“NOT VINCENT PRICE”: HORRIFIC MASCULINE CRISIS IN THE FILMS OF TIM
BURTON
A thesis submitted to the faculty of
San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
The Requirements for
The degree
Master of Arts
In
Cinema Studies
by
Derek Andrew Domike
San Francisco, California
May, 2009
Copyright by
Derek Andrew Domike
2009
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Not Vincent Price: Horrific Masculine Crisis in the Films of Tim
Burton by Derek Andrew Domike, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for
approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requests for the degree: Master of
Arts in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University.
_________________________________
Aaron Kerner
Professor of Cinema
_________________________________
Jenny Lau
Professor of Cinema
_________________________________
Jennifer Hammett
Professor of Cinema
iii
NOT VINCENT PRICE: HORIFFIC MASCULINE CRISIS IN THE FIMS OF TIM
BURTON
Derek Andrew Domike
San Francisco, California
2009
[FIND ABSTRACT]
I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the contents of this thesis
__________________________________________
__________________
Chair, Thesis Committee
Date
iv
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my family and friends, especially Michelle Sanchez, for their love and
support, and for the guidance and assistance of my colleagues and committee. Without them,
none of this would be possible.
I would also like to thank Tim Burton for such rich texts to explore, and for those theorists
who came before me who inspire me daily.
This thesis was written first as an examination of a particularly idiosyncratic director whose
films have received little critical discourse, as well as in examination of the masochistic
aesthetic and looking for other varieties of visual pleasure.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1
“Pleasure in the Displeasurable: The Masochistic Aesthetic and Tim Burton”………………3
“The Years, No Doubt, Have Changed Me…”………………………………………………..9
“I, Too, Am Strange and Unusual”…………………………………………………………..16
“We Don’t Have A Permit. Run!” (The Masochistic-Abject Space)……………………….22
Concluding Statements……………………………………………………………………....29
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………....31
vi
“His mother said, ‘You’re not possessed, and you’re not almost dead.’
These games that you play are all in your head.
You’re not Vincent Price, you’re Vincent Malloy
You’re not tormented or insane, you’re just a young boy.”
- Vincent (Burton, 1982)
Tim Burton’s filmography is, first and foremost, highly idiosyncratic but has,
thusfar, received little in the way of theoretical attention. Beginning as an animation
student at Cal Arts, his stop-motion animation work eventually led to feature films (his
first feature length film being 1984’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) and continuing on to the
present, his most recent film being 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet
Street.
From his earliest directorial work to Todd, Burton’s work, despite covering
disparate material, produces a powerful discourse on the nature and development of
masculinity. This focuses, particularly, on the transition from childhood to adulthood,
and on emotionally stunted man-children who have in one way or another rejected
traditional cultural mores, to their social or narrative detriment. Abjection, the grotesque,
and a masochistic aesthetic all inform Burton’s filmic discourse and appropriately distort
and reject his protagonists. These influences may stem from Burton’s influence from the
horror genre (in particular the monster movie subgenre), and contribute to creating a
discourse on the textual architecture that informs the paradigm of masculinity, in
particular the conflict between growing up versus attempting to stay a child. This is a
7
masculinity that is, at its essence, simultaneously enforced in dominant norms but highly
questioning of it and is inevitably recompensed into the heteronormative family structure.
For the purposes of my studies, I will be focusing on three of Burton’s films, from
different points in his career: Beetlejuice (1988), Ed Wood (1994), and Sweeney Todd:
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). This trend is not as evident but nevertheless
still present in some of Burton’s more franchise-based or science fiction fare (Planet of
the Apes [2001], Mars Attack [1996], and both Batman and Batman Returns [1988 and
1992 respectively], in particular both contain some elements of what I discuss). But in
these films, from disparate points in Burton’s directing career, contain the most poignant
examples of the general trends of this masculine crisis.
And it is indeed a crisis, for this masculinity is one drawn through the curious
masochistic pleasures drawn in abjection. Masochism is first and foremost, in all its
permutations, a pleasure derived in punishment of transgression of the (paternal) Law, a
kind of transgression that the abject itself is similarly concerned with. It stands to reason
that some instances exist where masochistic pleasures are also themselves abject.
In examining the narrative relationship between abjection and masochism within
these particular examples, I hope to show examples of a larger trend, a larger resistance
against seemingly inescapable forces (adulthood and adulthood’s inevitable result, death.)
8
Pleasure in the Displeasurable: The Masochistic Aesthetic and Tim Burton
What is Tim Burton’s aesthetic and is it masochistic? The discussion of this
particular kind of masochistic aesthetic has its roots in Gilles Deleuze, working against
Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten Essay,” in contrast to Masoch’s Venus in Furs. Carol
Clover, in her “Eye of Horror” chapter in Men Women and Chainsaws goes into details
applying this [what is “this” – a masochistic aesthetic?] aesthetic to horror, the slasher
subgenre in particular, and Gaylyn Studlar’s In The Realm of Pleasure makes similar
arguments looking in particular at the films of Marlene Dietrich-leading films of Josef
Von Sternberg.
The relationship between the abject and this particular masochistic mode, which
proposes a desire to reintegrate with this pre-Oedipal oral mother, might seem somewhat
contradictory. Abjection is a phenomenon primarily concerned with anxiety about the
solidarity of the self, and dissolution thereof might seem at odds with the desire for
reintegration that this masochism proposes. But, although not entirely logical, these
seemingly conflicting desires (solidarity versus incorporation) can exist side-by-side,
even as the masochistic subject might desire incorporation; there is reluctance to some
extent, a resistance, which lies in this abject compulsion to separate.
It is worth repeating and reinforcing the idea that Tim Burton’s filmography is not
as much horror as influenced by horror. They are arguably better described as “horror
masquerading as” another genre: comedy, biopic, and musical for Beetlejuice, Ed Wood,
and Sweeney Todd respectively. The one Burton film that does not fit neatly into any
one genre is his 1997 Sleepy Hollow.
