American Beasts
Beasts
The Cinematic Revision of Beauty and the Beast in The
Elephant Man and Edward Scissorhands
Doctoraalscriptie
Universiteit Utrecht
Engelse Taal en Cultuur
1e begeleider: Roselinde Supheert
2e begeleider: Jaap Verheul
Viola Rondeboom
Student nr.: 9801472
Utrecht, augustus 2006
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................4
2. Constructing Otherness: The History and Meanings of “Beauty and the Beast”................8
2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................8
2.2 Otherness ................................................................................................................................8
2.3 “Beauty and the Beast”: Origins ..........................................................................................10
2.3 Madame LePrince de Beaumont ..........................................................................................12
2.4 “Beauty and the Beast”: The Classic Story and Its Interpretations......................................13
2.5 The Beast: Male Threat and “Otherness” Disempowered ...................................................15
2.6 “Beauty and the Beast”: Into the Twentieth Century...........................................................17
3. The Elephant Man: Otherness as Obstacle ............................................................................19
3.1 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................19
3.2 David Lynch .........................................................................................................................20
3.3 The Elephant Man and the Beast: Racial Otherness and Basic Humanity...........................22
3.4 John Merrick and Women: A Motherless Beast ..................................................................24
3.5 Treves and Merrick: A Male Beauty and the Beast .............................................................26
3.6 The Transformation: From Freak to Human? ......................................................................29
3.7 Suicide..................................................................................................................................30
3.8 Context and Reception .........................................................................................................32
3.9 Conclusion............................................................................................................................33
4. Edward Scissorhands: Handy Otherness................................................................................35
4.1 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................35
4.2 Tim Burton ...........................................................................................................................36
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4.3 Edward Scissorhands and the Beast: Racial Otherness, Individuality and Cultural
Heterogeneity .............................................................................................................................38
4.4 Edward and Women: Beauties and the Beast.......................................................................41
4.5 The Transformation: From Individual to Freak ...................................................................43
4.6 Isolation ................................................................................................................................45
4.7 Context and Reception .........................................................................................................47
4.8 Conclusion............................................................................................................................49
5. Comparison and Conclusion ...................................................................................................50
5.1 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................51
5.2 The Directors and Their View of Otherness ........................................................................51
5.3 Merrick and Edward: Freakish Beasts as Racial Others ......................................................52
5.4 Society Beauties and Their “Acceptance” ...........................................................................52
5.5 The Transformations ............................................................................................................53
5.6 Unhappily Ever After?: Suicide and Isolation .....................................................................54
5.7 Conclusion: From Founding Myth of Sexual Difference to Racial Allegory ......................55
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................56
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1. Introduction
The cinema has always been closely associated with fantasy, magic and enchantment. As a new
form of storytelling, this medium can more specifically be linked to that age-old tradition of
storytelling, represented by the fairy tale. Though many film scholars have theorized about “the
question of fantasy and its relationship to cinema” (Petrie 1), it is the literary scholar and novelist
Marina Warner who identified a close connection between the fairy tale and film. This
relationship was the research subject of her publication Cinema and the Realms of Enchantment.
In this work, she explains:
Following in the footsteps of the literary form, film from the very beginning explored the
territory of fear, showing heroes and heroines dealing with the product of their darkest
imaginings. . . . In these two respects – the interest in the imagination and the
confrontation of private but universal terrors – film as a genre bears a close affinity with
the most popular branch of literary romance, [the fairy tale]. (13)
An important “private but universal terror” dealt with in both fairy tale and film is the fear
of the unknown, which can be represented by a figure that is termed “the Other.” Indeed, in her
course description of “Representations of Otherness in Twentieth-Century American Culture,”
Renée Hoogland argues that “[a] primary function of cultural production . . . is to provide the
frameworks for individuals to identify and give meanings to themselves as distinct from others.”1
However, she continues, “[s]uch distinctions are never quite ‘innocent’: categories of identity
always carry values and meanings that serve to structure social reality.” Because Others more
often than not are perceived as a threat to the dominant sociocultural group or Self, they are
usually put in underprivileged positions and are often represented in popular culture in ways that
“help to maintain [these] unequal power relations” (Hoogland, par. 3).
One of the best known fairy tales in the world dealing with Otherness, and a “dominant
myth of our times” (Griswold 18), is the French, eighteenth century tale of “Beauty and the
1
“Representations of Otherness in Twentieth-Century American Culture” is an American Studies master course
taught at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. For Hoogland’s course description, see the online studiegids at
http://www.studiegids.science.ru.nl/2005/arts/prospectus/engels/course/3581/.
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Beast.”2 Interestingly, this classic children’s story ends with acceptance of the – at first beastly
and horrifying – Other: Beauty (the Self) learns to love the Beast (the Other) and marries him.
