Thoughts on Tim Burton

This is a new thing I'm trying; let's call it an experiment in discipline. I'm going to try to have one coherent, well-formed thought a week that I will post about. Particularly for the past year, I've been very sporadic in my posting--sometimes a billion posts a week, sometimes once every month or so--and I can hardly call that a blog now, can I?

(Plus, I found out people actually read this thing...Who knew?)

So here goes my first post in this grand experiment. Tonight's topic was inspired by a conversation I had regarding 9 not too long ago: Tim Burton.


I've always been a fan of Tim Burton's aesthetic. While one (meaning I) would've expected it to evolve somewhat by now, it has been rather innovative and very different. I don't simply mean the dark, pseudo-Gothic, German expressionism-esque visuals involving canted angles, asymmetrical lines, and lots and lots of black--he does more. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example, the colors inside the factory are something to behold: bold, eye-popping, incredibly vivid. There's also his practice of reversing the norms of the color palette. The one that pops immediately to mind is Edward Scissorhands, where the bright pastels of the surrounding neighborhood (traditionally coded as safe, good, and normal), symbolize bizarre and grotesque. In contrast, it's the dark blacks, blues, and shadows of the castle and Edward himself that come to symbolize normalcy (of a sort) and good values. This style, as any casual viewer knows, has pervaded Burton's animated and live-action films, and I don't expect anything less from 9 or Alice in Wonderland. While it's something I suppose I will always admire and enjoy, as I continue to view and ponder Tim Burton's films, I have become increasingly disenchanted not with the visuals, but with the characterization. Specifically, I'm referring what I will call Burton's vision of the idealized woman.

This is not a new concept, and certainly not one limited to this filmmaker. What I am referring to, exactly? Tim Burton appears to have a very precise conception of the perfect woman, and I don't mean Helena Bonham Carter--though she started representing them cinematically once she started popping out his babies. Burton's idealized woman is a passive female; she doesn't instigate action, it comes to her. Now, different characters possess different degrees of agency, but what it comes down to is that virtually none of his women act on anything, but are merely reactionary. Physically, she's very pale with long, flowing hair and big eyes. In the beginning, she always wore a white dress, though in more recent films she proves that black is the new white.

The plot of the film carries the characterization in one of two ways. The first is that the hero admires this idealized woman from afar--naturally, for he must then spend the rest of the film in his goal to attain her. Think of Winona Ryder's Kim in Edward Scissorhands: Throughout basically the entire film, Kim is the object of Edward's gaze, as he's constantly admiring her from near and afar. She herself doesn't really do much until towards the end--her mother is a much more active female in the film--when she puts on her white dress and lets her long hair flow as she dances under Edward's ice sculpture. But of course, she gets hurt, and then proves unable to stand up to her idiotic jock boyfriend, who literally rouses up the angry mob with pitchforks and torches. She does pursue the fight back into the mansion, but she doesn't really do much besides cower and scream until Edward ultimately kills Jim. The kicker is that in the film's frame story, she's an old woman who is so vain that she doesn't ever want to see the love of her life again--or rather, the other way around--because she is now old. Note that Edward is up in the mansion making more ice sculptures of his idealized memory of her.

Consider also Sandra Templeton from Big Fish. If I remember correctly, she wore a light blue dress during her long, flowing hair scene, but details. If any girl is idealized and admired from afar, it's Sandra. Edward (again with the Edwards!) declares himself in love with her long before he even knows her name. She always seems to be posed the same way--standing with a smile, her head tilted to the side and her hands clasped in front of her--no matter where she is: In a field of buttercups (I think), by the riverside, at the circus, etc. He doggedly pursues her, despite the fact that she, too, is engaged to a complete asshole. Her initial spurning of his affection was just about as ineffectual as her attempts to keep said jackass fiance from beating on Edward, once again proving the old trope that the only thing a woman can do to hurt a man is to refuse to marry him.

Other Burton women who fall into this category: Katrina Von Tassel from Sleepy Hollow, in a way Mrs. Barker from Sweeney Todd (if anything, you can agree that she's totally idealized in his memorires), and Johanna from Sweeney Todd. The last one REALLY pisses me off because in the original musical, she actually had lines, character, and, oh yeah, a SPINE...

The other track that the plot can take involves a heroine who is hopelessly and utterly devoted to the hero, no matter the cost to her or anyone else. Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas immediately springs to mind. When it comes to Jack, Sally is nothing but a giggling school-girl, albeit an undead, stitched together school-girl. Her undead devotion to him is thankless; for example, she slips out at night, losing an arm in the process, to send Jack some food in a basket, but runs away before he can see who left it for him. What's notable is that she predicts the disastrous results of taking over Christmas, but doesn't exactly warn him. She tries, I suppose, though he just kind of talks over her and leaves her to shake her head after him and lament "Oh Jack" several times as she blinked her long eyelashes. I will give her credit for taking the initiative to take out Dr. Finkelstein, but she always willingly goes back with him, which I never understood because he doesn't seem like a very nice (or good) doctor.

Mrs. Lovett is on the completely other side of the devoted spectrum from Sally. While Sally is content with keeping her devotion on the sidelines, Mrs. Lovett lays it on thick right from the get-go. Now, Mrs. Lovett would seem to contradict everything I've said about Burton's women being super-passive; it was, after all, her idea to start killing people and baking them into pies. My complaint, however, comes from the change in Mrs. Lovett's characterization between the original musical and this film. Anyone who's seen either Angela Lansbury's or Patti Lupone's turn as Mrs. Lovett will know what I mean. These actresses' Mrs. Lovetts were so flippant and forceful--it feels like at every turn she's trying to force Sweeney to love her. Her only regret throughout the whole ordeal is that he found out the secret about his wife. Helena Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett, however, is a whiny sad sack, and I hate to say that because I love her as an actress. Lines that comes across as "LOVE ME!" with previous incarnations become "Love me? Please?" with her; she's pleading with him, and that's rather pathetic. Also, I never remembered Mrs. Lovett crying, let alone over Toby, before this version.

Other Burton women that fall into this category: both The Corpse Bride and Victoria Everglot (to different degrees) from The Corpse Bride.

What makes this all the more insidious is that he couches this completely outdated image of the idealized, virginal woman in white (and sometimes black) in this supposedly subversive visual style. It's such a disconnect when one aspect is so startlingly innovative and another is so overwhelmingly not! Am I really the only one who sees this?? Please let me know. I fully admit that I haven't seen all of Tim Burton's films, or even included all the ones I have seen**; feel free to disagree with me. (I will delete rude comments.) And if I'm totally off-base here, well, we can hope I'll come up with a better thought for next week.

~The Original Fong~
**You wish you could pull off being me**

**One that I didn't include but have seen is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I believe it to be different because there are no romantic relationships foregrounded in the plot. It's about bratty kids and parent issues.

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