Alison McMahan’s new book The Films of Tim Burton presents as its central argument an idea that is at once novel and helpful in discussion and thought about contemporary
Hollywood cinema. In the book, McMahan offers Burton as “a trendsetter” (216) in contemporary cinema – a director whose new approach to filmmaking – an approach
McMahan deems “pataphysical” named for the French Collège de Pataphysique
, founded in 1948. The approach is defined by a reliance on special effects, and a central grounding of special effects as an object of focus within the film. Pataphysical films have a selfawareness, often a comedic one, and occupy a space beyond and transcending genre - mixing approaches and images from a variety of past films and genres. And, finally, pataphysical films follow “the narrative logic of animation” (4) instead of traditional narrative logic. Examples of these films range from what can probably be generally agreed upon as “good” films such as Burton’s Edward Scissorhands to films that I am uncertain anyone other than McMahan has ever claimed were good, such as The Core.
The idea of the pataphysical film is promising, offering a reading of films that breaks out of the tyranny of a linear, Aristotelian narrative. Even separate from its pure application to cinematic structures, the pataphysical suggests a way of reading intensely low-brow literature in a relatively high-brow way. The continual resituation of genre and metacommentary of the self-awareness point towards a rhizomatic conception of narrative, dependent on a schizophrenic conception of the viewer who moves rapidly from watching one film to another. This continued reimagining of audience subjectivity also points towards other theory – one could readily move towards a Lacanian interpretation, looking at how the film continually signifies through and around an unspoken but continually marked other of the myth-based structure McMahan claims these films have.
It is unfortunate, then, that McMahan does none of this – her work is largely nontheoretical, instead providing an essentially historical analysis of the media of cinema and animation, arguing that the two mediums have unique narrative logics that the pataphysical film blends. Unfortunately, this claim is often made without sufficient attention to the history or current state of animation.
McMahan begins by making the claim that the narrative logic of animation is described as “an orderly establishment of parts that lead up to some main point, a succession of distressing mishaps, growing in violence, a cumulative chain of actions, increasing in force and resistant misfortune” (12). What is strange, however, is that she appears to make the claim that this narrative logic is inherent to the animated form. She cites the early animated films of Winsor McCay as typical of this narrative logic – and these films certainly are as she describes them. They are episodic, based around strange transformations such as a house that begins to fly, or a dinosaur who drinks a whole lake.
But to argue that this is inherent to animation is difficult to support – one need only look at a page of McCay’s comics work to see that McCay works like this in general – not just in animation. Similarly, the basic comedic plot of much animation is just as easily located in the historical circumstance of animators coming from the ranks of cartoonists, who were used to the gag-a-day plotting of the newspapers, and translated this plotting to their animated work. One can also look to contemporary anime as a counter to McMahan’s

claims of an episodic and comedic plot – one would be hard pressed to describe Ghost in the Shell as following the narrative logic of animation as McMahan sets it up.
But McMahan forecloses any possibility of treating the narrative logic she describes as a product of historical circumstance – she makes explicit that she intends for the narrative logic to in some way be inherent in animation when she frames her discussion of it in terms of her claim that “animation is actually the medium we are all studying. Cinema is just one part of it” (10). In light of this, her claims of a particular narrative logic of animation have to be taken as an extreme form of technological determinism, whereby she claims that the medium of animation itself necessitates a narrative that, simply put, it doesn’t, and that can be much more easily traced to the artistic roots of animation’s founders than to animation itself.
Her engagement with current trends in animation is similarly problematic – as shown in her discussion of machinima (Animations done within the engines of video games) in her first chapter. Her claim in this chapter – that Burton, through his series of Shockwave cartoons Stainboy provided a model of what she refers to as “the machinima crowd” (32)
– is made without much support – she cites a five page article in Res in a footnote as support for the claim that “ machinima filmmakers looked to Burton as one of their own after the release of Stainboy,” but gives no real exploration of the relationship between the two. Indeed, it’s unclear whether the mainstream of machinamists would consider
Stainboy as part of the same tradition that she mostly discusses – animations stemming from first person shooter games. It is also surprising that she makes no mention of Red vs. Blue – by far the most written about piece of machinima – out of her book, or that she situates machinima as a response to the first-person shooter genre, ignoring The Sims, a game whose community is so linked with machinima that the game recently began using player-created machinima as the centerpiece of its advertising campaign. And despite focusing on the first person shooter to the exclusion of other topics, she makes easilycorrected factual errors about the genre – she claims that the source code to Doom was released with the game (it was not) and that the Deathmatch mode of Doom was responsible for its criticism by parent groups (As opposed to the extreme and bloodsoaked nature of the violence and the propensity of the game towards Satanic imagery).
Errors such as these pervade the book, and mar its historically based analysis. McMahan frequently displays an annoying tendency to conflate several people’s arguments into one argument, only distinguishing them in her footnotes. In her introduction, for example, she asks if “[Neil] Gabler correct in arguing that these ‘warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills’” are indications of something (3). The problem is that the phrase
“warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills” isn’t a line from Gabler – the footnotes make clear that it’s from an A.O. Scott review of Van Helsing that came out two years after Gabler, and had been earlier quoted by the book. Later, she attributes the idea of remediation to Lev Manovich – and then defines the term in a footnote without mentioning Bolter and Grusin, who actually coined it. Even her claims about films can seem less though through than one would hope. It is difficult to take seriously a book that on the one hand dismisses Big Fish as a film that “fails” (77) while simultaneously

praising The Day After Tomorrow as “an example of the pataphysical film at its best”
(232).
These failures in her larger argumentative frame and in the details of her scholarship would be more forgivable if her analyses of Burton’s films were particularly clever or insightful. For the most part, however, they are not. It is not that they are actively bad, although they are frequently unsupported, as with the blanket claim that Big Fish is a failure. This lack of clear support often negatively impacts her argument at a whole as well, as she occasionally claims that a film is not pataphysical (As with Batman, Ed
Wood, and Planet of the Apes) in such a way that it becomes less and less clear what she means by the term, or how she sees these films as substantively different from Burton’s pataphysical ones. In her conclusion she offers a continuum that goes from myth to fairy tale to drama to pataphysical, but by this point the terms have become so muddled that the continuum doesn’t clarify much. Regardless, her readings of Burton’s films are not bad – perhaps a bit obvious (That Edward Scissorhands, which is explicitly framed as a fairy tale, follows a fairy-tale narrative structure seems like something that could have been established in less than four pages), but they are also not of particular importance.
Slightly Meaner Conclusion
Despite all of this, the book does make a useful contribution to its critical conversation in the form of the pataphysical narrative. There is a wealth of fruitful analysis to be done with the pataphysical as a starting point. It’s just that anyone hoping to base an analysis on the idea of the pataphysical film is going to need to do so much to rescue the concept from McMahan’s analysis that they will need to almost completely reinvent the wheel.
That said, just because the first try at the wheel is square doesn’t mean that the wheel should be abandoned.
Nicer Conclusion
It is difficult to overlook the preponderance of errors and missteps in reading McMahan’s book. There remains reason to do so anyway, however. Although McMahan does not take her idea of the pataphysical film to the interesting ends available, her book still provides a point of origin from which later discussions of the idea can begin. Despite its numerous shortcomings, it is a start, and that alone is a substantial contribution.