What is more, her love transforms him and the ugly Beast becomes beautiful. In his recent study
The Meanings of “Beauty & the Beast,” Jerry Griswold explains how this seemingly simple story
about looks versus looking has the capacity to remain popular, as he sums up and analyzes many
modern interpretations. Functioning as a perfect platform to discuss various forms of Otherness
and challenge stereotypical (negative) representations, it has been told and retold numerous times
and has managed to adopt multiple meanings. Griswold not only discusses different literary
versions, but also cinematic adaptations. However, while touching upon many modern cinematic
and televised interpretations, he only provides an in-depth examination of the two most famous
and literal cinematic translations of this classic fairy tale, namely Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la
Bête and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
Thinking of fairy tales in general and the outsider tale of “Beauty and the Beast” in
specific, two of my favorite film directors come to mind. Both David Lynch and Tim Burton are
known for their inventive power to create dark and unsettling fairy tale-like worlds about deeply
disturbed protagonists. Moreover, though admired by critics and public alike, they themselves
remain outsiders in the film industry. It is interesting to note, then, that both Lynch and Burton
have created a highly successful film dealing with the theme of an animalist or otherwise
inhuman male “Other” at odds with society and himself. Lynch directed the Oscar-nominated The
Elephant Man (1980) centering on a seriously deformed freak in Victorian England who wants to
be a normal human being. Ten years later, Burton directed his acclaimed masterpiece Edward
Scissorhands (1990). Burton’s modern-gothic version of “Beauty and the Beast” stars Johnny
Depp as a “monstrously scarred and lovelorn boy” (Griswold 18) whose scissors for hands
impede his coming to terms with himself and the world around him.
In this thesis I shall explore the relationship between these two popular American films
and their literary influence, the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast.” My research will focus on the
modern American interpretations of the classic fairy tale’s essential theme: learning to accept the
Other. How do the Elephant Man and Edward Scissorhands relate to the Beast’s character? Who
are the “Beauties” in the films, and why do they love or loathe their Beasts? How, if at all, do the
2
Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont, “Beauty and the Beast,” trans. Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition:
From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001)
805-815
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films depict the fairy tale’s final harmonizing event of the Beast’s transformation to prince? In
other words, my central question will be how these stories construct Otherness and deal with it.
Moreover, concerning the cultural politics mentioned by Hoogland, are they really as innocent as
they seem in trying to take a positive stance towards Otherness? Also, as Griswold notes that
“Beauty and the Beast” incarnations can take on many different meanings regarding Otherness
depending upon changing social norms, it will be interesting to see whether the American films
differ much from their French source or from each other, and why. Burton, whose film was
produced ten years later than Lynch’s, indeed seems to handle the “Beauty and the Beast” story
very differently than Lynch, who seems to stay closer to the original meaning in Beaumont’s
fairy tale.
While several film scholars and critics have mentioned the “Beauty and the Beast” theme
in The Elephant Man and Edward Scissorhands, these films have never been extensively
analyzed along the lines of the classic fairy tale and its representation of Otherness, let alone be
compared and contrasted with each other. This thesis would make an interesting contribution to
current cultural and American studies debates regarding the representation of social hierarchies
and multiculturalism in American popular culture.3 The Elephant Man and Edward Scissorhands
perfectly illustrate the connection observed by Marina Warner between fairy tale and film,
operating as cinematic fairy tales in their portrayal of heroes who struggle with their deepest fears
and desires. An intriguing aspect of films and fairy tales alike is that they often function as
mirrors on society, and it is for instance commonly understood that many “fairy tales contain
some instruction, some mechanism for helping us to understand and cope with the problems of
everyday life” (Petrie 1). These cinematic fairy tales can thus be viewed as a commentary on
American culture and its outlook(s) on Otherness, individualism versus collectivism, and
exclusiveness versus conformity.
Since “Beauty and the Beast” serves as a touchstone for comparing two modern films in
their treatment of Otherness, the next chapter will summarize and examine Beaumont’s story as
well as its origins and development. For this, I will use critical interpretations by literary scholars
such as Jerry Griswold, Marina Warner and Betsy Hearne, as well as recent publications in the
field of culture studies and philosophy to explain the complex sociocultural concept of Otherness.
3
For comprehensive studies and overviews of social representations in film, see for instance Davies and Smith,
Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film and Benshoff and Griffin, America on Film:
Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies.
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Key issues in the fairy tale which will be examined more closely are the Beast’s visual
representation and social characterization, his relation to Beauty and society, and how the
“problem” of Otherness is “solved” in the story’s ending.
In chapter three, I will discuss The Elephant Man and its notions of Otherness in light of
my analysis of Beaumont’s fairy tale. David Lynch himself, who felt very much personally
involved with his film, will also come up for discussion. Chapter four will provide an analysis of
Edward Scissorhands, which will be examined along the same lines as The Elephant Man.
Finally, I will compare and contrast the stories on the basis of what has been discussed in the
previous chapters.
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2. Constructing Otherness: The History and Meanings of “Beauty and the
Beast”
2.1 Introduction
As the goal of this thesis is to compare and contrast two modern-day American films about a
monstrous outsider figure with the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” this chapter will provide a
survey of the history and meanings of the “original” fairy tale in light of the sociocultural concept
of Otherness. Since the literary version resembling the story of “Beauty and the Beast” most as it
is known today is Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s, written in 1757, specific notice will be
given to this French source and its author. Besides a summary and examination of Beaumont’s
“Beauty and the Beast,” a general outline will also be provided of the tale’s precursors and
evolution into the twentieth century. Moreover, particular attention will be paid to the character
of the Beast, the story’s mysterious and feared male Other. Although the classic fairy tale
provides a female perspective, his character functions as the dominant force of the story.
