Johnny Depp's original 'Winona Forever' tattoo. Image Source: johnnydepp.org.
In the past couple of days, the word forever kept coming up. Finally, it all converged in a
'plate of shrimp' moment. The first mention came up in this analysis at
The White Review of
Johnny Depp and
Winona Ryder. The article,
Famous Tombs: Love in the 90s, described Depp's and Ryder's relationship as
the American youth romance of the decade. Author Masha Tupitsyn then probed a more interesting question. She almost cracked what, exactly, happened to the Depp-Ryder romance, not in terms of what it meant privately to the two actors, because we can't know that, but what it represented to the rest of us.
Tupitsyn hints that
it never went anywhere, but Johnny and Winona did. She believes that Depp sublimated
it in alcohol and drugs, replacing love for a woman with addictions so distracting that it became impossible to get back to the original source. Meanwhile, Ryder moved forward, but part of her is still trapped in that past time. It wasn't just her love for Depp. She embodied a decade for
Generation Jones and
Gen X rebels, symbolized by the curious fact that
she is naturally a blonde, but for decades has dyed her hair Gothic black:
Like
John Cusack, another black haired/pale skinned 80s/90s idol, as well as a youth actor whose great, and perhaps only gift, was to enact a different kind of youth (a counter-youth and counter-masculinity) in his youth, Winona Ryder was never timeless, she was of the time. Most especially that brief time in her life, her teenage years and early twenties. Perhaps this is why
Jake Gyllenhaal’s light hair was dyed jet-black for the retroactive
DONNIE DARKO, and
Christian Slater’s jet-black for
HEATHERS. Something about dark hair showing up in the late 80s and early 90s as a form of retribution for an aesthetically fascistic and representationally narrow decade. These are people who were not kissed by the sun, who were not California Dreamin’, or, as the German writer
Heinrich Laube puts it, ‘These pale youths are uncanny, concocting God knows what mischief.’ If, as the teenage radio pirate DJ, ‘Hard Harry’ puts it in
PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990), the 80s were a totally ‘exhausted decade, where there’s nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to’, Winona Ryder rose up from the bleached-blonde ashes of the 1980s.
Depp and Ryder started in gothic and horror genres. Their early work, like that of contemporaries
Keanu Reeves,
Parker Posey and
River Phoenix, appeared in dark indie films or popular movies with unsettling vibes. Depp made his feature film debut in
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which he played a nice but useless boyfriend. These roles reflected a time, when, for a brief period, surreal depictions of the collective unconscious entered the American mainstream in almost unedited forms. It was remarkable.
David Lynch, an American director surreal enough to be respected by Europeans, became popular, as his
Twin Peaks exposed the underside of the American Dream.
