With a string of hits stretching from Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Edward Scissorhands to Sweeney Todd, Timothy William Burton has been lauded as Hollywood's great 'outsider' for two decades. His fanbase has coalesced around emotional identification with the 'misunderstood genius' characters and themes of social exclusion that permeate his body of work; indeed a common explanation of the popularity of Burton's work might be that it offers hope to those who feel misunderstood that they can overcome their 'intrinsic' social awkwardness.This however disguises the reality that Burton is a de facto facsimile of the shadowy oppressive forces which frame the transcendental journeys of the privileged individuals around which his films are constructed.
Rather than acting as an emancipatory catalyst that encourages the disaffected to challenge the social norms which sidelined them in the first place, Burton's body of work offers a Dickensian sop to their misery. By celebrating the 'outsider' he legitimises the flaws of a capitalist society that marginalises those who do not serve it's agenda of profit at any cost. Burton's 'outsider heroes' can perversely only exist as part of a system which perpetuates the creation of 'outsiders'. The effect then of these films is to encourage the emergence of an 'outcast' sub-culture whereby people can only indulge their newly discovered sense of heroic uniqueness by going down to Blockbuster and renting the latest patronising dollop of schmaltz served up by Herr Burton.
Luckily for Tim this helps him fund his own continuing transcendental outsider narrative. This began with his misunderstood animator phase when the folks over at Disney told him they didn't like his drawings for The Fox and the Hound. Happily Tim overcame this tragic difference of opinion to wind up as an extremely wealthy film-director living in the home of former British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith with his girlfriend, Asquith's great-granddaughter, Helena-Bonham Carter.
I somewhat doubt the likelihood of Burton's fans following in his footsteps, however 'empowered' they might feel after a tenth viewing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. After all there are only so many ex-prime minister's residences to go round.
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I would also add that his curiously benign aesthetic palette is interesting to dissect in light of the political qualities of his work.
ReplyDeleteHis 'Batman' film lacks all of the nuances of the Nolan works, which are not without problems themselves, so to suggest such a thing clearly marks Burton negatively.
He is a man who toys with a passive grotesquery. His 'montrosities' never approach the sublime or profane but linger around the finges of Victoriana caricaturisation. A kind of uplifting bleakness that supplements it's own mythic inadequacy with a semblance of a spirit of 'realism' that seems to at once use and disavoy the 'grit' that exists in social-realist cinema.
He seems to borrow a 'darkness' that both bastardises Noir and the kitchen sink as well as removes all historical relevancy of these styles of film-making.
In doing so he undervalues both traditions by turning them on themselves in a parodic fashion so as to make them humourful. This distances them from the moral/political ambiguity that has previously been the underpinnings of these aesthetics and allows for him to return to a moralistic tone, albeit a kind of 'outsider' chic morality. His 'humourisation' of the shadow actually inverts the moral ambiguity of the noir/Sink variety, and returns the White Stetson back to the good cowboy and the Black Stetson back to bad one, so to speak.
Hence his seeming fixation with the most moral of forms, the 'children's narrative'. Even if he toys with dipping his toe into the deeper pools of shadow, he cannot, as to do so would undermine the generic conventions of the fable, the 'children's narrative', in so doing would return his work in a double inversion back to the domain of moral ambiguity, which is precisely the opposite tactic he seems so pleased to deploy.
I think he is nothing more that a return to moral film-making, just in the cynical clothing of the 21st Century.