Generation Cry Face

One of the smartest things about “Homeland,” the President-elect of American television, is its casting of Claire Danes in the starring role: her presence gives its dizzy plot, about a bipolar C.I.A. agent waging her own personal war on terror, a tender double edge. Most actors are an amalgam of all their previous roles, but these alternate personas are slippery, and a skilled performer can slough them off. Danes, who has been acting since she was a kid, has a first-role problem: no matter how old she gets, the mannerisms of the fifteen-year-old Angela Chase—the lead character in “My So-Called Life,” the most affecting high-school show ever—are visible just beneath the surface of her performances. (Incidentally, Mandy Patinkin, her co-star in the show, also has a version of this problem: Inigo Montoya’s endearing monomania lives on in Saul Berenson.)

Angela Chase—with her oversized flannel shirts and striking (dyed) red hair, her precocious sensitivity, her kittenish restraint punctured by bursts of impulsivity, her improbable chosenness as Jordan Catalano’s love object—is a character who is difficult to forget because she presses on a wounded teen-age spot that hasn’t healed over in most of us. Danes may never live her down, but “Homeland” plays her Angela-ness to its advantage—her presence gives this slick show a jagged edge. Carrie Mathison is Angela Chase all grownup and a little twisted, but the inner material is the same: both characters have the curse (or gift) of fine intuition that exposes their vulnerabilities and protects them in equal measure.

A testament to Danes’s knack for self-exposure is her willingness to look ugly—her reedy, boyish frame can become galumphy and graceless, her smooth, radiant face can crumple like a paper bag. This mood-swinging is the essence of her acting, and so it’s also the thing that people like to make fun of. If you’ve come across the “Claire Danes cry face” meme—it began as a Pinterest board and evolved into a viral montage—you’ve seen the meanish, gleeful thrust of the joke: that every scene or movie that Danes is a part of leads inevitably to the moment when her mouth contorts into a grimace, her lower lip trembles, and she lets out a violent sob (or, as last night’s spoof on “S.N.L.” put it, “Her whole face looks like it’s chewing gum”). It’s true. And this is what is great about Danes: she’s our perennial teen star, embarrassingly—and excitingly—capable of reaching an expressive climax.

Little gems like the Danes supercut are always surfacing on the shores of the Internet, and sometimes they make a pleasing collection. Around the time that the Claire Danes cry face meme emerged, Jason Kottke posted this video of Henry Thomas’s audition tape for the role of Elliott in “E.T.”—he’s got the same unnervingly open quality Danes has. Is it possible that the Internet was finding relief from an election season whose central issue was the economic hardship that will eventually fall on the shoulders of Generation Y by watching two child stars of the eighties and nineties cry desolately? Who knows. But there were moments on the eve of this election when I, for one, wanted to be eight or fifteen again, before I had to worry about things like fiscal cliffs or terrorists, when I could cry like a maniac and no one would dare stop me.