9
Barring the simple syllogism – assuming Tim Burton has a horror-influenced
aesthetic, and accepting Clover’s argument that horror is rooted in masochism, and thus
concluding that Burton employs a masochistic-influenced aesthetic – one can also see the
importance of suffering in Burton’s work. Suffering is important both in the physical
acts of pain perpetrated, but also in the social suffering of the outcast protagonists.
Although at times highly pleasurable for purely aesthetic reasons, there is a certain
schadenfreude that permeates Burton’s work, as we watch people suffer (many of whom
we want to see suffer). Although that desire may initially seem sadistic (and in fact
might be a more traditional view of spectatorship in Burton’s films), this is not a purely
sadistic gaze of scopophilic pleasure in the suffering of others. It is not assumed here that
Burton’s films are not totally without sadism, but that it is not the principal device at
work. Pleasure comes here from the suffering of those characters who we identify with,
and from their eventual punishment. Tim Burton’s protagonists typically do not win in
the traditional sense of the term, and none of these characters have any real victory (the
titular lead for Beetlejuice is prevented from performing the transgressive act of staying
permanently in the living world and forced to live as he was from the beginning,
essentially trapped between the worlds of the dead and the living,1 Sweeney Todd is
murdered, and Ed Wood is resigned to a postscript of alcoholism and eventual death).
An aspect Clover in particular zeroes in on as a feature of the horror narrative, the
compulsion to repeat, to “retell the same stories decade after decade, sequel after sequel –
stories that are often age-old and close to worldwide to begin with” has its routes in a
1
If one is concerned for the Maitlands, or Lydia, who might appear for all narrative and
schematic purposes the protagonists of the film, they are allowed an, at best, tenuous
resolution, but in terms of where the locus of interest seems to lie for filmmaker and
audience is in Beetlejuice himself.
10
psychological process “Wiederholungszwang,” which is defined by Laplanche and
Pontalis as an “ungovernable process originating in the unconscious” where a person
“deliverately places himself in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old [but
unremembered] experience” (p78.) Clover notes that Wiederholungszwang “thus has its
roots in unpleasure.”[citation] Laplanche and Potalis note that Wiederholungszwang has
its roots in historical suffering – a suffering that has more or less been sexualized as
“erotogenic masochism.”[citation]
Burton himself has a strong compulsion to repeat, often returning to previous
properties (barring his shorts, Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before
Christmas, all of his other projects are based on pre-existing properties), as well an
upcoming project like a remake of a short film Burton made while still in art school
(Frankenweenie). With that in mind, perhaps the masochistic, as traditionally rooted in a
genre and relying on a condition often linked therein, can then almost assuredly influence
his aesthetic.
But we must be careful not to confuse our terms. Masochism has been defined
and redefined by various scholars. Laplanche and Pontalis, as psychoanalysts and
disciples of Freud, are more interested in what Silverman terms “feminine masochism,”
which is rooted primarily in Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” essay, and the (male)
masochistic subject’s dream of being his mother being beaten and achieving pleasure by
first becoming the father beating the mother and (according to Freud) identifying with the
mother. Deleuze’s theory, grounded in the original Masoch novels (like Venus in Furs),
instead does not discuss identification with the mother, but, rather, a fear of Selfhood
being devoured by the “oral mother.” The relationship between (male) child and mother
11
does not lie as much on identification as it does on desire for her, a desire that is
forbidden and is supposed to be resolved but can permeate other aspects of the psyche, as
it does in this instance. The masochistic oral mother here is not castrated and remains a
central figure of authority, unlike the post-Oedipal mother who is deemed subservient to
the patriarchy.
This physical resemblance Todd and Beetlejuice share (which will be touched on
in a subsequent section), also calls to mind Burton’s own appearance (pale with frayed
hair.) This kind of commonality might show some kind of link between filmmaker and
protagonist, again fitting into the highly subjective nature of the kind of masochistic and
abject power plays at work here. Similar to Ed Wood, who struggles (and fails) to make
the kind of movies he wants to make in an uncaring Hollywood, these films could also be
seen to be a vindication of the freewheeling individualistic artist. However, even keeping
in mind that spirit, it is never the place for these artists to overcome their obstacles.
There is no real victory for Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Todd, or any other Burton protagonist
other than the most temporary. The victory for them, and for the audience as well, seems
grounded in the pleasure achieved struggling, in failing, the narratives are essentially
boundless and exist primarily to showcase the warped protagonists and their own
challenges.
In examining this kind of pleasure in displeasure, we can also see the highlights of
a visual pleasure rooted not in scopophilia and sadism, as traditionally asserted, but rather
in exhibitionistic spectacle. The hierarchy of the gaze, men as bearers of the gaze
looking at women, seems to break down. The male characters in Burton’s films, for all
their spectacle (singing, joking, wearing drag, etc.) are, as appropriate to masochism,
12
soliciting the gaze and calling to attention their lack. There are examples in each film of
the traditional scopophilic power dynamic where a female character is positioned as
looking into the scene of the transgression, of the site of the future problem. In
Beetlejuice, Lydia stares in with her camera into the open attic window, although both the
Maitlands (and by extension the audience) are unsure at first if she sees anything. Shortly
thereafter they see an ad on the TV for Beetlejuice’s “freelance bio-exorcism” services.
For Ed Wood, when Dolores goes to check for her sweater, we do not so much see her
looking directly at Wood, but an interesting subversion. Wood is in bed, facing the
audience, while Dolores is behind him in the sweater. As she looks away, Wood looks
towards us, staring out in terror at the thought of being discovered. In Sweeney Todd
there’s the crazed beggar woman, staring at the smoke coming from Mrs. Lovett’s pie
shop, muttering to herself and screaming for something to be done. The feminine
presence here is one that is gazing on the masculine, and on the horrific events related to
the masculine; it is not something of scopophilic pleasure but rather a look of horror.
