Gothic in a loveable way
Examining Tim Burton's style in the movie Edward
Scissorhands
Anyone
who is familiar with Tim Burton's style easily recognizes his works,
the dark, Gothic and quirky horror and fantasy films that made him
famous and popular. He was born at the end of the 1950s in the United
States in California and grew up in the suburbs of the city of
Burbanks. He started making films in his backyard as a hobby before
he would turn 13 years old; he used stop motion techniques or shot
them on 8 mm film without sound (The Famous People). Burton
loved monster movies as a kid, his favorites were Godzilla, and the
British Hammer movies (Tim Burton Collective). His childhood
exercised a great influence in his later film directing work.
After
high school, Burton started studying character animation at the
California Institute of Arts. His works drew the attention of Disney,
and he spent a few years at the company working as an animator,
storyboard artist and concept artist before he was dismissed for his
movie, Frankenweenie in 1984 (Tim Burton Collective). His
style obviously did not match Disney's expectations. However, horror
writer Stephen King saw this movie and commended Burton to Warner
Bros movie studio, where he finally got the chance to direct his
first movie, Pee Wee's Big Adventure (The Biography Channel).
The film was very successful, and Burton's individual career set
forth.
The
first movie with which he was given a full creative control was
Edward Scissorhands – Burton wrote the story and also produced the
film (The Biography Channel). The film is a romantic drama, a
kind of Gothic, horrorish fairy tale. The main character of the story
is Edward, who resembles Frankenstein's monster in the sense that he
was “made” of a cooking robot by an old man, the Inventor.
Unfortunately, Edward's creator died before he could have been
finished, and he was left “incomplete and all alone” in the
Gothic, scary mansion where the Inventor lived his life (Edward
Scissorhands, 4:35). Several years later, a nice woman, Peg,
finds Edward in the empty mansion, and takes a pity on the lonely
man. She brings Edward back to her suburban home, and thus she sets
off several troubles – Edward does not really know how to adapt to
the people of the suburb. This movie is regarded as the best one of
all of Burton's works by critics (The Famous People), and it
also sums up the director's style perfectly.
Tim
Burton has several easily recognizable characteristics: he likes to
use Gothic style, suburban lifestyle and flashback storytelling. He
has common archetypes as protagonists and antagonists, and his main
characters are mostly eccentric, misunderstood people, outcasts from
society. He also uses dark-light contrast deliberately, and often
casts the same actors and actresses in his movies. Edward
Scissorhands represents all of Burton's characteristics.
Edward
Scissorhands is full with the Gothic visuals that characterize Tim
Burton so well. Gothic tradition evolved from Romanticism, which
emphasized the importance of emotion and imagination. “Where the
classical was well-ordered, the Gothic was chaotic; where the
classical was simple and pure, Gothic was ornate and convoluted;
where the classics offered a world of clear rules and limits, Gothic
represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the
uncivilized, a world that constantly tended to overflow cultural
boundaries”, said Punter and Byrorf about Gothic (The Gothic
Imagination, 5). The main aim of Gothic was to reconnect with the
dark side of life and human nature, to show and evoke the extremes of
emotion, and the thrill of terror (The Gothic Imagination , 5).
At the beginning of the existence of the film industry, it aimed for
the same experiences. Entering the dark cinema was equal to exploring
the strange and the unknown. The stylistic characteristics of the
horror genre also originate from these experiences (The Gothic
Imagination , 7). The style of Gothic horror was first presented
by the German expressionist directors – Tim Burton gains his main
inspiration from these movies most of the time.
The
dialogue between the old Kim and her granddaughter clearly shows the
main assumption of people on Gothic. Kim asks the little girl: “You
know that mansion on top of the mountain?”, and she responds: “It's
haunted” (Edward Scissorhands, 3:50). Even the position of
Edward's house evokes fear in people: it's above the suburbs, as if
it was threatening its people. When Peg, Kim's mother sees the
mansion in the rear view mirror, scary music starts to play (Edward
Scissorhands, 7:59). Edward himself is dark, he has dark hair, he
is wearing dark clothes, his face is pale white and full with scars,
and he has huge scissors where his hands should be – he instantly
scares people around himself. However, Tim Burton's Gothic is
actually nice from a closer perspective. The haunted mansion becomes
friendly with the hedge animals, the creepy robots bake heart shaped
cookies, and the threatening mansion above the suburb becomes a
source of beauty – it is the reason why it is snowing down in the
hill. Edward turns out to be a warm-hearted and selfless person, he
would do anything for the people he loves and expects nothing in
return. Tim Burton presents Gothic in a loveable and friendly way,
which stands in a huge contrast with the candy colored, seemingly
nice but actually hideous suburb.
