GQ has selected Tilda Swinton as its 2014 Woman of the Year. It’s an exceptional choice, but a surprising one: Swinton is a strange and beautiful rare bird, with insane hair that she occasionally styles into a comb-over. She is a committed polyamorist who takes perfectly weird and glamorous vacations with Haider Ackermann and sometimes sleeps in glass box at MoMa. Her magic, though very clear to all of us and, evidently, Amy Schumer, is not always understood by the average man.
In an attempt to demystify Swinton, GQ has a writer tramp all around Scotland with her. Swinton picks him up from the airport. They play with her four dogs. They take some kind of foggy, damp hike on the moors. They share some haggis (Swinton eats most of it). They have a totally weird time — it is Tilda Swinton after all — but there is still some attempt to explain her as a total normie: “She smells like wildflowers and wood smoke. Her sweater is chunky and soft. Her profile is the kind of thing you need to work up to looking at directly.”
First mistake: You cannot look directly at the visage of Swinton. She is a special alien goddess who walks this Earth knowing that she is not one of us. The magic of Tilda is that we can never comprehend her, or as Schumer perfectly summed it up in a speech last night: “She can scare the shit out of you and break your heart and give you a boner all at the same time.”
