This is what happens. A young woman wearing a white lab coat is sitting in a cafeteria, keeping her thoughts to herself, when a man carrying a tray sits down across from her. Striking up a conversation, he tells the woman—her name is Joyce—that he recognizes her from years before; they grew up in the same small Canadian town. Joyce then feels obliged to tell the man a little bit about herself. She teaches neurology at a nearby university. Her demeanor is polite, formal, distant. She doesn’t smile much; you can tell that she’s one of those extremely self-contained people who regard smiling—the baring of teeth—as a form of aggression. Outside, the rain falls in sheets. At one point, the man tells Joyce that she’s very beautiful. She says, “Oh, please,” and her irritation casts a pall on the conversation. Still, the man presses on. He says, “You should have been a model.” Joyce says, “Well, that’s the last thing I would want to do.” When he asks her whether she could ever imagine being something other than herself, she says, “No. . . . When people think of their lives as being different, they always make the most trivial changes. ‘If only I’d been to that party, or taken that job.’ They never say, ‘If only I’d had two brains, or been able to photosynthesize my food.’ It’s as if they think the smaller changes are more likely to have occurred, that God might have overlooked them. How could anything be different from what it is?”
Fiction, as someone once said, is always true. As played by Tilda Swinton in the Canadian director Robert Lepage’s 2000 feature “Possible Worlds,” Joyce is one of Swinton’s numerous selves. More specifically, Joyce is the part of Swinton’s self that works to subvert the standard male response to her considerable beauty (“You should have been a model”) with analytical, imaginative, and precise language—to put the watcher in the position of being watched by the very person his vision sought to claim. It is this aspect of Swinton’s presence, in two dozen films (and one music video)—her witty, sometimes eerie ability to turn the screen on the viewer, as it were—that has made her quite possibly the only real film star whose career has been fostered almost exclusively by the art house and the cinéaste. In the eighties and early nineties, in film after film by the late, pioneering English director Derek Jarman, Swinton became the avant-garde’s Garbo, a manifestation of ideas in the flesh. “But that kind of art is dead,” she said not long ago. The film industry takes less and less interest in the kinds of talent that Swinton encountered and, in many cases, promoted at the beginning of her career. “What you can do now,” she said, “is subvert with art that disguises itself as commerce.”
Recently, Swinton has pursued this goal in several roles: as a protective mother in “The Deep End,” a less-than-two-million-dollar art film with a seemingly accessible narrative, which was picked up by Fox Searchlight; as an oracle of sorts in Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky”; as a peculiarly idealistic studio executive in Spike Jonze’s forthcoming “Adaptation”; and as the love object of the heartthrob Ewan McGregor in an erotic film noir, “Young Adam,” which begins shooting in Glasgow this month. But, a dreamer in pursuit of a dream, she cannot relinquish her roots, despite the hard work and scant financial remuneration, and she still takes on parts farther from the mainstream, in films like Lynn Hershman Leeson’s upcoming “Teknolust,” in which she plays three clones who must drain men of their sperm in order to survive. Collectively, Swinton’s current choice of roles reflects the schism between the art film and the populist epic. She is the object that each camp—one headed by The Artist and the other by The Businessman—struggles capture, because of what she confers: power to the former, credibility to the latter. She manages to offer both while seeming to do nothing at all—the stillness of her face conveying a complex and distinctly cinematic presence informed by language and distance rather than the dramatization of emotion.
She is, perhaps, one of the last of the great cinema objects. She has said, “I don’t exist”—and the job description is accurate enough for a woman whose “I” is not the point. Marrying her image to the audience’s imagination is the sleight-of-hand to which she aspires. She has an interest in the closeup. “What insight it provides,” she said last December. “How many of us can ever say we’ve seen the emotion in the backs of our heads?” Yet she is detached enough from her work to describe her performances with disinterest. She said, recalling the brilliant, if uneven, 1996 film “Female Perversions,” in which she played Eve, a lawyer who is rigid with self-doubt and perfectionism, “I saw it just recently, and it’s gotten nastier and better with age.” She bit down hard on “nastier,” with a deadly emphasis that is usually absent from her conversation; it was perhaps an imitation of Eve’s voice, which conveyed Eve’s will—the strength that kept her ankles from wobbling in heels that were sharp enough to stab, if not kill, anything underfoot, be it flowers or men. In the film, Eve’s vulnerability soon became evident in spite of those heels and the lipstick glossy with deceit—war paint that armed her for the struggle to be a woman in a nearly all-male world, the only game in town.
