Winona Ryder, Analogue Youth

“My life is a darkroom. One. Big. Dark. Room.” Thus spake Wynona Ryder in her career-making role in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice as Lydia Deetz, a widow’s weeds–draped teen who looked as though she’d sprouted full-grown from a pile of tear-watered Cure LPs. In films like The Age of Innocence and Little Women, Ryder would prove herself perfectly at home in demure 19th-century crinoline while at the same time she, as much as any single actress, embodied the sullen subcultural energies that, between the rises of goth and grunge, had suddenly flooded the zeitgeist. More than holding her own against Count Dracula, a certain pallid, scissor-fingered young man, and even the force of nature known as Cher, Ryder established herself as the “It” Girl of an emergent Gen X, and we’ll be paying her a much-due homage in the big, dark cinema.