Any analysis must begin with her Germanic name. There’s nothing funny about a German joke, as the old saw goes, and her customary bemused opening posture, mouth open as if to say something funny, creates a dissonance when one simultaneously encounters her odd combination of jet black eyes and Nordic blonde hair. Consider the effect if her eyes were green; wouldn’t you just laugh at what she says, having forgotten it immediately? Instead you’re pulled into further confusion, the disturbing mix of her man height, man walk, man hands, man shoulders, and man forehead with her very female take on such irritating qualities as hauteur, mockery, ridicule, impatience, insolence, condescension, fury, indignation, madness, bubble-brainedness and shit-losing, in effortlessly modulating subtle shadings of high bitchiness. This all centers of course on her neck, which you want to strangle, especially when it physically protrudes on the sides, and her adam’s apple wobbles, as she performs one of the above-mentioned irritating qualities. You do not want to strangle Scarlett Johannson or Zoey Deschanel. Add to that the fangs (she’d be great in a Van Helsing squealquel), the eyebrows that can wilt a carrot, and that awkward hairwhip move that only a gangly teenager who’s been mercilessly teased for years can pull off, and it’s almost, almost possible to not realize that she’s got a totally bitching bod. Completing the effect is the most effective eyelid acting of this generation. When James Lipton had her on the Actor’s Studio his first question of course was about the eyelid acting, how he uses her work to train his students but they never get it, what’s her secret, to which she replied, in that unctuous yet silly manner, “I dunno, I guess it just comes nat-rullly”. And that’s the point, isn’t it, the complete innocence of it all, the centuries of forgetting required, you just want to ask her what’s the deal, even though you know this will only result in those lips, those lips moving, squishing around some statement so contrary, so implausible, all you want to do is stick your tongue inside her mouth, even though you know she will suck up your whole psyche and mash it down like another chain-smoked cigarette.
It’s in the bone structure, that pure Aristotelian form more like a philosophy than something physical. Every face you see you’ve seen before, but bone structure, that’s unique, and you have to contend with its uniqueness. And hers is almost perfect, like F. Scott Fitzgerald said Katherine Hepburn’s was, and it frames her shaming smile, lights up her vacant eyes, brings depth to her relentlessly unforgiving brow. She gives you nothing, no hope of any leverage over any aspect of her, no control of anything now in your possession. You are only thankful you are tormented from afar, that you don’t have to hear the laugh if you were to ask her out on a date.