Swinton has a performer’s natural interest in lies. She said, “I was four when my little brother was born, so naturally I wanted to kill him. One day, I walked into his nursery and he was chewing the ribbons on his bonnet. He could have choked on them. I wanted to choke him. Someone saw me bending over his bassinet, and they thought I was trying to pull the ribbons from his mouth—trying to save him. They said, ‘Oh, what a clever darling you are. You saved your brother’s life.’ But that had nothing to do with my intention.”
She, unlike Eve, has little need for the arsenal of makeup and heels. She stands five feet eleven in her stocking feet and has a distinctly military bearing. Her father, the eminent Major-General Sir John Swinton—former Commander of the Queen’s Household Division, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and all that—heads the family seat in Swinton, Berwickshire, land in Scotland that the family has owned since the ninth century, long before Sir Walter Scott remarked that he was honored to be a “mere twig” on the Swinton family tree. “J’espère, je pense” is the family motto. An ancestor was painted by Sargent.
She studied English and social and political science at Cambridge. She said, “I used to write poetry, and then I read too many books. ‘I used to write poetry’—isn’t that the saddest thing you can say?” She was sent, recently, these lines from Joseph Brodsky’s 1974 poem “Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots”: “Mary, I call them pigs, not Picts, those Scots. /What generation of what clan in tartan / could have foreseen you’d step down from the screen / A statue, and bring life to city gardens.” She said, in response to the poem, “Yes, yes, the Picts. Painting themselves blue, as my feral children do, quite unlike Mel Gibson in ‘Braveheart.’ ” The children to whom she was referring, four-year-old fraternal twins named Honor and Xavier (“She is my honor and he is my savior”), are as slippery-limbed as their mother. She lives with them and their father, the Scottish painter, playwright, and socialist John Byrne, in northern Scotland, an hour from Inverness. She sends her children to a Gaelic nursery school. She lives in a way that she was not raised. She said, “My father describes me as a contrarian. I have always been allergic to drama and dramatics, the very reason I cannot live around theatricals. It is too strangely out of the frying pan into the fire at moments.”
She said, of her parents, “They sent me away from Scotland to school in England when I was ten so I would grow up to speak like them”—meaning the English. The late Princess Diana was a classmate. “There is no such thing as a British person,” Swinton avers, aligning herself with the vast number of British subjects—Welsh, Irish, Scots—who once collectively outnumbered those who force-fed them the English ideal. Much of her œuvre can be read as a visual dissertation on such problematics: being non-British, being non-male, being not who-you-are-watching-at-the-time.
She appeared, in 1992, in “Orlando,” Sally Potter’s filmed essay on the nature of the British Empire, which was based on Virginia Woolf’s story of a boy who becomes a man who becomes a woman over the course of four centuries of English history. She would not be nearly as believable in the part were she not subverting her own aristocratic forebears’ dream of England. (“I can’t tell you how autobiographical that film is,” she said.) When Lady Orlando, faced with penury, is propositioned by the unappealing Archduke Harry (John Wood), who says, “I am offering you my hand. . . . I am England and you are mine,” she looks at him ruefully, her expression tight with the strain of not laughing in his face. She turns England down flat.
She said, “It all comes down to class, doesn’t it? And I mean the middle class, because there is no other significant class. It’s about the theme-park-ization of Britain. We’re all supposed to aspire to the generica that the middle class aspires to. It’s not only the working class that’s disenfranchised but the owning class as well—disenfranchised from their intellectual and artistic aspirations. For the middle class, the only thing that matters is sitting on the fence, whereas the disenfranchised classes aspire to soul values. I am of that other class that defined itself as different because—ridiculous word—we ‘discovered’ things and defended them with sharp objects and wrote them down.”