2.2 Otherness
Although fairy tales are often dismissed as escapist entertainment, many reflect serious social
concerns and fears and try to provide tools to deal with them (Zipes 4). One of the most common
human fears is probably that of the unknown and the strange, symbolically represented by “the
Other.” Although this fear is universal, the term “Otherness” typically “entails a western dualistic
structure of thought” (Plate 11) and was initially a Western philosophical and sociological
concept that gained more and more notice in the twentieth century (Irigaray 7).
In his cross-disciplinary textbook Critical and Cultural Theory, Dani Cavallaro offers a
comprehensive analysis of Otherness, which is by now also a popular concept within literary and
cultural studies. Cavallaro explains how the Other or object functions as a referential identity,
against which the subject or Self can identify him or herself (121). By identifying oneself as
distinct from Others, one thus attributes characteristics to oneself that the Other does not possess:
if the subject or Self is Western, for instance, the Other is non-Western. More often than not,
however, imagining the Other involves a power struggle, since, as Giles and Middleton put it,
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“[i]dentity and difference are about inclusion and exclusion” (34). In ascribing characteristics to
oneself, the Other is often denied those characteristics or even characterized as the opposite (eg.
Western/non-Western) and thus can be excluded from certain privileges that the Self holds. This
exclusion entails a process called “Othering,” which “refers to the way a dominant culture
ascribes an undesirable trait … onto one specific group of people” (Benshoff and Griffin 56).
Since race, class, gender and sexuality are the four most common Western identity categories
(Plate 4), Othered people often are outsiders and marginalized people that deviate from the norm
in these terms (Cavallaro 122), and as such are seen as inferior. Thus, since the Western
privileged and dominant “Self” is white, male, heterosexual and middle-class, underprivileged
Others are for instance typically colored, female, gay or poor (Plate 4). Benshoff and Griffin
further remark how a marginalized group or subculture can leave its imprint on mainstream
culture, however, this usually entails hegemonic processes called “commodification” or
“incorporation;” i.e. “turning something into a product for sale” and including subcultural aspects
only “to the extent that a subculture’s concerns can be adapted to the needs of the dominant
ruling interests” (14). In his study on the adaptation of rebellious folklore by mass media, Jack
Zipes has coined the term “instrumentalization” to describe this process of incorporation. His
term has sharper and more politically charged connotations, as Zipes explicitly views this
adaptation as abusive.
In line with the process of Othering, Others feared by mainstream society have often in
literature been portrayed as monsters or beasts.4 As evil is commonly associated with ugliness,
and goodness with beauty, the worst form of Otherness must be monstrous. Interestingly, the
best-known fairy tale about a terrifying and beastly Other interchanges these categories: the Beast
in “Beauty and the Beast” turns out to be beautiful. Moreover, in light of the Western terms of
subordination mentioned above, it is remarkable that the Beast is neither colored, nor gay, nor
poor, nor female. Instead, and for many readers quite disappointingly, he turns out to be a white,
wealthy, heterosexual prince. He seems to be one of “us.” His otherness then seems to lie only in
his visual appearance, just as the title simply seems to refer to aesthetics rather than ethics. This
begs the question, how is “Beauty and the Beast” about Otherness?
4
For an interesting and rich analysis of the creation and use of monsters (and other fantastic figures of Otherness) in
Western literary history see Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness.
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2.3 “Beauty and the Beast”: Origins
The version of “Beauty and the Beast” that most people know today is Disney’s animation film
by the same name, released in 1991. Although Disney seems to have become the cultural
authority on fairy tales for a widening global audience, which is regretted by many critics, its
commercial success with Beauty and the Beast is based on a long and rich tradition of so-called
“animal bridegroom tales.” These tales, that tell of beautiful women who must learn to love (or
leave) their beastly spouses, can be traced back in written form to the time of Christ,5 but,
according to Griswold, “were, no doubt, told by storytellers for centuries before they were ever
written down” (67). Animal bridegroom tales were mostly told from a female perspective and
dealt with psychological and sexual maturation, the problems of arranged marriages and the fear
of exogamy. In her extensive study of fairy tales and their tellers, From the Beast to the Blonde,
Marina Warner explains how “[t]he beast stood for the crucial choice in a growing woman’s life:
to leave family (as the word implies, the familiar) for the unknown and unfamiliar” (276).
Depending upon time and geography, the stories either ended with the acceptance of this male
Other, or its annihilation.
Recorded a century after the Indian Panchatantra tale “The Woman Who Married a
Snake” was Apuleius’ myth of “Cupid and Psyche.” Most scholars recognize this second-century
Latin fairy tale in Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass as the earliest and most important literary
precursor of “Beauty and the Beast” in Western literature.6 This, as Warner puts it, “founding
myth of sexual difference” (From the Beast to the Blonde 274) tells of a romance between a
mortal woman named Psyche and the mysterious and feared Eros/Cupid, the god of love and son
of Venus. Psyche is forbidden to look at her lover and has to make love to him in the dark.
