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WILL WINONA RISE FROM HER OWN SMOLDERING ASHES?
Cutting price tags off garments in a high-end department store was the final act for the Hollywood Dark Girl, a type that Winona Ryder inaugurated 13 years ago in Heathers. It was a far from fitting close for the trademark Ryder ingenue: disaffected but winsome, she was equally capable of sucking the straw of a Slushy like a succubus and investing pathos and intelligence into lines like "I don't really like my friends. They're just people I work with, and our job is being popular." With her glowing pale skin and air of inferiority, 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. When she asked one of her high school tormentors, "What's your damage?" back in Heathers, it seemed unlikely that the question of damage would ever come back to haunt her.
Her recent crack-up-the shoplifting, the illegal painkillers-cap a bad stretch for Ryder, whose Hollywood Dark Girl high point was a long time ago: the years immediately following Heathers. The apex of her routine occurred in the otherwise unremarkable Reality Bites, where she played Lelaina Pierce, an unemployed recent liberal-arts graduate. Lelaina was meant to stand in for a generation whose "den of slack" was built on top of the fallen idealism of its Boomer parents, who had "disemboweled their revolution for a pair of running shoes." (The former hippie parents referred to in the film could just as easily be Ryder's own-with her brothers Jubal and Uri, and her sister Sunyata, she grew up on a commune; her godfather was Timothy Leary.) Attempting to answer the question of what her generation believes in her college graduation speech as valedictorian, Lelaina distills in a single sentence the paradox of the Hollywood Dark Girl: "The answer is," she says, wind blowing through her shag haircut, "Um . . . I don't know." According to the film's plot (and Ryder's own biography) though, "the answer" is simple: to fall in love with a would-be indie rock star, and to have him quote advertisements and...