the ladies who ran X-Files message boards, but I was on some second or third wave.) Someone with the now-defunct username jamesluv (not me) did most of the heavy lifting. We amassed 154 members. Not a bad pre-Tumblr number.
Now, I’m close to 40 at this point, and I have no idea what goes on over on TikTok aside from the detritus that gets funneled into my Instagram algorithm months after it actually trends, but it feels as though James Spader might be having a moment. Can you ask your kid and let me know? Maybe the youth know him from his stint on The Office (from when their parents watched it, because that was 15 years ago), or from his starring role on the inexplicably long-running show The Blacklist (do you know anyone who watched this show? Who was this for?).
To know him as he is now and to discover what he looked like in his twenties is the best kind of whiplash, like a secret only you know. James Spader was punk rock in his preppiness. He went to school with JFK Jr. but seemingly only does movies about sex stuff or aliens (Egyptian or otherwise). Instead of having visible tattoos, he had a tan, presumably from yachting. (He does have a tattoo on his upper arm that can be seen in some of his early movies; it’s an ace of spades symbol—I know, sorry—that looks like it was drawn on with a Sharpie in 1983 and then modified with vines, maybe? And a spider? Weird tattoo.)
I have a daughter now. I have no idea what social media is going to look like when she’s 17, but I secretly want her to come across fan edits of James Spader set to “If You Leave” by OMD, sprinkled with glittering stars. (Maybe when she’s 18.) Maybe she’ll ask if I know who he is. We can break out my physical media collection, settle in, and compare notes. Maybe it’ll be someone else (let’s be real; it will be). Maybe she’ll wallpaper the internet with her thoughts and make sure everyone knows how much she loves whatever she loves. I really hope she does.
Lydia Pudzianowski lives in Bucks County, PA, with her husband and daughter. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, PopMatters, FLOOD Magazine, March Xness, and elsewhere. Her favorite vacation spot is somewhere in New Jersey (pick a place).
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