Tim
Burton has always emphasized in his movies that darkness is part of
human existence, that there is a dark and a light side of life and
one cannot exist without the other. The people of the suburb in
Edward Scissorhands do not understand this, they live their life on
the surface. Their denial of the reality of death makes it impossible
for them to accept different perspectives of life and imagination.
Tim Burton told about the suburbs of his childhood in the following
way: “That thematic thing of the living world being much more
‘dead’ than the dead world, playing with juxtapositions and those
feelings – I remember having that from very early on. It goes back
to childhood: I just remember that feeling that what people call
‘normal’ is not normal and what people call ‘abnormal’ isn’t
abnormal” (The Gothic Imagination, 3). The people in Edward
Scissorhands resemble Tim Burton's neighbors from his childhood. They
live in perfect, but at the same time, repelling candy colored
houses, and the first scenes show that no one actually cares about
the others, the only thing that has the significance to connect them
is gossip. After Peg brings down Edward to the suburbs, the first
thing to do is to give him “human” clothes and put makeup on him.
This shows that the people expect Edward to assimilate to the
neighborhood. At dinner, nobody listens to each other, Peg asks her
husband not to call Edward “Ed”, but he does not hear her. The
neighbors do not understand Edward, and through him, Gothic and
darkness, and that darkness is part of existence. The deeply
religious woman warns them that Edward is “straight from stinking
hell” (29:44), and that they should “trample down the perversion
of nature” (Edward Scissorhands, 31:03). Edward begins to
love and appreciate his new family, and he is also falling in love
with Peg's daughter, Kim. All he wants is to fit in, and being
inexperienced and unbiased as he is, he easily falls for the intrigue
of the neighbors: he helps to break into the house of Kim's
boyfriend, which results in his later expulsion. The neighbors do not
trust him anymore, and after Jim, Kim's boyfriend, tells him “you
can't touch anything without destroying it” (Edward
Scissorhands, 74:41), he cuts off his clothes, which is a sign of
him not being part of the suburb anymore. He is fed up with the
people around him and with his own faults as well, and realizes that
it might be best for everyone if he went home to his mansion. As he
is running away and the police are chasing him, an old man asks Kim's
brother: “Have they caught him? […] That cripple.” The same
person told Edward only days before not to let anyone call him a
cripple. This sums up the wickedness of the suburb: people are
backstabbing, two-faced and vicious. Peg's and Kim's personalities
are in a sharp contrast with the other people of the suburb: Peg is
brave and unbiased, she goes up to the castle to see Edward and then
she brings him home, and Kim recognizes the human in Edward, and is
not afraid of hugging him or even kissing him. At the end of the
story, she stays away from Edward to protect him.
Burton
often uses eccentric, misunderstood people as protagonists in his
movies. They are outcasts from society, eccentric and strange, thus,
nobody understands them. Edward is a perfect example for this
character. The old Kim says about him: “[he] was left by himself,
incomplete and all alone” (Edward Scissorhands,
4:35). When Peg finds him in the mansion, she asks him: “What
happened to you?”, and Edward answers: “I'm not finished”
(Edward Scissorhands, 13:43). The Inventor died before he
could have finished Edward, so he lived alone for a long time, and
this way he does not know how to behave when he is brought back to
society. He constantly scares people with his scissors, he does not
know how to eat, he knocks his head on the car door. For him, the
suburb is much scarier than his old mansion was: he gets startled
when he sees himself in the mirror, and accidentally breaks the water
filled mattress on Kim's bed. For Edward, everything is black and
white: when Kim's father asks him what he would do if he found a
suitcase on the street full with money, he says he would give it to
his loved ones (Edward Scissorhands, 69:58). Kim smiles at
this answer: although Edward does not live by the rules of society,
it only means that he lives without restrictions, and without bias.
Tim
Burton also likes to use sharp visual contrasts in his movies, which
he represents with contradictory colors. He uses these contrasts to
highlight the important details in the scene, and also to emphasize
the difference between two characters, places or items. The first
huge contrast in Edward Scissorhands is shown at 8:21, between the
colorful suburb and the dark mansion on the hill. As I already
mentioned, the contrast here is delusive, since the colorful suburb
is actually the source of all evil, and the dark mansion is the home
of peace and love. When Peg enters the mansion at 11:52, the
conveying is in a bright light, while the rest of the room is dark.