Echoing Eve’s curiosity, she steals a peak at him afterwards, while he is asleep. He turns out to
be not at all frightening, but the most beautiful and sweetest creature she has ever seen. Her
disobedience, however, causes him to vanish. The rest of the story then deals with Psyche’s
journey and ordeals to win back the lover she wrongfully mistrusted. From the late Middle Ages
onwards, “Cupid and Psyche” became widely distributed in Europe and was “[s]ubsequently
translated out of Latin for larger reading publics with less education” (Bottigheimer 45) .
5
Around this time, the Panchatantra, a classical Indian text, was written down and included the tale “The Woman
Who Married a Snake.”
6
For a discussion on the oral and literary precursors of “Beauty and the Beast” see Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale
Tradition 787-789, Bottigheimer 44-46, Griswold 67-71 and Hearne 8-32.
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Jerry Griswold provides a clear summary of the further evolution of Western animal
bridegroom tales derived from Apuleius’story and oral folklore, moving from Italy in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the French literary salon in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s amusing story of “Re Porco” (“Pig King”)
in Le Piacevoli Notti (“The Pleasant Nights,” 1550) deals with a swinish husband who loves to
roll in the dirt before going to bed with his wife. After having murdered his first two disgusted
wives, he only changes into a prince when his third wife accepts his gory habits.
Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1634-36) contains three stories resembling the plot of
“Cupid and Psyche”: “The Serpent,” “The Padlock” and “Pinto Smalto.” In these stories, wives
must go in search of their lost husbands after having wrongfully perceived them as monsters.
Over sixty years later, Madame d’Aulnoy in France presents a number of animal groom tales in
Les Contes des Fées (“Fairy Stories,” 1697-98), among which the story “Le Mouton” (“The
Ram”) resembles “Beauty and the Beast” most closely, safe for the tragic ending in which the
ram’s beloved returns too late to save him from death of a broken heart (Griswold 68). Another
French writer of fairy tales for aristocrats and intellectuals, Charles Perrault, published Histoires
ou Contes du Temps Passé (“Histories or Stories from Times Past,” 1697), which includes a story
about a beautiful, stupid girl who marries an ugly, smart prince, on condition that she will be
given intelligence after one year. When she receives intelligence, her husband suddenly appears
beautiful.
The first story entitled “La Belle et la Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”) appeared in 1740 in
La Jeune Amériquaine et les contes marins, a novel by Madame Gabrielle de Villeneuve.
Although a highly complicated story with numerous characters and intricate side plots, it mainly
deals with a cursed prince who will only transform back after his wedding night. Beauty, just a
merchant’s daughter, saves him by marrying him and is praised for her virtue, which is deemed
worthier than social status (although she is ultimately revealed to be a princess). According to
Zipes, Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête” “became the classic model for most of the Beauty and
the Beast versions that followed in the eighteenth century” (The Great Fairy Tale Tradition 788).
Most importantly, it became the literary work that inspired Madame Leprince de Beaumont to
write her own, now canonical, version also entitled “Beauty and the Beast.”
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2.3 Madame LePrince de Beaumont
Unlike many other fairy tales, “Beauty and the Beast” is not an age-old folkloric story eventually
written down, but a literary work created by two French writers of the eighteenth century,
Villeneuve and Beaumont, though based on folk tale elements (Windling) and earlier literary
versions about supernatural or enchanted brides or grooms. Its most famous author was JeanneMarie LePrince de Beaumont (1711-1780). Her eighteenth-century version based on the previous
French version by Madame Gabrielle de Villeneuve was shorter, simplified and highly didactic in
comparison with Villeneuve’s. In her article “Beauty and the Beast,” Terri Windling argues that
the most important change De Beaumont made in relation to De Villeneuve’s “original” was
“alter[ing] the tone of the story from the symbolic to the psychological, making the power of
perception (rather than obedience to good advice) the story’s theme. . . . Beauty’s task is . . . to
look where others would not, and to perceive the man within the beast” (pars. 2, 6). Other literary
versions followed, but Beaumont’s eighteenth century tale has achieved the most definitive
status.
In light of Beaumont’s revisionism, it is important to mention some biographical details,
mainly concerning her first marriage and professional career. Born in Rouen, France, she enjoyed
an outstanding education and therefore, according to Warner, “believed strongly in young
women’s capacities to think and act” (“Beauty and the Beasts” 8). She married a Monsieur de
Beaumont, a minor aristocrat, in 1743. As was usual in her time, their marriage was an arranged
one, and a failed one at that. Unhappily married, she divorced him after two years. In 1746
Beaumont traveled to England to work there as a governess for fourteen years. During this period
she established herself as a writer of books for children and adolescents. Beaumont first wrote
Magasin des enfans (1756), which she then also translated into English in 1759 as The Young
Misses Magazine. The Young Misses Magazine presents dialogues between a governess, Mrs.
Affable, and her six girl pupils. According to the title page, it aims to blend “the Useful” with
“the Agreeable,” “the Whole being interspersed with proper Reflections and Moral Tales”
(Griswold 50). One of these “Moral Tales” is the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast.”