Carol Clover writes about the use of eyes in horror films: “the eye of horror works
both ways. It may penetrate, but it is also penetrated… The open eye of horror is far
more often an eye on the defense than an eye on the offense” (Clover, 104). It is a
vulnerable eye threatened, one that could be gouged out or attacked. It is also an
inquisitive eye, one that is injured by what it has seen. Burton’s work tends to avoid
physical attacks on the eye, so the latter idea seems to be the dominant one.
This mechanic is interestingly subverted in shot-reverse-shot eye on action, a
typical central focus of the gaze. The male protagonists in Burton’s films are often
looking away. Some good examples of this include in Ed Wood when Wood describes
13
first meeting Bela Lugosi, in Sweeney Todd where they first begin planning their plot
(and spend their time looking at, and considering to prepare, men for their meat pies), and
in Beetlejuice when Lydia goes looking for Beetlejuice in the graveyard. There are other
examples as well, as if the narrative is desperately trying to create or preserve any hint of
the gaze that might possibly exist. There is nervousness about the gaze, and often it’s the
women who are doing the looking.
14
“The Years, No Doubt, Have Changed Me…”
- Sweeny Todd, Sweeney Todd
The presence of the grotesque is a consistent feature in Burton’s films, no surprise
given his influence of horror in his work, and thus the presence of monsters and the
monstrous, a gateway to the grotesque. There are two kinds of phenomenon at play here:
the first is the straightforward physical grotesqueness in its literal sense with hybrid
characters sharing both realistic and fantastical elements, a trend more noticeable
amongst Burton’s outcast protagonists. However, in the world of the filmic text, the
grotesque permeates every element, elements which instill a sort of terror and dread into
even the characters designated “normal”. Of the two types of the grotesque that [FIRST
NAME] Dorrian outlines, combination applies primarily to the protagonists (as
mentioned in terms of hybridity), however, distortion will play a part for both the normal
and the abnormal alike.
Beetlejuice’s hybridity stems from his relationship between the living and the
dead, but, in addition to his blatant and explicit grotesqueness as a walking corpse, there
are other elements at work. He seems the most capable of interacting in both the worlds
of the living and the dead; in fact, he’s the only character to actually speak with both
living and dead characters. Also, through his highly ritualized linguistic summoning, he
is able to physically transition from the world of the dead to the world of the living, a feat
that seems to be extremely difficult for other characters. For example, the Maitlands in
their one attempt near the end of the film seem to disintegrate from their normal nondecayed appearances to brittle cadavers, while Beetlejuice is never worse for wear. This
15
also plays into the other living dead displaying some distortion of the body reminiscent of
how they died, visible markers of death like open still red wounds, charred bodies,
shrunken heads, or having the same shark that ate a scuba diver still consuming his body
save for his feet. In these displays of hybridity, Beetlejuice shows his grotesque nature.
Ed Wood’s grotesqueness primarily applies through his transvestitism, exhibiting
traits of both genders in one, and although identifying as male, still enjoying wearing
women’s clothing (often to the shock and dismay of many of those around him). In this
way, he might seem a literal representative of the Oral Mother, but it falls into more
masochistic grounds. Wood’s pleasure in transvestitism seems to come to him from all
the ways Silverman discusses the masochist’s pleasure. Similarly, Wood’s general circle
of friends seems something of a menagerie of freaks and rejects, with a literal transsexual
(Bunny Breckenridge, although he spoke often about the procedure but never began it),
and people who had otherwise been fringe elements of the Hollywood scene (the
Amazing Criswell, and at the time long out of favor Bela Lugosi). They are a group of
symbolic “monsters” (in the sense of the social acceptance) making monster movies.
Even setting-aside his relative normalcy, Wood’s macabre tastes add a certain
morbidity to the film, which opens first on Criswell rising from a coffin, and then a run
through a miniature cemetery with each actor’s headstones, blurring the distinction
between life and death (which ties also into the latter scene of Bela Lugosi trying
coffins).
In Sweeney Todd, on the other hand, this grotesqueness is not as blatantly
obvious and is much more stylized, generally attempts to mar or scar an otherwise
beautiful, perfect, or “untouched” human form. People have things that, although
16
commonplace for Victorian England, seem grotesque to contemporary viewers: twisted
teeth, thick-lidded bags under the eyes, premature shocks of stylized hair, excessive
pallor, feminine bodies squeezed into corsets, that the grotesque comes into play: they are
bodies twisted and shaped, molded almost, into their final bizarre forms. But they are
forms that seemingly have been designed, which helps to simultaneously (depending on
how its down) mediate or heighten the kinds of changes the body undertakes.
Discussing the victim-hero characters in horror films, Carol Clover notes the hero
is also, “always understood as implying some degree of monstrosity” (Clover, 4).
Sweeney Todd is probably the best example of Burton playing with this particular kind of
character type. Johnny Depp is a reoccurring actor in Burton’s films best known for this
sort of part, as the tortured monster in Edward Scissorhands, the sexless investigator
Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow, or even the disturbingly chipper titular Ed Wood or
Willy Wonka as the reoccurring center of these masochistic abject fantasies, although the
details of the exact scenario may change, the rest often remains the same.
Helena Bonham Carter has a similar look as Mrs. Lovett. She is extremely pale,
with a mop of frizzy dark hair, and the same dark bags under her eyes as Mrs. Lovett.
Although other characters might seem pale or caricatured, but none more so than Todd
and Lovett. This mark may link her to Todd (or as co-inhabitant of the place of their
eventual crime) or, more explicitly, like the Mark of Cain, a marker of their criminality.
The resemblance here between Todd and Lovett and Beetlejuice (pale skin, frazzled hair,
17
dark bags under the eyes) is noteworthy, cementing their connection to morbidity in their
shared signification with corpses.2
At the end of the film Toby, a street urchin who moves in with the two as they
begin their venture (after killing his previous master), kills Sweeney Todd at the film’s
climax, he shows the same pallor and heavy bags under the eyes as Todd and Lovett.
