TIM BURTON – SEVENTEEN FILMS
A VOYAGE TO EREWHYNA INSTEAD OF EREWHON
Dr Jacques Coulardeau
Abstract:
The
only question we may ask when watching so many films by one film maker covering
a thirty year period is about the existential meaning of the whole set.
First
let me tell you I do not give a damn about the film maker’s personality or
personal data. That he had a bad or good youth with a father who was loving or
terrifying;, and a mother who was evanescent or over powering is of no concern
to me though we could say hat the virtual “author” of these films
obviously has an existential problematic relation with life and death.
He
will, I guess, excuse his morbidity, his cultish liking of death, his
depressive black humor by saying he is a Halloween author. That would be short
indeed. That would neglect the audience. The public, and mostly children when
the films are not restricted or are Walt Disney films, are bombarded with
gruesome juicy corpses in any state of decay, with frightening scaring traumatizing
supernatural beings from the other side of life: vampires, werewolves, ghosts,
witches and so many other curse-throwers and curse-catchers as if cursing your
neighbors was nothing but a game of baseball.
But
in the end does Tim Burton have a vision of society that could be explained to
anyone? I am afraid not. In the name of extreme black somber humor he
criticizes, vandalizes and victimizes anything and anyone supposedly sacred in
this society, except mind you anything really religious. In other words these
horror or suspense stories are the stories of a very faithful choirboy, or
choirgirl if they could have girls in that function, who has never been able to
take his robes down, probably because that is his only vestment, clothing and
he is nude and prudish underneath. In other words these stories, be they
morbid, humorous or simply gruesome, are nothing but the expression of his
total nudity under his superficial existential circumstantial diapers. He hides
behind such ugly stories and tries – at times fails – to make people laugh at
his funeral corpselike mind. [...]
Research Interests:
Discussion
Can there be any sense
in this farcical grotesque pastiche showered onto the innocently perverse
world? Tim Burton turns the whole world into a funeral parlor. And even Alice in Wonderland
becomes under his fingers a story of death, of dying, of getting their heads
off not with laughter but with an axe. Doesn’t he know that such obsessive
references could become traumatic for some children who would experience all
that as a symbolical castration? In fact he knows and he must think that these
boys
and girls who will lose their phalluses (because even girls have phalluses
according to Jacques Lacan) in contact with such stories definitely deserve
that loss because they have no stamina, no courage, no daring crazy
enterprising sense of adventure. If they do not like his stories – must he
think – let them get to C.S. Lewis instead of Lewis Carroll Burton. So enjoy
hunting the Snark in these pages and you might find a truffle here and there if
you have the nose for such nice black tubers, but are they tubers really?
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 12:13 PM