Beaumont’s personal experience with marriage and her employment as a governess echo
throughout “Beauty and the Beast.” Jerry Griswold is right to stress that “Beaumont lived in
times when old ideas about arranged marriages were being challenged by new notions of
romantic love” (47). Regarding this debate, he argues that Beaumont takes a middle position in
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“Beauty and the Beast.” She clearly dismisses the idea of an arranged marriage by emphasizing
Beauty’s freedom of choice. However, she also makes it clear that Beauty does not marry the
Beast out of wild passion or infatuation, but out of gratitude and a growing attachment to him.
Beaumont thus promotes neither a practical, nor a very romantic marriage. Instead, she rationally
advises women to seek a kind and loyal husband. Amiability is what is most important, not
charm, wit, or good looks. The fact that Beaumont expressed this moral lesson (among others) in
“Beauty and the Beast,” also has to do with her profession. Both the author and the narrator, Mrs.
Affable, are governesses. Thus, their didactic intent becomes very clear, as is their audience:
young women.
2.4 “Beauty and the Beast”: The Classic Story and Its Interpretations
The first half of the story of “Beauty and the Beast” tells of a rich bourgeois family, consisting of
a merchant father, three sons and three daughters. The youngest daughter, called Beauty for
obvious reasons, reads a great deal, is humble, hardworking, patient; all in all highly virtuous.
She shows no interest in marriage and prefers to stay home with her father. Her elder sisters,
however, are arrogant, jealous, idle, and only aspire to marry into aristocracy. When the merchant
suddenly loses his fortune, the family is forced to move to a farm in the country. Beauty’s sisters,
now rejected by their aristocratic suitors, refuse to help their father and only lament their new
poverty, while Beauty and her brothers assist their father in farm labor uncomplainingly. One
day, the merchant receives the fortunate news of lost merchandise having finally arrived in town.
Excitedly, the elder daughters demand rich gifts, but Beauty requests only a rose. The merchant’s
journey to town, however, proves unrewarding with another stroke of bad luck, and on top of it
all, he gets lost in a forest on his way back home. He then stumbles upon a lit, but seemingly
deserted palace. Inside, the merchant finds a freshly cooked supper, enjoys a good night’s sleep,
to find a small breakfast set out for him the next morning. Upon leaving and thanking out loud
the magic castle’s possible fairy owner, he plucks a garden rose for Beauty. Suddenly, a horrible
beast appears, furious with this theft and accusing the merchant of ingratitude towards his
hospitality. Threatening to take his life, the Beast sets the merchant free on condition he sends
back one of his daughters. In a surprising stroke of generosity, the Beast then allows him to fill an
empty chest with any valuables he fancies to bring home with him. At home, his two elder
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daughters only wail and blame Beauty. While the chest with gold enables them to marry, Beauty
is happy to save her father by sacrificing herself.
The second half details Beauty’s stay at the Beast’s castle. Instead of being eaten or
otherwise brutally murdered, she is welcomed as mistress of the palace, the Beast showing her
nothing but kindness and generosity. Although Beauty grows very fond of him, she keeps
rejecting his nightly marriage proposals. The Beast, insecure and well aware of his horrid looks
and lack of intelligence, becomes content with her mere promise never to leave him. When
Beauty observes her distressed father at home through a magic mirror, she wishes to visit him
one last time. She promises to return in a week, but as her malicious sisters trick her into
overstaying the visit, the Beast almost dies from grief and disappointment. When Beauty realizes
her mistake, as well as the fact that she cannot live without him, she returns just in time to accept
his proposal and save his life. The Beast suddenly transforms into a handsome prince, explaining
his beastliness had been the work of an evil fairy. Disenchantment was not possible lest a
beautiful girl would consent to marriage. Beauty and the Beast, and her entire family (transported
to the castle by a good fairy) live happily ever after, except for her evil sisters, who are turned
into statues.
“Beauty and the Beast” is what Marina Warner calls a “classic fairy tale of
transformation” (From the Beast to the Blonde 275), and has been interpreted from various
angles, mainly psychological, socio-historical and feminist. Child psychologists like Bruno
Bettelheim employ Freudian and Jungian analyses to point out Beauty’s oedipal conflict in her
overattachment to her father and initial refusal to marry.7 Bettelheim posits the interesting notion
that Beauty and the Beast symbolize two aspects of man, the intellectual and sexual (animal),
which “in the process of maturation … must become unified” (308). Marxists, in turn, propose
the class conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy to be the story’s pivotal underlying theme,
since Beaumont explicitly describes the characters’ social status. Jack Zipes, for instance, points
out that the Beast, obviously of noble descent, threatening the merchant father “was a warning to
all those bourgeois upstarts who forgot their place in society and could not control their
ambition” (Breaking the Magic Spell 11). Finally, feminists have either attacked or appreciated
the story, which has to do with Beauty’s ambivalent portrayal. On the one hand, she is presented
as industrious, dutiful and self-sacrificing; on the other, Beaumont in the second half of the story
7
For an interesting Freudian analysis of “Beauty and the Beast” see Bettelheim 303-309.
14
(during Beauty’s stay at the castle) stresses Beauty’s free will and autonomy. A rarity in fairy tale
romances, Beauty receives all the time she needs to get to know her prince and fall in love, and
their union all depends on her approval.
