Tilda

These notes were written on the occasion of Tilda Swinton being awarded a medal in honor of her work at the 38th annual Telluride Film Festival.

I first met Tilda in a world that no longer exists. That constellation was called the Bowery Bar, and its primary astronaut was a man named Erich Conrad. In that pre-9/11 atmosphere—it was the June, July or August before that momentous event; love stuck to the Bowery Bar booths that summer like bare knees—New York thought everything was possible, and so did Erich Conrad. At Beige, the party he’d hosted at the Bowery since 1994, Conrad facilitated the crowd’s shy and big energy by opening the space to the superficially divergent worlds of fashion, film, and journalism, and then standing back to watch what happened. Inevitably those various disciplines, and the artists behind them, found one another in the glow of Beige’s continual disco beat, but only if you listened.

The throwaway theme on most of those Tuesday nights was that one was not alone in this world, certainly insofar as one’s aesthetics were concerned. Liquor might help you find the rest. Tilda doesn’t drink, but I do, and it was a combination of liquor and nerve—or nerve made plucky by its pickling—that I said to her, approaching her booth, “Tilda Swinton! We’ve been looking for you!” (The “we” I was referring to included a close friend of mine; at the time we were making a series of documentary portraits of performers we admired. Tilda was on that list.) Fortunately for me, Tilda was sitting next to her close friend Jerry Stafford; he knew my work, which made me, perhaps, at second glance, a more socially acceptable lunatic. “You’re the man who wrote about X,” Jerry said, naming a fashion editor we were both close to, and Tilda beamed, and said, “Somebody invite Hilton to my screening,” and I sat down, and the conversation, thus begun, continued and continued for days and months and years, all the way into the now and beyond, in the cosmos of our shared imagination.

2001 was a hallmark year for us and many others. That was the year that the New York Tilda and I met in crashed and burned, and out of the heaved-up towers many ghosts emerged: America’s cold war alliance with the Afghan mujahedin, the Gulf War, the Iranian hostage crisis, stretching all the way back to our genocidal interest in difference while the outside world helped add new piles of death. In our post 9/11, synthetic atmosphere of nationalistic conservatism that gets events like Beige not only shut down but discouraged, Tilda took the party elsewhere and learned to connect with her audience, and me, in a different way. Before 2001, Tilda’s work was that of a hitherto unseen ingenue, an industrial age fairy figure whose happiness and pain were hard won. You wanted to walk with her, but at a distance, offering what you could, but only when asked. She began her on-screen life as a largely silent film star in Derek Jarman’s baroque contrivances (CARAVAGGIO, 1986; EDWARD II, 1991), a beautiful girl with long red hair and long legs, with expressive hands and a half smile, and as interested in muting the volume on oversized or “theatrical” feelings as Lillian Gish had been when she lent her aura to D.W. Griffith’s beautiful pre-World War I world of silences. Indeed, Gish and Griffith’s relationship helped inspire Jarman and Swinton’s 1989 film WAR REQUIEM—a not-silent movie, but whenever Tilda appears in it, she turns the volume down on its myriad goings-on. In 2001, Tilda drew a line between this earlier work and the work she needed to do in a changed world.

The film she invited me to that first night at the Bowery Bar was THE DEEP END (2001). In it she played a mother trying to learn how to breathe. In the opening sequences, one hears and sees Margaret Hall, Tilda’s character, drawing her breath in and letting it out, as a car whizzes by. Margaret is living in a changed environment. Her son is gay, but that’s not the issue; the issue is his blackmailing lover, who dies, and whom Margaret must revisit in his watery grave. More breathing. The suspense is in Margaret’s lungs—accordions filled with panic. THE DEEP END was a watershed role for Tilda, and established a quartet—what I call her Motherless Mothering roles: Julia in 2008’s JULIA; Emma Recchi in I AM LOVE (2009); and, now, Eva in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. Each of these parts could have gone the wrong way; that is, they could have conformed to the world that 9/11 made and ended up as a series of portrayals leading to redemption, no matter how inherently craven or short-sighted the characters could at times be, and often were. But I don’t think Tilda’s interested in wholeness. She’s interested in the fractured female (when she plays females), which is to say those beings whose audience generally splits women between The Mother (KEVIN) and The Whore (JULIA) while sometimes being called both (I AM LOVE). What’s a girl to do in such a regimented, non-forward-thinking universe?

If she’s half the man Tilda is, she sticks her mind and face in the cracks of such presumptions, and says as Tilda says, by way of her performances: Now look at it this way, now let’s turn it around and look at it another way. What does my face mean when it says this? What do my breasts mean when they’re handled thus? Who am I? More importantly, who are you? (A very interesting Master’s thesis for some as yet-to-be-born cineaste would be a study of the number of times Tilda stares her interlocutor—the audience—down in her films. Jarman had her do it, Sally Potter had her do it, Disney had her do it.) While each of the characters in the Motherless Mothering quartet has children, or wants them—Julia’s methods may be wrong, but her heart’s in the right place—one gets the sense that these Motherless Mothers themselves long for a love that, by rights, should be a child’s: an unconditional love. They are spiritual omnivores, and eat their way through prawns, booze, a child’s disdain, blood, to get at the heart of something, anything, that will satisfy what cannot be satisfied, which is their early hurt, the mother who would not love them, or who practiced a cold disdain toward the child who lived with such high style from the first that she ended up in a movie. Watching Katherine Matilda Swinton in these various roles, or mirrors that reflect her characters’ luck, or bad faith, and hope, one thinks of Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel Matilda, the story of a little girl whose parents turned away from her, thereby sending her into a gentle world of books and art and dreaming, where adults have a way of not altering her imagination at all.