The Crucible Article
She is almost transparent. On Screen Winona Ryder glows like a backlit moon, and her charisma is ghostly, not of flesh. My first memory of her on film is a black-clad teen with a talent for conversing with the dead, in "Beetlejuice". And the 25 year old woman who walks into Lucy's El Adobe on Melrose Avenue still has that adolescent's ever haunting intelligence and nascent carnality in her face. In person she is tiny, tinier even than most actors on first glimpse. And shaking her hand is like grasping, for a moment, the wing of a bird.
Beyond her appearance, there's something else about her that's ghost like -- a spirit-world sagacity that's more Teen Gothic than New Age, an air of having been a young person for hundreds and hundreds of years. Her early career was made by playing adolescents in films like "Lucas", "Heathers", "Beetlejuice", "Mermaids", and "Edward Scissorhands". In Martin Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence", her first grown up role, she invested young womanhood with a hint of the shocking rapacity of innocence, something most adults have forgotten all about. Her performances definitely indicate that it's as if every experience she ever had is still fresh; indeed, she does have the gift of total emotional recall.
But first, there's one question I'm dying to ask. Did she get to meet Arthur Miller? Her face lights up. "Yes!“ she cries. Ryder plays Abigail Williams opposite Danel Day-Lewis's John Proctor in "The Crucible" , set in Salem, Massachussets, of 17th century witch-trial fame. Her tone conveys the pleasure of a true literary junkie. "I saw a lot of him. I talked to him about writers and books and poetry. 'Who's your favorite writer?' I asked him all those stock questions. He was really the warmest, sweetest man. But you never forget that he's Arthur Miller.'
We order margaritas, and they're so large we have to ask for straws. Behind the enormous fishbowl of a drink, she looks like a punk Alice in Wonderland -- Tim Burton's Alice, maybe."I'm a terrible lightweight," she says, "I had my wisdom teeth out, and I've been on Percodan for three days, but yesterday I flushed the rest of them down the toilet."
She smiles a little. "I was starting to like it too much. But now if I ever have to play a heroin addict...I realized something recently," she goes on. "Someone was telling me how miserable they were when they were acting, and all of a sudden it occurred to me: I really love it. And then" -- she relishes the punchline -- " she said, 'You just feel that way because you've been doing it your whole life.' And I said, 'Oh , that's not true! I didn't know I wanted to be an actor until I was eight.' And I said it seriously!“
Ryder says simple things with a purposeful edge to them, always in context, and it's this personnal style that gets her featured in stupid quote-of-the-day wall calendars; "I feel best when I'm happy" Face to face, though, she talks with an ironic twist of the voice. She often hunts for words and leaves sentences half finished as she feels her way along a train of thought , chuckling and mimicking herself as her stories spin out."
Maybe she shouldn't have flushed the Percodan. Her teeth hurt, and she can't really eat, so instead she talks, in an animated flood that quickly spills over the three-hour mark. And besides, it sure beats working out with a trainer six hours a day to beef up for her part in "Alien Ressurection", in which she will have to keep up with Sigourney Weaver.
"I guess it's called cross-training," she says curiously, sounding as if it were a recent invention and kind of a shady practice at that. "I don't think I'm cut out to do that kind of training. I just don't have that type of body. I'm really small. I have a weird metabolism. Muscles look strange on me." Why go through all the pain and grief? (Besides, of course, her multi million dollar fee.) "I was ten when I went to see that movie," she recalls, "and I'd never seen a woman be the hero. It had a huge impact on me."
We talk about physical violence on screen. She cocks her head and searches for the tail of an idea. "To me a person slapping someone across the face really hard is more violent than someone being shot, because it's so humiliating and it's such a horrible feeling." She pauses, "I know I've slapped a few people, but I've never gone out with a guy who's hit me. I'd say most of my female friends have been raped or hit or beat up by boyfriends or a date, or something horrible. It's amazing to me. I feel, was I sheltered? It happens much more than we think. Out here, too,it happens a lot in the business. People haven't any idea. I mean, actors do it to girls, to extras."
Before I can register surprise, she says, "I once was around an actor-- I was really young, like 15 or 16, and he was a lot older and he was coming on to me, and it made me uncomfortable. I never said anything, because he was a big star, and I wasn't. And I always kind of regretted that. Things like that stay with you. He didn't hurt me. I'm not damaged from it. I'm not scarred. But when I hear stories now it makes me mad. I think I should of said something." ---- But then she laughs and acts out a comic scenario of a 15-year-old Winona trying to file a sexual harassment complaint, and how absurd it would have seemed ten years ago. She ends with a sheepish, hang dog caricature of herself: "Gee, I dunno, he made me really uncomfortable."
