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FILM COMMENT
September/October
PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD
by ALISSA QUART
above: Simone
Cutting price tags off garments in a high-end department store was the final act for the Hollywood Dark Girl, a type that Wynona Ryder inaugurated 13 years ago in Heathers. With her glowing pale skin and air of interiority, Ryder suggested a reservoir of untapped subversion, signaling deviance with her doe-eyed scowl and clench-jawed delivery. Her Dark Girl was an alternative cultural dolly, the "thinking" man's jailbait, but her pretty fragility had a certain toughness to it as well. By the late Nineties, however, that outsider persona was losing its luster. Her Hollywood Dark Girl was confusing to teens reared on the unashamed buy-me chipper-ness of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Dawson's Creek. Still, her disaffected shtick was so intertwined with her stardom that she seemed unable to let it go. Ryder's chosen mode of self-destruction exposed the depressingly uncool side of the social type of which she has now entirely become a prisoner. It's time at last to free the new Winona - from the old one.
You can read the complete version of this article in the print edition of the Sept/Oct Film Comment.
