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14-20 Oct 2017 guide 16

kind of rise in status and, in

this case, the only difference

from the previous decade

was that she was now being

offered the adult roles that

every other older woman was

offered. “I know there’s a lot of

conversations right now about

ageism, and I know a lot of

actresses who have a tough time,

and I’ve gotten offered those

mom parts,” Ryder told T ime in

2016. She took some of them.
      In The Iceman (2012) she was
      the unknowing wife of hitman
      Richard Kuklinski (Michael
      Shannon) who alternately gives
      birth and is subservient to her
      abusive husband. It was barely
      a character. In Experimenter
      (2015), which she signed on
      to because she was asked by
      director and old friend Michael
      Almereyda, she did even less as
      the wife of social psychologist
      Stanley Milgram and mother of

their two kids. “She was so edgy

and alt as a teenager, as an icon

of a certain kind of girl-woman,

that these motherhood roles

seemed like an odd fit to me,”

says Karlyn. “She was kind of

getting forced into this notion

of what an acceptable wife

or mother had to be to these

famous men.”

While Ryder used to be a

fierce outsider in her teen films

it would appear as though

Hollywood can only accept her

as an adult if her adulthood is

defined by the conventional

trappings of grownup life: a

husband (preferably a powerful

one) and kids. “In terms of

allowing mothers to be as

complex as fathers on screen,

we’ve got a long way to go,”

says Karlyn. “For a woman to

be a mother but not that be the

defining thing about her when

she has children.”

Still it was not until Stranger

Things, in which she plays Joyce

Byers, that Ryder started being

asked by the press how she

could act like a mother without

kids of her own. She remains

defined by her son but, in his

absence, we see the familiar

Ryder-as-outsider who is missing

something and searching so

desperately for it – an “it” we

can momentarily forget is a

child. Even when her son’s

dead body appears, she blindly

persists, communicating with

‘I went from weirdo

teenager to pixie

waif to Hollywood

not knowing what

to do with me’

Hail Ryder

(left to right)

Experimenter;

Black Swan;

Mermaids;

Mr Deeds;

Reality Bites

ALLSTAR/MAGNOLIA PICTURES; UNIVERSAL