Prior to this, and Toby realizing his complacency in the crimes of Todd and Lovett, he
does not show this extreme paleness or condition. It is also curious, then, to think of the
three as a kind of impure or improper family. A family that, instead of being centered
around life or procreation (Todd seems, at best, unaware of Mrs. Lovett’s romantic
overtones) is based on death. The only thing that is produced by this improper family are
these corrupted pies.
But no one is safe from this corruption. The mocking ridicule the so-called
“normal” individuals in Burton’s textual worlds shows implicit and implied
grotesqueness in those who seem the most normal, even as it showcases the differences
of its protagonists. Even for Lydia in Beetlejuice, when she quotes the Handbook for the
Recently Deceased, “The living tend to ignore the strange and unusual … I too am
strange and unusual,” there is some demarcation of strangeness, of grotesqueness, in even
the most mundane and banal characters, elements left unignored[?] within the narrative
world, bizarre commonplaces that make the world of the ordinary seem far from it. The
distortion they suffer is not as immediately physically visible, but is one of mental or
spiritual distortion, of a human psyche stretched in such a way that it becomes almost
unrecognizable.
2
More on Todd, Lovett, Beetlejuice, and their resemblance to Tim Burton on pages 5 and
6.
18
In Beetlejuice, besides the recently deceased Maitlands (who are still acclimating
to their state of death) the only other example of normalcy would be Lydia’s family, the
Deetzes. However, coded as New Yorkers (a sculptor step-mother and investment banker
father) they seem as different and bizarre to the Maitlands as Beetlejuice does. Similar
markers of differences, other kinds of aberrances, mark or mar taints the otherwise
normal characters of Burton’s world. Interestingly, Delia is Lydia’s stepmother, as a new
part of that family, that seems to introduce these bizarre elements, almost as if a blended
family or second marriage could be a type of grotesque experience, a family missing a
component and having something dissimilar attached in its place. Her abstract sculptures
call to mind twisted organic forms, which Beetlejuice subsequently animates, one
resembling a brain attached to a rock, dragging itself along, and the other aligns its spines
to the ground to walk like some kind of insect, each one seems almost a twisted parody of
the represented world of the natural. She’s also involved in the Bohemian New York art
scene, and brings in the Otho character, himself existing outside the family structures
and, as a gay character, is coded as one of the “strange and unusual” people who seems
more sensitive to the paranormal activity in the house. By the end of the film, when the
Maitlands and the Deetzes reach some kind of symbiosis, Delia’s shows off her latest
creation, a stair banister made in the likeness of Beetlejuice (when he had transformed
into a giant snake and threatened the family). This might show that, using these two
mediating figures (Beetlejuice more on the side of the dead, and Delia on the side of the
living), that there can be a way of embracing, attempting to reintegrate and recompense, a
possible happy ending and conclusion for at least that family, although this happy ending
is, as noted earlier, one denied to Beetlejuice.
19
Although the cast of characters Ed Wood surrounds himself with might be seen
most visibly as freaks, the entire studio system in Hollywood, populated primarily by
overweight sweating men in suits, are also monstrous in their own way. From the cigarsmoking executives hysterically laughing during the screening of Glen or Glenda, or the
regional distributor screaming on his phone, these Hollywood moguls and businessmen
seem no more human than the monsters in Wood’s movies. Their physical distortions are
minor, but these people are still presented as something aberrant or bizarre, like the
characterization of many Hollywood executives who make their livings from art but are
reluctant or fearful of just how it works, and seemingly unappreciative of Wood’s
individuality or creativity.
In Sweeney Todd, on the other hand, the most grotesque characters besides Todd
and Lovett themselves embody the patriarchal normalcy. First, we have Judge Turpin
and his agent, Beadle Bamford. They are agents of the law, and as such, agents of
patriarchy. They are highly defined by external relationships and circumstances, both to
their functions within the justice system, and for their hypocritical relationship within.
For Turpin to his ward (Todd’s daughter) Johanna, there is an improper, borderlineincestuous, attraction that, after she spurns his advances, he leaves her in Bedlam. As for
Bamford, his first major action on screen (besides leering next to Judge Turpin) is
attacking the young sailor Anthony on Turpin’s orders. Both men speak about upholding
the law, but seem incapable of preserving it. Amongst their other acts, Turpin acts
without impunity in his treatment of both Todd’s wife and daughter, and most damning,
is their seeming inability to even notice the implicit murder plot.
20
Both are physically distorted in minor ways, Turpin seems to be almost always
disheveled, the Beadle is rotund with cross-eyes and a crooked tooth, although this
doesn’t compare to the more extreme appearances of Todd and Lovett.
Another example of this is with the rival barber, Pirelli, the first of Sweeney
Todd’s victims. If Turpin and the Beadle are more examples of hypocritical normalcy,
Pirelli is a complete sham. An Englishman who has adopted an elaborate persona as an
elixir-hawking celebrity barber, “Pirelli” is violent, short-tempered, and manipulative, as
illustrated right before his murder trying to blackmail Todd after being humiliated by him
earlier. If Turpin and the Beadle are hypocrites, Pirelli is an example of crime run
amuck, or a blatant criminal who remains unpunished and seems to flaunt his immorality
even as he maintains only the slightest façade of propriety. Similar to Turpin and the
Beadle, he also has some minor physical distortion: his tight bright blue costume (with
long vertical stripes along the side) and curled mustache seem to exaggerate a sense of
thinness. However, like Turpin and the Beadle, Pirelli’s distortion is more spiritual than
physical.
Burton seems inordinately interested in the monstrous, finding the hints of the
grotesque (and by extent the monstrous) in nearly every aspect of his fictive worlds.
What that might mean will be further explored in the idea of the Masochistic-Abject
Space.
Noteworthy, for the link between the grotesque and abjection, Kristeva notes that
“the body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper to be fully
symbolic” (101). While no speaking body is fully symbolic, hence Kristeva’s instance
upon the heterogeneity of language, what makes Burton’s (masculine) bodies monstrous
21
is that they expose the traces of the bodies indebtedness to nature, to the pre-symbolic,
like that proposed by Deleuzean-style masochism.