Diverging and specific as these readings may be, they can all be linked in a generic
reading of the fairy tale as a story about Otherness. From a beautiful, bourgeois, intellectual,
virginal female’s point of view, the threatening Other can be an ugly, aristocratic, simpleminded
and sexual/animal male. However, to focus on interpretations of class conflict and sexual
maturation misses the point of Beaumont’s fairy tale. Since the story “assumes a female audience
. . . who fully expect to be given away to men who might well strike them as monsters” (“Beauty
and the Beasts” 8), and the story’s objective is to present an eventually acceptable marriage to
both partners, Beaumont is primarily concerned with the dilemma of arranged marriages. Taking
into consideration her own unhappy experience with an arranged marriage, it is easy to discover
in the story’s shifting between male and female power Beaumont’s intention to resolve a highly
topical and pressing gender conflict. To Beauty, the Beast does not represent a threat that has to
do with class or sexuality, but he confronts her with her powerlessness in being given away rather
randomly. From a subservient female point of view, the Beast’s Otherness therefore lies chiefly
in his powerful masculinity.
2.5 The Beast: Male Threat and “Otherness” Disempowered
In terms of marginality and power, a woman was a powerless and subjugated Other. Whereas in
previous animal bridegroom tales women were simply “taught to know the worst so that they can
perhaps deal with it when it happens” (“Beauty and the Beasts” 8), as the tales’ female
protagonists had to win back their mistrusted spouses or simply endure their husbands’ primitive
habits, Beaumont’s story slightly but significantly shifts this gendered power balance. Reflecting
the gradual dismissal of arranged marriages at that time in favor of romantic ones, Beauty
eventually has her own say in marriage. As Hearne argues, “Beauty’s independence owes … to
the glimmering developments of individual and female freedoms” (16). Although she is in a way
“given away” by her father, an event which was still the prospective of most of Beaumont’s
young female readers, Beauty significantly does have the power to refuse the Beast’s proposals
and even to leave him, just as Beaumont divorced her aristocratic husband. As Beauty regains
control in the castle, the Beast conspicuously hands over his power to forge a marriage to her.
15
Since Beauty now has more power to make up her own mind, and the Beast’s status and
wealth no longer alone secure a marriage, Beaumont’s Beast has to win Beauty’s heart instead of
the other way around. The story’s earlier noted psychological privileging of perception over
obedience interestingly adds to its renegotiation of power. Because the Beast will not transform
until Beauty recognizes his qualifications as a husband, his character now gains much more
significance in the story. As opposed to Eros just sitting back and “waiting for his bride to prove
herself and earn him” (From the Beast to the Blonde 274), the Beast has to prove himself a
worthy husband, his own character and behavior becoming pivotal for the story’s solution.
The Beast’s physical or “racial” Otherness is not attractive but repulsive, and forms an
obstacle in showing his good nature and worthiness as a partner. Interestingly, this monstrous,
powerful male turns out to be quite insecure and well aware of his horrid looks, as he professes to
Beauty in agony: “I know quite well that I’m just a beast” (811). Beauty herself expresses the
central paradox of this story when she confesses to the Beast she finds him very ugly, but
believes that he is very good. His racial otherness is not authentic, though, but the result from a
curse, perhaps the curse of arranged marriages, as his beastliness can be seen to symbolize his
difference from Beauty in terms of gender and power. A different part of the Beast’s Otherness,
however, lies in his character, since, although his character is still rather flat, it mainly serves as a
foil for the false culture this pedagogical tale wants to preach against. Thus, when Beauty tells
him, “There are many men more monstrous than you” (811), she recognizes that the Beast is
different from the other, haughty aristocrats that are after her sisters’ dowries. Instead, the Beast
is genuinely kind and eschews empty flattery and hypocrisy. Since Beaumont deemed amiability
to be most important in a successful marriage, she thus merely humanizes her Beast, portraying
him as a kind and sweet, but still rather flat character. Finally, Beauty’s recognition of his inner
beauty solves the problem of his (inauthentic) “racial” otherness, and thus of their “arranged
marriage,” when her love transforms him back into a handsome man. Interestingly, the Beast also
regains his intelligence as soon as Beauty accepts him (both his ugly looks and dim wit are
revealed to be the result from a curse). This shows a striking feminist progression compared to
Perrault’s bridegroom tale noted earlier, in which it was the dim-witted woman who was
rewarded intelligence for accepting the Beast.
In Breaking the Magic Spell, Zipes has argued that “Folk and fairy tales have always
spread word through their fantastic images about the feasibility of utopian alternatives” (3).
16
Indeed, regarding the sensitive issue of arranged marriages at that time, Beaumont’s canonical
version cautiously renegotiates the conventional balance of power between the sexes and directs
at more gender equality. The Beast as male Other has lost not all, but a significant part of his
power due to the waning popularity of arranged marriages, and in this way, Beaumont’s tale “is
not a story of feminine submissiveness but of feminine empowerment” (Griswold 65). In her
version, the Beast as woman’s allotted partner has in this way become slightly more Othered.
That is, he is seen in an unflattering light until he gives up his power to Beauty. Beaumont’s
Beast as male Other is not put into a completely subjugated but significantly less powerful
position.
