The Image Is Never as Interesting as the Person

I don't know where to start, so I'm just gonna start. One of the best feelings in the world is to be seen. Truly seen. And one of the simplest, yet most profound things we can offer another person is exactly that: to see them. To truly see them.

I'm not going to pretend that I could have possibly seen Hayden Panettiere. Not even in a parasocial way. I wasn't someone who followed much of her career, or her in general. But the more I have learned about her now, the more her story and what she went through seem to sit at a crossroads of so many things to admire and so many things that deeply trigger me. There's the sense of wanting to talk about it, while at the same time knowing that I am probably not the best person to talk about most of it.

Still, this idea of being seen has been wandering around my mind. And somewhere in the middle of all that, one very, very small Hayden Panettiere memory came back to me. Apparently, it had been sitting somewhere in my head for thirteen years.

It was the summer of 2013. I had just graduated from high school. One late night everyone else in my family had gone to sleep and I was still up doing, well, absolutely nothing. Just chilling alone in that wonderfully aimless period after graduation, where one part of your life has ended and the next one hasn't quite started yet.

At some point during that night I stumbled across I Love You, Beth Cooper on television. Probably somewhere halfway through. I don't even remember where in the movie I started watching. I pretty much just remember knowing the broad premise because I had seen the trailer a few years earlier.

The main character Denis is the nerdy valedictorian who has spent years crushing on Beth Cooper, the beautiful and impossibly popular head cheerleader. During his graduation speech, he announces to the whole school that he loves her and, through increasingly ridiculous circumstances, actually ends up spending a hectic graduation night in her company.

Not exactly a movie I would have sought out at the time. Not a premise or a cast I had any particular opinions about either. But I stayed. Partly because Beth, Denis and the others were driving around in the same little Toyota I had at the time.

I remember very little of the movie now, but I remember the main thing. The fantasy comes "true." The awkward guy gets to go on an adventure with the girl he has built up in his head for years. And then Beth Cooper starts ruining Denis' image of Beth Cooper. She is reckless. Weird. Funny. Impulsive. She drives like a maniac. She drinks. She swears. She does ridiculous things. She can be selfish. She can be frightened. I vaguely remember being pleasantly surprised that the movie wasn't going in quite as shallow a direction as I had expected.

And then there were the moments I really remember. Those quieter moments. Not really the dialogue. Not precisely what happened before or after them. I have had to go back and refresh my memory about much of that. But I remember Panettiere in them. I remember Beth becoming vulnerable. And I remember something about the way Panettiere played those moments cutting straight through the fairly silly movie happening around her. Suddenly you weren't looking at the beautiful cheerleader anymore. You weren't even really looking at the film archetype of the popular girl who secretly has problems too. For a moment, all of that disappeared.

There was just a person there. A person who seemed to carry pain. A person who wasn't entirely understood. A person who, despite everybody looking at her, somehow didn't feel completely seen. And Panettiere's presence in those moments was so strong that the rest almost stopped mattering. The quality or even the central plot of the entire movie didn't matter, because a person was shining through.

For example, there's a tiny moment in an empty gym, where Beth and her friends do their old cheerleading routine. For most of it, she is exactly the Beth Cooper everyone knows: energetic, confident, performing. And then it ends. The others move away and for just a moment something changes in her face. She tears up. Denis notices it but the movie doesn't dwell on it. She doesn't make a speech. Panettiere barely does anything. But suddenly there is this whole interior life there.

The other scene my brain somehow managed to record all those years ago is when Beth finally gives that moment in the gym words. She tells Denis that she is scared. High school was good to her. This was where she knew who she was, and now it is over. Denis has this whole future opening up in front of him, while she is afraid that perhaps this was her peak and nothing interesting is waiting for her. And I remeber buying every line, every expression. The movie never really convinced me to take it seriously most of the time. Panettiere somehow convinced me to take Beth seriously anyway.

So yeah, that is the thing I remembered. Not really the dialogue. Not precisely what happened before or after it. I had forgotten almost all of that. What I remembered was Panettiere becoming vulnerable and the overwhelming humanity she managed to put into those few moments with remarkably little from the movie itself helping her along.

Now, whether that was simply a very gifted actress doing exactly what a very gifted actress does, or whether there was some small trace of the person behind the performance coming through, I obviously can't know. Maybe from this side of the screen, that isn't even a useful distinction to make. I only know what it felt like watching her. It felt inhabited. Like there was a person inside the character. In the simplest of terms, there seemed to be more human being there than that initial premise had prepared me for.

And without getting too hyperbolic about it, I think something little shifted in me that night. Not in some gigantic movie-montage moment where a nineteen-year-old suddenly developed a sophisticated philosophy about human relationships. I was half-asleep watching a random teen comedy. But I think Panettiere's performance gave me one of those little experiences that stays somewhere inside you: the idea that the image is never as interesting as the person.

That is probably the closest I can get to describing it. What makes you laugh? What scares you? What happened to you? What do people get wrong about you? How weird do you get when you don't feel like you need to perform? What do you carry around that nobody looking at you would ever know was there? What does the world look like from your side? It's always there in a person. And for some reason, during one completely random summer night in 2013, Hayden Panettiere's performance made all of that feel incredibly clear to me.

Maybe that's also why the ending of this film was the one scene I actually did remember perfectly even all these years later. Denis doesn't really “get” Beth. The “nerd” doesn't win the beautiful girl as some kind of reward. They kiss, yes, but ultimately something much more interesting has happened. They have actually met each other. The fantasy has collapsed and somehow that isn't a disappointment. It's better. Beth Cooper turns out to be a real, sometimes difficult, sometimes wonderful, slightly crazy, layered human being. And so does Denis. They see each other.

And when they finally part, Beth tells him: “Thank you for loving me.” The line says loving. But the way Panettiere plays it, after everything that has happened during that night, what I hear now is something a little different: “Thank you for seeing me.”

If it's just my reading of it, then so be it. But that also goes to show what an amazing actress Hayden Panettiere was. There was so much going on with so little. Beth could be doing one thing while Panettiere's face was quietly telling you something completely different. The inner life was always there. And, well, I suppose knowing a little more now about the person who delivered that, there is something about the idea of being seen that lands particularly hard.

When I Love You, Beth Cooper came out, Panettiere said she hoped that maybe one day people would remember lines from it in the way they remembered the John Hughes movies she had grown up with. She imagined looking back on the film many years later and fondly remembering making it. I don't know if I Love You, Beth Cooper ever became that kind of a movie. For me, apparently, it didn't. I barely remember it. But thirteen years later, I remembered her performance. I remembered it making me want to see the person instead of the idea of a person.

I have no idea how seen she truly felt in her own life. But I know she made that character visible. Really visible. And I am sure there was a person behind all of it who deserved to be seen too. A person who clearly made a huge difference with her life, and will definitely keep making one through her legacy as well. Including, I suppose, even in this super small, obscure, indirect way I described here today. Rest easy, Hayden.

If you'd like to hear Hayden speak for herself:

Hayden Panettiere on On Purpose with Jay Shetty

If you'd like to put a little something good into the world in Hayden's memory:

• The Whaleman Foundation — Save the Whales Again!

• PETA — protection of dolphins, whales and other animals