22
“I, Too, Am Strange and Unusual”
- Lydia Deetz, Beetlejuice
Abjection, as outlined by Julia Kristeva, materializes in the overall thematic
material of Burton’s work. First, in the choices of physical subject matters (the material
abject of difference) as well as in the idea of abject characters (often transgressing
Symbolic law) these elements further reinforce the problematic elements of the narrative,
as well as provoke the kind of powerful responses related to suffering.
The material abject, those things that remind us of the limits of life and the human
body, are present in Burton’s films, things like corpses (animate, in the case of
Beetlejuice, or not, in the case of Ed Wood or Sweeney Todd), blood (especially true for
Sweeney Todd where blood seems to flow in excessive amounts), and unclean foods
(again Todd is an excellent narrative-focused examine, but Beetlejuice is often seen
eating cockroaches). And this abject material would provoke a greater sense of unease
except it is often mediated through symbolic language (as is true of many films, horror
and otherwise, or other artforms that cannot always project the sense of dread, disgust,
and limitation, one can experience at seeing a corpse or similar moments of material
abjection). This is definitely an important part of the focus of Burton’s work, but it is a
symptom of the larger symbolic power play at work here.
In addition to the abject material, the embodiment of the milk skin Kristeva
describes, the , we have more of a moral or character abjection, which connects to her
connection between the abject and Biblical abomination, the abject as a ritualized
distancing and rejection from the pre-symbolic mother towards language and the
23
symbolic order of the father. Burton’s protagonists, in addition to this previous kind of
abjection, also are trying to realign themselves within the symbolic world.
Although primarily an anarchic figure, Beetlejuice is just as bound by rules as
anyone else. As Juno the caseworker notes, he can’t materialize “unless you say his
name three times.” Beetlejuice himself, wanting to exist both in the lands of the dead and
the living, needs to be bound by marriage in order to do so without the use of ritual and
language. As Beetlejuice himself notes, “it’s not my rule, come to think of it, I don’t
have any rules.” Likely unintentional, its here that the crux of the matter is laid, it’s
through a move away from the mother (the abject-masochistic womb-space of the
afterlife) through the symbolic and ritualized activity marriage that Beetlejuice would be
able to mediate and eventually show dominance over the feminine. The only proposed
break from his existence, trapped in a stifling and bureaucratic underworld, and from his
suffering is through this new stasis, however, it isn’t to be, and Beetlejuice’s suffering,
even if made light of, is there.
Ed Wood might not seem as much of a transgressive in terms of defying the
divine law (other than blending the boundary of Self, both with his missing teeth and his
transvestitism). However, it is in the language he speaks, of filmmaking, in particular
science fiction and horror filmmaking, where his abjectness is called out. This is not just
in his desire to direct in drag, but in the material itself, and Bela Lugosi notes the
reasoning behind this is to Wood earlier in the film. “The women prefer the traditional
monsters,” he tells Wood, “the pure horror it both repels and attracts them because in
their collective unconsciousness they have the memory of childbirth. The blood! Blood
is horror.” Although we can always call Lugosi’s veracity into question, for Wood these
24
words seem to ring true. And these traditional monsters, this form of sacrifice that Wood
proceeds to discuss in his films, are itself the kinds of punitive sacrifices towards Order.
Arguably, however, these traits are to be contradicted, however, with his more
positive character traits: his earnestness and his almost unflagging optimism in the face of
rejection and failure. This might be due to the fact that Wood already deals in the realm
of the symbolic, in more than words or brief bursts, in a whole language that he has
difficulty finding the venue to express, but never the words. Although fractured and
disjointed and seeking wholeness, he is closer to that goal than perhaps most other
Burtonian protagonists, which makes the post-script at the end of the film, about Wood’s
real life alcoholism-related death and pre-mortem obscurity all the more tragic. For
Wood, then, has begun the process of sacrifice to forestall taboo, but he seems incapable
of outrunning it, and thus doomed to failure.
Sweeney Todd’s abjection is rooted in very Western (and Judeo-Christian in
particular) dietary values, in particular the kinds of dietary distinctions outlined in
Leviticus. His transgression comes, first, as a murderer, as creating the abject (the
corpse) and processing it for consumption into (assumedly) purer bodies.
One interesting parallel worth discussing is the death of Mrs. Lovett at the end of
the film. After her relationship to Sweeney Todd seems to be cemented with the death of
his wife, Todd tosses her into the oven where she burns alive, screaming as the oven door
closes on her. She’s the only character to be disposed of in such a matter. The corpse is
given special priority, every other character who perishes in the film, including Todd, is
killed when their throat is slit. Although many of those characters end up in the oven as
part of a meat pie, Mrs. Lovett is the only character burnt in the fire. If Kristevan terms,
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looking especially at Biblical Abomination, due to her connection with the most impure
or improper element of the crimes of the film (the cooking of human flesh into pies), she
is the sacrifice to the symbolic order to allow some kind of stasis to return.
At first, this might all seem like a bit of a stretch, given the generally pleasurable
nature of Burton’s films, but how these elements are mediated, however, is where the
more interesting and complicated relationships of narrative and spectator are forged.
Another common trait worth examining here is how language serves as a way of
mitigating or relating with the abject. Beetlejuice is forced to trick people to say his
name three times, Sweeney Todd expresses (fitting within musical genre conventions) his
truest feelings through song, and Ed Wood reveals his own anxieties through the
narrative language of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. In a wider sense, then, genre
itself can serve as the language of taboo forestalling sacrifice for Burton’s films, the
genre “masquerading as” horror to forestall its own sacrifices, to preserve its own taboos,
to laugh at the abject, to preserve it in history, or to capture it through song.