2.6 “Beauty and the Beast”: Into the Twentieth Century
Jerry Griswold and Betsy Hearne, the only two scholars who have both written monographs
exclusively devoted to the fairy tale “Beauty and Beast,” in different ways show the story’s
powerful potential and influence to this day and age. While Hearne sheds a light on the “art and
artifice” of the tale and its numerous adaptations, to arrive at a conclusion pinpointing the story’s
fundamental and surviving elements, Griswold works out their multiple meanings and
interpretations. In her quest to find constants, Hearne focuses on, more or less literal, literary
adaptations, while Griswold also takes into account other genres like drama and film. Moreover,
looking at the story in a broader context, he identifies countless not so literal, but thematic
incarnations of “Beauty and the Beast” in modern popular culture (18-26). The two studies prove
rather compatible with each other. Hearne’s “nucleus of elements that has survived cultural,
historical, economic, and aesthetic change” (6) is mostly symbolical in nature, which precisely
allows for the multiple “meanings that can be discovered in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ [and] … have
been imposed upon ‘Beauty and the Beast’” (Griswold 11). Many of the surviving elements that
Hearne identifies form opposite pairs. Of course most important are the characters and
characterization of Beauty and the Beast, again opposites, “who have a capacity for both
symbolism and development” (Hearne 131). This dualistic language and developmental potential
serve exactly what Griswold argues to be the fundamental theme of, and “reason for our era’s
fascination with [the story],” as he proclaims, “‘Beauty and the Beast’ is about Otherness, and the
story permits an investigation of our own reactions to Otherness in all its various forms” (24).
17
As a platform to explore Otherness, the “Beauty and the Beast” stories of the twentieth
century have, as Hearne observes, become “multi-traditional” (87). Although Beauty, not the
Beast, is society’s actual marginal Other, modern revisions interestingly have focused on the
Beast as the struggling and subordinated Other. Thus, modern literary, theatrical and cinematic
revisions have used its themes and symbols to investigate, for instance, not only femininity and
masculinity, but also racism, sexism and homosexuality. This “development from oedipal triangle
to the struggle of the individual” (Hearne 87) seems to be steered towards by Beaumont’s minor
but nevertheless important first disempowering rendition and Othering of the Beast, and the
added psychological challenge of looks versus looking. Not the good girl Beauty, but the
mysterious, agonizing Beast has ensured this classic fairy tale’s compatibility with modern
popular culture.
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3. The Elephant Man: Otherness as Obstacle
3.1 Introduction
David Lynch’s The Elephant Man is both a disturbing and touching portrayal of a monstrously
deformed freak struggling with his place in Western civilization. Although widely appreciated as
“a truly moving story about inner beauty and familial love” (Caldwell, par. 5), this somewhat
sentimental rendition of a freak’s humanity is only a secondary part of the film, as Lynch’s main
interest regards the grimmer story of society’s treatment of the freak, in which he masterfully
“exposes undercurrents of metaphysical anguish and absurdist fear” (Levy 68). Although many
critics have vaguely touched upon its “Beauty and the Beast”-theme and Lynch himself has
explicitly stated viewing films as fairy tales or dreams (Rolling Stone), The Elephant Man has
never been extensively analyzed along the lines of this major influence, the archetypal fairy tale
of “Beauty and the Beast” and its exploration of Otherness. Though dissimilar in plot, The
Elephant Man uses and revises many thematic elements of Beaumont’s fairy tale. Since the story
also “closely coincided with many of Lynch’s own obsessions” (Andrew 48), an account of his
life and career contributes to a deeper understanding of the film and its vision of otherness.
The Elephant Man depicts the real life of John Merrick (1862-1890), a young man in
Victorian England afflicted by the appallingly deforming disease neurofibromatosis.8 Set in
1880s London, the film narrative opens with a circus freak show, in which a mysterious figure
(John Hurt) is exhibited as “the terrible elephant man” by its sadistic owner Bytes. Dr Frederick
Treves (Anthony Hopkins), a young surgeon and humanitarian, comes across this sideshow and
is so disturbed and intrigued by the poor creature’s affliction that he persuades Bytes to bring him
to the hospital for medical examination. After an impressive presentation before his colleagues,
Treves sends the dumb Merrick back to his owner. However, when he learns of Bytes’ abusive
behavior, he tries to admit Merrick in the London Hospital indefinitely, though its policy
excludes incurable idiots. Treves then discovers that Merrick is no imbecile, but a well-read and
intelligent human being worthy of friendship and respect. News of this charming and civilized
young man trapped in a monstrous body spreads rapidly through London society, and attracts the
8
The story is based on an account of Merrick’s life described in The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923)
by Sir Frederick Treves, Merrick’s doctor, and in part on the book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity
(1972) by anthropologist Ashley Montagu.
19
attention of a kind and famous actress, Mrs. Kendal. She pays Merrick a visit and others soon
follow her example. By day, when he is not working on a cardboard model of St. Phillips
Cathedral, Merrick enjoys the better companionship of so-called charitable visitors. By night,
however, he is at the mercy of the hospital’s night porter, who plans to make a profit exhibiting
him after hours to a sleazy clientele. Though his stay at the hospital is eventually secured with
royal support, Merrick is still not safe. One night, Bytes is among the porter’s guests, who then
kidnaps his “treasure” and flees to Belgium. Merrick escapes with the help of other circus freaks,
but upon arrival in England gets cornered by a bewildered mob at the train station. He utters a
heartrending defense, collapses from illness and is returned to the London Hospital by the police.
