killing me softly

Tilda Swinton is my new grrl crush.

I think it's too early for even drew's script-o-rama to have the down-low on the Chronicles of Narnia script, but anyway I can't tear myself away from Tilda long enough to look. So why don't you go and see? That's a good reader.

Even in the crowded marketplace that is a Disney Holly-day extravaganza like Narnia, Tilda Swinton's bizarre Borg beauty and unmitigated cool arcs free of the movie, free of directorial manipulations and the time limit, free of the (albeit well-rendered) Christian allegory that underpins the piece.

When she stands poised above Aslan ready to make a kill on behalf of the Deep Magic, you almost want her to put the knife to you next.

The movie works, not only because of her. It works because the allegory remarks again and again on the peculiarly pantheistic and matriarchal foundations of English Christianity. So that the White Witch is a neither/nor being (the kind of beings I like best): she straddles (literally, breathtakingly) the cold iciness of evil in her winter garb and the hot breath of unshaped animal need in her tawny military garb.

There she comes on the battlefield, bloody warpaint dotting the inside of each eye, tricked out like the lioness she is, in furs and slithery chain mail, Aslan's equal in passion if not in compassion.

Here is an itsy bitsy pixely photo that doesn't do her justice:



Oh, man. Pick me, pick me, pick me next!

[first image via Karin & Bruce's flickr photos. Second: Disney et al.]