The relation between the masochistic and the abject was touched on most
interesting in Kaja Silverman’s look in Male Subjectivity at the Margins on the subject of
the former. In her examination, looking at the phenomenology of the masochistic
portrayal, she notes the acting out “in an insistent and exaggerated way the basic
conditions of cultural subjectivity, conditions that are normally disavowed.” These are
conditions that are often cemented in abjection: “meaning com[ing] to him from the
Other,” soliciting the gaze, “exhibit[ing] his castration for all to see,” and “revels in the
sacrificial basis of the social contract.” In an exaggerated manner then, the masochist,
according to Silverman, reveals a gaping psychological wound that is often repressed or
26
recompensed in cultural hegemony or, a “negative inimical to the social order”
(Silverman, 206). In Powers of Horror Kristeva notes, “as in true theater, without
makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to
live” (PG #?). The similar function of the corpse to theater, and thus to Burton’s work
(often requiring makeup and masks to enhance the spectacle and resemblance to the
corpse), shows the sacrifice of the abject, and just exactly what has been thrust aside for
life, calling heed to the very same social contract that the masochist cannot seem to stop
calling attention to. And thus, this display of masochistic pleasure plays into the same
phenomena: the masochist refuses to be culturally recompensed from the “damages” of
abjection.
But the greatest connection between abjection and Deleuzean masochism is found
on page 101 of Powers of Horror, in particular discussing the nature of childbirth, talking
about the fantasy of anal birth, a fantasy:
which links him to the ab-ject, to that non-introjected mother who is incorporated
as devouring, and intolerable. The obsession of the leprous and decaying body
would thus be the fantasy of a self-rebirth on the part of a subject who has not
introjected his mother but has incorporated a devouring mother.
Phantasmatically, he is the solitary obverse of a cult of the Great Mother: a
negative and demanding identification with her imaginary power.
This “Great Mother” Kristeva describes here seems only visible in half-forgotten
glimpses for Burton. There are sparse representations of mothers (i.e. women who have
born children) in Burton’s films, the suburbanite Avon Lady of Edward Scissorhands is a
noteworthy exception, as are the disapproving mothers in Mars Attacks and Corpse
27
Bride, but most children in Burton films appear to be motherless. In fact, the anal selfrebirth phantasy seems just as valid a reason as any for their creation, since sex and
procreation, unlike death, is a subject not gleefully breached in Burton’s work. These
non-mother female characters tend to absorb a great deal of, possibly psychologically
transferred, hostility, either characterized as rude or cold and unsympathetic (like Deelia
Deetz in Beetlejuice, or Dolores in Ed Wood), or flat-out killed by the film’s end (Mrs.
Lovett tossed into the oven at the end of Sweeney Todd).
Earlier on Kristeva also notes abjection is often “placed or displaced” by
“laughter” and joissance. Which would fit into the idea of Burton’s films being
pleasurable. Burton often relies on a morbid dark sense of gallow’s humor; darkly comic
elements are often present in his work, with traditionally dark subject matters like murder
and death, disease, drug addiction, being made light of. But although it is thought of as
funny and humorous, this humor is more of an intellectual sign, like Kristeva’s example
of the flatline of an encephalograph to signify death, and not an actual referent of humor.
It links to the actual emotion of humor, but this kind of dark comedy is to cerebral to
provoke real laughter the way more direct comedies might.
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“We Don’t Have A Permit. Run!” (The Masochistic-Abject Space)
- Ed Wood, Ed Wood
Trying to tie Tim Burton’s work to Deleuze’s particular theory of masochism,
linked to a pre-Oedipal “oral mother,” might seem at first to be a difficult prospect.
Mothers are, as a whole, few and far between. The women in Burton’s works tend to be
childless, as though the very thought of making that terrible distinction between woman
and mother (or desire and mother) provokes such crisis that it must immediately be
negated, repressed. But, in terms of psychological repression as much for physical
repression, something cannot be displaced without producing some kind of rupture.
For Burton, then, the desired masochistic mother has been pushed to the side, into
the very spaces of the film itself. The Deleuzean oral mother is thus not so much a
person as a space, something boundless and unrepresentable, and stands not only for the
maternal, but also, as a masochistic nexus, stands in for the paternal Law that must be
repudiated but ultimately is reinforced. These spaces are initial sites of conflicts, like
Sweeney Todd’s London, Beetlejuice’s afterlife, and Ed Wood’s Hollywood, but,
ultimately, each is repudiated for their attempts to transgress normalcy and is inevitably
co-opted or destroyed, even if via postscript.
There is a relationship, then, between abjection and masochism (in the
transgression of Law, abjection in the construction of law (and, in particular, patriarchal
law), masochism in the pleasure we receive for watching those transgressors invariably
being punished). This relationship between the strict regiments set about Kristevan
Abjection, and the pleasurable displeasure of suffering brought about by its transgression,
29
in Deleuzean masochism, also brings about a sort of bizarre marriage between patriarchy
and the devouring feminine.
This marriage, if you will, between the Oral Mother and Patriarchal Symbolic law
might seem at odds, but since the Oral Mother is a pre-Oedipal one and, thus, an
uncastrated one, she can claim the same phallic power than the patriarchal law clings to.
This marriage between the symbolic, physical, and mental, dimensions allows the
psychodrama to play out through allegory, almost like a dream. Appropriate to the
masochistic phantasy, however, this is one that can be endlessly repeatedly, with changes
of scene dressing or details, but remain a similar scenario.
When describing Proust, Kristeva writes, for Proust “that if the object of desire is
real it can only rest upon the abject, which is impossible to fulfill. The object of love
then becomes unmentionable, a double of the subject, similar to it, but improper,
becomes inseparable from an impossible identity. Loving desire is thus felt as an inner
fold within that impossible identity, as an accident of narcissism, ob-ject, painful
alteration…” and similarly how “Sade’s scene integrates: it allows for no other, no
unthinkable, nothing heterogenous.” (Kristeva 94.? – this citation I believe is from page
21) Masochism, on the other hand, calls to existence the existence of the Other; in fact
flaunts our repressed unspoken requirement on the Other. These spaces are needed,
because they are the site of origin for this trauma, the bizarre characters of Burton’s films
cannot make sense out of the context of their own bizarre worlds.