Later the importance of the conveyer belt turns out: it was the
“birthplace” of Edward. At 12:17, there is a sharp contrast
between Peg's clothes, and the rest of the mansion, which shows that
she is very different from Edward's world. At the end of the movie,
when Edward returns to his mansion in his original dark clothes
again, Kim follows him in a white dress. Also, while Edward has black
hair, Kim is blond. These contrats represent Edward as the dark, the
Gothic, and Kim as the light, the purity. It also highlights the
differences between them, and the incompatibility of their worlds.
In
almost every Burton movie there is a witch, the antagonist, an evil
woman who is up to no good, and causes a lot of trouble for the main
character. In Edward Scissorhands, this witch is Joyce, the seductive
neighbor of Peg. Joyce is constantly flirting with Edward since the
first moment they have met, but her innocent badinage turns serious
when she tries to make love to Edward in the backroom. Edward does
not know what is happening to him, and he leaves Joyce half-naked
after they fall off of a chair. Later on that night, the police
arrests Edward after breaking into Jim's house, and the following
day, Joyce lies to the disillusioned neighbors that Edward tried to
rape her, and thus irrevocably turns them against him. When Edward
returns to the mansion, the policeman tells the neighbors to go home,
but Joyce convinces them to follow him up to the hill, and thus Kim
is forced to lie that Edward died in order to stop them from breaking
into the dark house.
It
is a well-known attribute of Burton to tell a story within a larger
story to explain the history of the protagonists. This flashback
storytelling adds an additional depth to his characters and helps the
audience understand their behavior, their personality, problems,
fears, pains and goals. There are three flashback stories in Edward
Scissorhands. The first one happens in the 33rd minute,
this is the first time the audience meets the Inventor, and the
conveyer belt in the mansion. This story explains how the Inventor
got the idea to create a man out of a salad chopping robot. The
second flashback in the 38th minute shows the process of
the creation of Edward: the good Inventor tries to educate him and
discipline him for good manners. At this point, Edward is in a
semi-finished state, his legs have not been attached to his body yet,
and he learns how to express emotions with his face. The last
flashback occurs in the 85th minute, and it shows the
moment when Edward gets his hands – but unfortunately, the Inventor
dies of a heart attack before he could attach them to his body. Thus
Edward is left to fend for himself, up until the point when Peg finds
him.
Finally,
Burton has his own crew who he likes to work with. His favorite actor
is incontestably Johnny Depp, who plays the main character of Edward
Scissorhand, and who also stars in seven other Burton movies: he is
one of the main characters in Ed Wood, Sweeney Todd, Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, the Corpse Bride, Sleepy Hollow, Alice in
Wonderland, and in Dark Shadows (“The Best”). Winona Ryder, who
plays Kim in Edward Scissorhands stars in two other Tim Burton
movies: Beetlejuice and Frankenweenie (“Winona”). Also, musician
Danny Elfman, who made the soundtracks for Edward Scissorhands is the
main colleague of Burton, considering that he composed the
soundtracks for all of his movies except Ed Wood (Perno). The
recurring actors and music makes Burton's style even more
recognizable, which further contributes to his success in film
directing.
The
purpose of my essay was to explore and present the attributes of Tim
Burton's style in his movie, Edward Scissorhands. The story
represents Burton's affection towards Gothic style, since its main
character, Edward is a half-human who lives in a dark castle on the
top of a mountain. The suburb lying on the foot of the hill resembles
the suburbs of Burton's childhood, where people does not understand
and deny everything that is abnormal, and they do not like disturbing
people in their seemingly perfect, but actually wicked and boring,
lives. Edward is a perfect example for the misunderstood and
eccentric protagonist Burton likes to feature: he has been living
alone for no one knows how long, and he has no idea about how to
assimilate to the society that is surrounding him. There are numerous
visual contrasts in the movie, which is also a specific technique of
Burton, and this contrast is also visible between the two main
characters: Edward and Kim. Joyce, the selfish and seductive woman
from the neighborhood plays the role of the witch, as she is the one
who contributes to Edward's downfall the most. Flashback storytelling
shows Edward's past and tells the story of the kind Inventor who gave
him life. Finally, Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder are recurring actors
in Burton's movies, and composer Danny Elfman is the foremost
musician of Burton. Edward Scissorhands is a beautiful and sad Gothic
fairy tale, symbolically telling a story about the feeling of
loneliness, being an outcast and misunderstood, but at the same time,
it is about sacrifice, hope and love.