She appears at the end of Derek Jarman’s 1987 film “The Last of England”—another meditation on England as lost empire, England as dream, England as Thatcher-induced nightmare—in a long white wedding dress, looking like a Miss Havisham who has made it to the altar but is none the happier for it. In a visual melee, she is torn between comforting a baby swaddled in scandal sheets, posing for wedding photographs, and smiling at a posse of young men dressed in eighteenth-century fancy dress—the English dandy as glib, apolitical grotesque. She uses her body here as she does in all her films: as a visible script, a narrative of flesh. As many other notable members of the nobility have done since, she runs from marriage, rending her wedding dress; her long red hair twirls and swirls like a shroud she cannot shake; her face contorts in a look that is the visual corollary of English punk’s anthem about having no future, none of the promised glory, no triumph over the Pakis and blackies littering England’s shores.
She made seven films and one short with Jarman, starting in 1986, after she had left Cambridge and spent a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She never took to the conventional stage, but she did take, almost at once, to the intimate tangled universe of the film set, with its convergence of science and art, a closed-off world of smoke and mirrors. She has called her time with Jarman her “apprenticeship.” In his silent cinema (the early movies were filmed without synchronized sound; most of the dialogue was recorded later, in voice-over) she began to think of her work as performing, not acting. Jarman’s filmmaking relied greatly on the largesse of friends who shot, edited, and costumed, and on a distinctly political sensibility, informed by AIDS and the closeted lives that gay men led for decades for fear of shame or arrest. Swinton was the only actress to have survived his aesthetic, the weakness of which—a kind of visual solipsism overlaid with gold filigree—she counteracted with long limbs that connoted action, not self-absorption. She was, in a way, the strongest actor in his films—the idealized “male.”
She said, of those days, “There is so much that I do miss and so much—to be honest—that I don’t. There was a constant unspoken push toward fighting, which I always squirmed under. It infuriated Derek that I would not engage with that certain predilection for drama, and the awful temptation for queens in a pack to project onto the one female in their midst a dreadful, mawkish, pantomime diva-ship that is entirely inappropriate to the individual. But all this mixed in with more riches than I can describe—true familial companionship and guerrilla comradeship on a day-to-day basis that was beyond price. Surviving it leaves me feeling like Marianne Faithfull about twenty years earlier than I thought I might. That time just closed up behind us like a trapdoor, and now there’s no way back. Only fragments to take forward. There were so many casualties, and one is in mourning less for the individuals and more for the time, for—I would even go so far as to call it—‘the movement.’ But a regrouping is in force. Maybe more splintered and less obvious than before, maybe more infiltrated. The years of the cold war are upon us. More spies than soldiers, perhaps.”
She had, two years after Jarman’s death, in 1994, an attack of shingles. She diagnoses it now as a delayed case of grief. During her convalescence, she read the work of several mathematicians, as well as Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century meditation “Imitation of Christ,” while sitting in a window seat in a London flat. She said that trying to understand those books was what got her through—that applying her emotional imagination to both the infinite and the concrete was a kind of balm. In her New York hotel room a few months ago, waiting for a call that would summon her to one of the events she had to attend to promote “The Deep End,” she commented on another kind of grief: “I was sitting in the Inverness airport after the attack in America. I had to come to America for two days for an engagement I’d promised to do before, and I thought, What if the plane crashes—I’ll be furious. For my poor children, and for John. And I looked around the lounge and I said, ‘Well, where else would you rather be than with other people? What else is there but other people?’ ”
She is a visual enemy of political correctness; that is, she is very white. She has the coloring of a nurse, or, rather, of a nurse from literature—Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” say, or Sylvia Plath’s “In Plaster.” She is white on white, like a Butoh performer, but with swatches of lushness mottling her angular cheeks, thin lips, and high, intelligent forehead, like blush. She had, for many years, long, red, “actressy” (to use Susan Sontag’s word) hair, which sometimes blew across her open mouth, or hung dank with horror, as when she played a mother in Tim Roth’s astonishing directorial début, “The War Zone.” The movie was shot in 1998, shortly after the birth of her twins, when her body was fuller than it had ever been, slightly battered yet vibrant, a body that Lucian Freud has never dared to imagine from the distance of his “gaze.” “I said I wouldn’t play this woman who had just given birth if I couldn’t show what a woman’s body looks like after she’s given birth,” she said. “There would be no point. I’m offended by all those films that show women, moments after delivering a child, with one perfectly rosy breast suckling a child contentedly.” She played a mother again, this time with short hair, in “The Deep End.” She called her character, Margaret, who tries to protect her gay son from the threat of blackmail, an “ordinary woman who finds herself in a film noir.” She added, “It’s a very unexotic story. Mothers find themselves in a film noir every other day. My byline for the film is ‘It’s a mess. She’s a mother. She cleans it up. Next.’ ”
She is not averse to fashion, or to dismissing it as “spinach,” as the fashion writer Elizabeth Hawes once did. She favors clothing by the Dutch design team Viktor & Rolf, clothing that, with its sharp creases and large cuffs, accentuates her angularity and renowned androgyny. She would make a credible red-haired addition to the extravaganzas by Takarazuka—the all-female Japanese troupe whose male impersonators, in tuxedos or leisure suits, bring a new kind of love to Tokyo girls, a love layered with more sensitivity and less body hair. “She’s a dreamboat,” I have heard more than one woman who generally does not favor women say about this woman, who once said, running her fingers through her just cut hair, “What we have here is either a ‘Young Americans’ situation or a ‘Thin White Duke’ situation,” referring to the seventies coifs of David Bowie. She further upset perceptions of her “maleness” by playing her own husband in John Maybury’s 1992 film adaptation of the stage play “Man to Man.”
She has been described by other women with the intensity one finds in letters written by women in the nineteenth century. In 1993, she and Sally Potter were in Moscow during the Moscow International Film Festival, after shooting on “Orlando” had wrapped and the long process of screenings and press junkets had begun. Potter, who has endeavored to create the kind of narrative cinema that Jarman might have taken on, had he lived, wrote in her diary, “We pass each other hurrying down the long corridors of the hotel on our way to different events and commitments. But, eventually, we manage to find an early morning slot where we can meet. We sit wordlessly in my room gazing into each other’s faces. I know her face so well—every curve of it, every nuance of expression. There seems to be nothing to say, because so much has been said over the years, and yet never enough to begin to describe the complexity of our relationship and the extraordinary endeavor we have shared. So an hour passes in silence as we sit, open-faced, opposite each other, occasionally embracing.”
She stood in her New York hotel room, on her third or sixth or tenth visit to America, preparing to make another appearance in support of “The Deep End.” She had skipped the screening in order to spend more time with her children, whom she had brought along on this trip. Honor and Xavier—lean, pale, navy-blue-eyed and dark-lashed, with close-cropped hair—were jumping on their mother’s bed, saying “Darling! Darling! Darling!” in high-pitched children’s voices, but with a tone that reminded me of their mother. Their babysitter, a neighbor from Scotland, scanned the newspaper for ads for “Vanilla Sky,” which had yet to be released back home.
Swinton walked out of the bathroom in a black suit and heels. The merest wipe of lipstick across her pale lips had transformed her face. She was an entirely different visual experience from the woman who had walked into the bathroom with her glasses and corduroy trousers on. She kissed Honor, who began to cry when she realized that Mummy was going off to be Mummy—or someone else, named Tilda Swinton—out in the world. She left the room quickly, not daring to look back, and in the hallway she wiped away tears of her own, saying, “Well, now you see.” She got into the elevator and continued a thought she had begun as she was dressing: “When I saw a retrospective of my films, I learned something, which was—in its most gauche form—that I have a natural resistance to following the expected rhythm. Sometimes to disastrous effect, and sometimes to enlightening effect.” She leaned back against the elevator’s wallpapered surface. She said, “I can’t resist trying to break that traditional rhythm.” Later that night, in the bar of the hotel, she put her feet up on the table and went on, “Learn the rules so you can break them properly. So many actors are insecure. And so many actors say, ‘I’m waiting to be found out,’ meaning they feel that what they’re doing is false, that they’re not becoming the thing they’re supposed to be—with their character’s voice in their inner ear. But when I say acting is easy I mean it. Actors go through this whole thing about how difficult it is—‘It’s the conscience of the world,’ of humanity, and so on—when it’s really play.” She sipped her white wine and concentrated. She said, “We’re playing metaphors about real people.” ♦
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