By examining some of the settings of these films, there are some startling
similarities. The first of these being the importance of home, and of traditionally
feminized spaces made simultaneously terrifying or inexorable. Haunted houses,
30
Hollywood sets, and mixtures of mortuary, abattoir, and kitchen each lend their own
touch to this abject space.
This construction makes particular sense when examining both the Deleuzean
masochistic scene and the abject scene because both concern infant development. To the
perspective of an infant the immense body of an adult mother would seem all-enveloping;
it was the initial site of genesis for the self. The child is nursing on the mother,
dependent on her for existence, with perimeters beyond the infant’s ability to trace. We
lack the capacity for speech (in fact, the symbolic processes of language arise later
according to this theory), so the infant is incapable of knowing or understanding the
mother at this point. If the protagonist by extension is that infant, the mother couldn’t
exist in an inter-character relation between two individuals, the mother would have to be
something desired but unknowable and unapproachable, an object. Abject.
In Beetlejuice, barring the beginning and ending of the film, which show people
traveling to or from it, the majority of the action is set in the Maitland’s home or in the
Underworld connected to it. Even if these spaces are vastly disparate (the doorway to
Saturn that exists for the Maitlands should they try to leave, or the town-in-miniature in
the attic that Beetlejuice routinely haunts). For this story, the dominating space is this
haunted house, which, although it is not unbounded and infinite in terms of its space and
its scope, seems to entirely contain the entire narrative universe and the action therein.
Even those parts of the outside world (the nearby town) can be found inside the house,
and ways in and out are made as easily be drawing a chalk outline of a door and knocking
three times. The house, like the Symbolic Order and the repressed Oral Mother, are
things that cannot be escaped even partially without ritual and recompense.
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Hollywood has been the focus of the movie industry’s own self-reflexive
omphaloskepsis on multiple occasions, especially looking at the post-Depression/pretelevision “Golden Age” of the industry. Ed Wood, starting slightly before the release of
Glen or Glenda (Wood, 1953) chronicles the film industry’s underbelly, showing the
typically neglected world of the smaller-scale distributors, the backlot, backstage, or the
secretarial pool, with only fleeting glimpses of the screening rooms and major studios.
This is not the traditional signification of the world of Hollywood, of the world of glitz
and glamour, yet, at the same time, it does not come across as the seedy underbelly of
corruption and decadence that is the typical alternative. The world of Hollywood for Ed
Wood is the Oral Mother, cold and distant and authoritative, one that continually rejects
the protagonist despite his best intentions.
The opening number in Sweeney Todd has its protagonists darkly intone, “there’s
no place like London.” And the dark world of Victorian London does seem to be unique,
as Todd notes. Even though there are many exterior settings, the sky is oppressive and
gray, the buildings at times seem crooked, leering in on its inhabitants (an extension of
Burton’s own influence from Expressionism), and the crowding and congestion of people
and things seem, first and foremost, of things trapped inside. Even in the opening
sequences, of the city skyline during a rainy day, the raindrops begin falling, tinted red
like blood, confusing purity with the impure (and vice versa). One splatters on the
windowpane a dark red. The next shot is inside the center of the action (Todd’s shop),
first framing a Victorian silhouette-painting turning a dark red and seeming to melt into
the wall as drops of water-blood roll down Todd’s chair. There isn’t an open window
visible in the shot and no clue as to how the water got inside, except that there’s some
32
kind of unseen permeability, or the boundary between inside and outside is just as
confused for. As the substance coalesces in the chairs of the gears, it is clearly blood.
The next clips show the (human) meat in the grinder, blood pooling on the floor, after a
shot of the illicit pies baking, the blood falling down the drain and pooling into the
sewers, not clear blue water, but an oily red and black mass that finally pours out a grate
into the ocean.
Although the spaces are, in and of themselves, interesting from an aesthetic
standpoint, what is more interesting is their relationship to these characters. Each is a
product of their place, inexorably tethered to location, be it Beetlejuice to the afterlife, Ed
Wood to Hollywood, or Sweeney Todd to London. And there is a link between these
places and their inhabitants; almost like a womb, a birthing place of the grotesque, and
those things which, as Kristeva said, stand “outside of God or science.”[citation] Those
who have sacrificed to the symbolic order and the paternal law and not physically marked
the same way as those who have yet to pay. Normalcy then, or the appearances of it,
comes as a sort of symbolic castration, a sort of removal of passion or soul, or a
lobotomy.
Similarly, Kristeva notes regarding the abject that, for that which is not fully
separated, becomes “a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered.”[citation]
Although its literal interpretation speaks for itself, the issue of memory is also just as
interesting. For the masochist, constantly reliving, there would be a constant
remembering, an obsession almost, of the site of trauma, of the place where suffering and
pain hold their greatest sway, for Burton, the sites of death and failure. Beetlejuice hangs
around in the Maitland’s model cemetery, the symbolic referent where the dead still exist.
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Sweeney Todd’s home is a literal abattoir, the sole site of the murder and subsequent
preparation of the corpse, although prepared into palatable pies instead of painted corpses
in coffins. Still mediated, but watching the unknowing patrons eat the corpse-pies
provokes a sense of unease, the transgression one that can be felt (literally and
figuratively) in the gut. Ed Wood, although it never is explored in great detail, has some
reasoning behind his compulsion to dress in women’s clothing, a ritual that one can only
assume has some deep psychological roots (even if he finds wearing angora pleasurable
to the levels he seems, it must not be purely for the tactile response or else he would have
stopped his involvement given the increasing social stigma his lifestyle has on his work
and his relationships.)
What is equally telling is these characters’ desire for a reintegration with the
structures of this space. Ed Wood, despite his failures, longs for acceptance (along with
his desire to emulate the critically acclaimed paragon of traditional cinematic artistry).
Sweeney Todd, as soon as he returns to London, feels the “once familiar city shuttered to
[him],” desiring a return to the idyllic past with his wife and child before his conviction
and exile, and can only find succor at Fleet Street, in his old home.
