Reading time: Just over 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about metaphors and similes from Rachel Syme…
A New York Times Magazine article by Rachel Syme about the movie A Star Is Born, had me ready to line up at the theatre.
Her figurative-language-laden story — about the movie starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper — ran under the headline, “The Shape-Shifter.”
Here are my favourite examples of Syme’s graceful and clever writing:
- Lady Gaga did not so much arrive at the Venice Film Festival this August as she floated into it, a platinum Aphrodite borne on the waves, black stilettos skimming the sea foam. Which is to say, she took a water taxi.
- Her hair [was] shaped into three victory rolls like a crown of croissants.
- Lady Gaga is our pop laureate of the grand entrance, our patron saint of operatic ingress.
- Gaga once described herself as “a show with no intermission,” but it might be more accurate to view her career as a glorious series of overtures; her curtain is always rising.
- Her lips were matte red, slightly overdrawn, an enthusiastic valentine.
- Her earrings, obsidian chandelier dangles [sic] heavy as hood ornaments, cast prismatic shadows on her clavicle and seemed to threaten the general integrity of her otherwise regal posture.
- She spoke carefully, in a breathy tone, as if she were in an active séance with an old movie star whose press agent advised her to remain enigmatic and demure.
- She kept her legs crossed at the ankles and her spine rod-straight, with her shell-pink nails gingerly intertwined in her lap, as if she were practicing to meet Queen Elizabeth.
- But Gaga adds something of her own: a sensual, earthy confidence, like gasoline in her veins.
An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Oct. 11/18.