Which is not to
say Ryder hasn't been on the receiving end of physical violence. She
talks about being beaten up pretty badly at the age of 12. "Because
three guys thought I was a gay boy," she recalls. "I got six stiches in
my head, was slammed into a locker, got a fractured rib. I was just
walking down the school hall and they started calling me names." Ryder,
new at the school, told the guys she was a girl, but her hair was
short. "So they beat me up. My parents were outraged." She went on home
study, devoted herself to acting, got discovered...
"And I did my first movie the next year."
Did Ryder ever have another run-in with the bashers? "I did encounter a girlfriend of one of the boys. I saw her a couple of years ago. She came up and asked me for my autograph. I asked her 'Do you remember that boy who was beaten up? ' She remembered and said, 'Oh, that f*a*g*g*o*t?' And then I said it was me. I got a big thrill out of that. She was mortified and refused to believe it at first. I had to convince her by recounting every detail of the event. I did not give her an autograph."
For the next twenty minutes, our conversation spins out to books a documentories and the evolution of sexual harassment in the culture. Somehow , we always range back to the essential root nature of adolecence, which still fascinates her. She mentions having a sheltered childhood, which is odd. Her parents are die-hard counterculterists -- both writers -- and after all, Timothy Leary was her Godfather. Ryder doesn't see the contradiction. "I grew up in San Francisco, then in this commune for four years. I grew up around drag queens and gay men and hard-core feminists and all sorts of people, and I never differentiated. Also, there was a lot of free love. Everyone was naked, so it was never a big deal."
Her inverted form of rebellion was to long for an imagined picket-fence normality. "I think I wanted things to be more strict," she says. I wanted rules and a curfew, and I wanted to have dinner with my family every night. I wanted to be like all the kids at school. I wanted to live in a town, in a little house."
When she was 11, the family moved to Petaluma, the small suburban town of Polly Klass notority, in northern California --and she got her wish. And the aformentioned gay bashing. "It was what I wanted, but I had no idea it was going to be so horrible: living in a town where I was afraid of my neighbors and I was afraid of the kids at school, because we were the hippie family on the block. The police picked on us because we drove this psychedelic van. I was in shock. This was my dream; we had a house, a neighborhood, we each had a room, and it was really exciting. And then suddenly my dream was shattered and I went into a massive depression."
Ryder talks about the horror of stealing a comic book and being put under citizen's arrest, which led to her getting handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car. "Then the police brought me home and my parents tried to beat them up."
So being sheltered, it turns out, means that your parents beat up the cops when you get arrested for shoplifting!!! It sounds to me to be the perfect childhood -- deeply weird yet graced with authentic sanity. When getting bashed got her kicked out of school "They said I was a distraction and asked me to leave" -- her parents sent her to study at the American Conservatory Theather in San Francisco. By the time she entered high school, by now transformed into "the little punk rocker" she was also a working actress."
Looking back at her ten-plus years in the industry, Ryder recalls her roles in "Heathers", "Beetlejuice", and "The Age of Innocence" with genuine fondness. But in between, she's been stuck, she says, playing confused, what-should-I-do-with-my-life girls. To remedy that situation, Ryder has optioned several projects and is developing them independantly, including "Girl Interrupted" about a young woman's hospitalization in a mental institution; "Roustabout", which is quite literally about running away with the circus; and "The Trials of Maria Barbella", about the culture clash that results when a turn-of-the-century Italian immigrant woman murders her American lover. "It never makes anybody the victim," Ryder is quick to point out. "And it never says whether what she did was right or wrong; it's only about the concept of innocence.
Unless anyone has missed the point, all three film projects are about outsiders, to be played by Winona Ryder, who, on-screen and off, revels in that outre rebel status.
Take her latest role, in "The Crucible". Most critics call Abigail the play's villian -- a young girl who cries witch in order to save herself and implicate her rivals. Ryder sees her somewhat more sympathetically. "In reality, Abigail was 12 and John Proctor was 65," she begins,"He's been fucking her since she was a little girl, and all of a sudden she's kicked out and he says 'Nothing happened, we never touched' And she is left saying, 'But wait, we did, and you said that you loved me and you said you were going to be with me.' To me, that's so incredibly abusive and sick and warped." ------ Apparently, for Ryder, who's been bashed by homophobes and handcuffed by the police, life and art have definately come full circle. "I found a lot more sympathy for Abigail than I thought I'd find." she says, "It was so obscene how children and women were treated." She pauses for a moment, then sums up what is to Winona Ryder, the obvious. "Of course," she exclaims. "Abigail had seventeen people killed and she ran off to Barbados!"
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Pictures
all pics are some of my fav pics of Winona
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