But to what end is this space constructed? Kristeva actually outlines this in her
section “An Exile Who Asks Where.” The abject non-subject, the deject in her terms,
tries to separate and remove himself, who:
therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.
… Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaen, he divides, excludes, and
without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware
34
of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself among them, thus casting within
himself the scalpel that carries out his separations. [citation]
This is not unlike the Burtonian protagonist, who tries to escape his bounds (Beetlejuice
the Underworld, Ed Wood the metaphorical escape of obscurity, and Todd from his past.)
She continues: “instead of sounding himself as to his ‘being,’ he does so
concerning his place: ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’” (Kristeva, 8). For the space
that encloses the deject is excluded is never one, nor homogenous, nor totalizable, but
essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territory, languages, works,
the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines – for they are
constituted of a non-object, the abject – constantly questions his solidity and impel him to
start afresh. … He has a sense of the danger, of the loss of the pseudo-object,”[citation?]
in this case, the Deleuzean devouring pre-symbolic Oral Mother “attracting him
represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself
apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.”[citation?]
For Burton’s protagonist then, the pre-symbolic self is an Exile Who Asks Where,
and the “where” in this space is a barrier, a buffer, from the self against the non-object
unrepresentable devouring Deleuzean Oral Mother, the unrepresentable site of terror.
Like the layers of calcium carbonate encircling a piece of grit in a clam to form a pearl,
the abject-masochistic space is something that has been created, it is not real space in the
sense that it is constructed, rebuilt, a symbolic attempt to physically represent a presymbolic mental space (its grotesqueness could attest to its difference from reality). It is
a site where the abject has not been forgotten only displaced, and even if the protagonist
wants to break free, or acts like they want to, in reality they are sabotaging their own
35
attempts, suffering for their own sake for fear of success. They are constructing the
womb, but it is an abject womb, for the kind of anal birth that Kristeva links to desire to
the pre-symbolic mother (the same mother) a birth they struggle to prolong indefinitely,
creating the kind of suffering of trying to maintain self-stasis in such a manner. The
tension here is internal, it is of the subject who, in true masochistic terms, wants to return
to the realm of pre-symbolic, but has created a grotesque mockery of a half-forgotten
world he longs to return to. But for the character, as for the self-longing for dissolution,
there is no real return, but the promise of that kind of incorporation is equally terrifying,
leading to a buffer between devouring and being devoured.
36
Tim Burton has, at least in part due to the influence of the horror genre on his
work, a masochistic aesthetic. This masochism is also informed by abjection and the
grotesque, and it leads to the creation of a sort of meta-narrative: a protagonist, victim,
hero, and monster all in one, doomed to suffer and failure, unable to recompense his loss
and rejoin the patriarchal and symbolic order. The cruel, devouring Oral Mother is not
physically present but her influence permeates the very space and memory the character
inhabits, the marker of difference that the subject longs to return to but is simultaneously
terrified to rejoin.
Kristeva notes how the writer is “metaphorizing in order to keep from being
frightened to death; instead he comes to life again in signs” (Kristeva 38). And indeed, in
this particular world, the artist, and the filmmaker involved (here a special case, visually
playing in the world of systematized signs in a way similar to the writer), is again one
who is frightened to death only to live again. Through the complex mediation of form, of
the highly ritualized aspects of this struggle, the kind of symbolic sacrifices Kristeva
describes to stave off biblical abomination come into play: by acknowledging the abject,
in the mediated form of this devouring Oral Mother abject-masochistic space, and by
rejecting it, the protagonist has marked himself as not being part of it.
I feel there are definitely other avenues along this research I am interested in
exploring. First, looking at the portrayal of femininity, or lack thereof, in Burton’s films,
and how that might play into this power play, perhaps there are no “female” characters in
the truest sense of the word, or in terms of gendering the viewer-viewed relationship, or
not ones that carry the typical signification of loss or lack? This will definitely need
37
revising after Burton’s 2010 release of Alice in Wonderland, which might prove to either
support or completely subvert what I’ve been discussing. Alternatively, exploring issues
of class and how that may or may not play a factor in the development of these norms and
anxieties may be an interesting avenue of research, especially looking at the vastly
different levels of wealth or class standing of the characters and how important that may
seem to the particular narrative. There’s also the possibly of expanding this work and
seeing where it might fall apart and what alternatives might arise (looking especially
close at Big Fish [2001] and Sleepy Hollow [1997])? Finally, I am very much interested
in exploring the idea of the Masochistic-Abject Space in wider theoretical terms, and to
see if it can be found in other masochistic and/or abject narratives, which will require
further inquiry.
For many of the male characters in Tim Burton’s films, the chiding words of
Vincent’s mother ring true, or at least half-true. These emotionally fractured manchildren, who long for the unfeasible return to simpler pre-symbolic understandings but
simultaneously reluctant to achieve their goal, are not the monsters of their own making,
but, rather are lost between the binaries of childhood and the power of the maternal and
adult patriarchy and unsure which polarity draws them further. It is almost as if there is a
pleasure in suffering, brought about by the creation of rules meant to be broken and by
asking “Where?” instead of “Who?” For the world Burton created for his protagonists is
one of great physical distortion, one that calls to mind the inescapable rules of reality
even as it tries to mitigate them.
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Bibliography
1. Beetlejuice, Dir. Tim Burton, Warner Bros., 1988
2. Clover, Carol, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1992, pp. 4-5, 12, 80, 191, 212
3. Dorrian, Mark, “On the Monstrous and the Grotesque,” Word & Image, Vol. 16, No. 3,
July-September 2000, p310-317
4. Ed Wood, Dir. Tim Burton, Warner Bros., 1994
5. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press,
New York. 1982.
6. Silverman, Kaja, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Routledge: New York. 1992
7. Studlar, Gaylyn, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the
Masochistic Aesthetic, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988
8. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dir. Tim Burton, Warner Bros.,
2007
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