Knowing that Merrick, although having recovered, is dying, Dr Treves and Mrs. Kendal surprise
him with an evening out to the theatre. At the end of a magical performance, Mrs. Kendal
dedicates the evening to him and Merrick receives a standing ovation. At home, Merrick
expresses his gratitude to Treves, admires his finished model cathedral and finally lays himself
down to sleep like a ‘normal’ person, thus committing suicide and dying in his sleep.9
3.2 David Lynch
David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, on 20 January 1946. His father was a
research scientist for the Government’s Department of Agriculture and his work often involved
transfers, obliging the Lynch family to move regularly. Thus, Lynch grew up in various small
towns in Idaho, Washington State, North Carolina, and again Idaho, before settling in Alexandria,
Virginia, in 1960, where he went to high school. His family’s nomadic lifestyle during his
childhood may have contributed much to Lynch’s cinema, as his protagonists often function as
outsiders and the “quintessential Lynchian alter egos [are] innocents (or children) struggling to
comprehend their immediate environs and what is happening to them” (Rodley 1). Despite his
perpetual outsider status, however, Lynch had a very happy childhood which he consistently
describes in terms of an American 1950’s magazine advertisement: “elegant homes, tree-lined
streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green
grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be” (Lynch on Lynch 10).
9
The weight of his enlarged skull had always obliged Merrick to sleep in a sitting position, his head resting on his
knees, in order to be able to breathe. Lying down would cause suffocation and death.
20
However, already as a child Lynch became concerned with the deceptiveness of
appearances, precisely because his world seemed too perfect. Especially fascinated with his
father’s agricultural experiments on tree diseases and insects, Lynch would, for instance, find that
“if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath” (Lynch
on Lynch 11). Comparing life with a garden, he explains: “[T]here are a lot of things attacking the
garden. There’s a lot of slaughter and death, diseases, worms, grubs, ants. […] As a gardener you
have to stay on top of an awful lot of things” (10). This semi-biological fascination with beastly
forces threatening a seemingly perfect, familiar outside world would become an important theme
is his films.
A mediocre high school student, Lynch did not follow in his father’s footsteps of science
but instead developed a passion for painting. He attended various art schools in Washington, D.C.
and Boston, before enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia at the age
of nineteen. Ultimately, he would combine visual arts with cinema because he thought his dark
paintings “needed just to move a little bit” (Lynch qtd. in Alexander, 3). Lynch graduated after
two years, after which he managed to raise enough funding to start his filmmaking career.
His first two shorts, The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970), both dealt with
traumatized children in abusive homes and proved to be critical successes. In 1970, he gained a
fellowship in the Center for Advanced Film Studies of the American Film Institute in Los
Angeles, where he moved with his first wife and child. He completed his first feature film,
Eraserhead, in 1976. A comically dark and surrealist film, Eraserhead takes place in a
nightmarish, mechanized world where an estranged father has to take care of an unnaturally
conceived and unwanted monster baby. It is often regarded as Lynch’s most personal film,
reflecting both his country boy disgust of Philadelphia’s ugly industrial atmosphere and violence,
as well as private anxieties spawned by recent fatherhood.
Eraserhead failed to gain access to film festivals, but as a night show cult hit it
miraculously managed to attract Hollywood’s attention. Producer Mel Brooks hired the unknown
Lynch as the director for his upcoming project, The Elephant Man. Lynch found himself instantly
attracted to the title and was lucky to receive from Brooks a great deal of support to make the
film his own. Despite the nerve-racking challenge of having to direct first class actors like Sir
Jonn Gielgud and Anthony Hopkins on foreign soil, Lynch says what kept him going was “pretty
much John Merrick – the character of the elephant man. He was such a strange, wonderful,
21
innocent guy. That was it” (Lynch on Lynch 103). With the character of the Elephant Man, then,
Lynch subverts what would in later work become his usual characterization of “innocence
transformed by knowledge and experience” (Andrew 50) to present “someone who was a monster
on the outside but who inside was a beautiful and normal human being you fell in love with”
(Lynch on The City of Absurdity Website). The Elephant Man, released in 1980, received eight
Oscar nominations, including the ones for “Best Picture” and “Best Director,” thus proving
Lynch’s first commercial success.
Except for the expensive science fiction flop Dune (1984), Lynch has since then written
and directed other critically successful pictures and the popular TV series Twin Peaks (1990).
Blue Velvet (1986), the American cult classic that gained Lynch critical acclaim and a second
Oscar nomination for “Best Director,” Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks in different ways all dealt
with “misogynist violence hidden beneath the veneer of idealized small town middle America”
(Caldwell, par. 7). Fundamentally, Lynch’s work examines an existential theme of human frailty
and “the evil that men do” (Caldwell, par. 1) and is “seen through a lens distorted by an
outsider’s perspective” (Alexander 5). Reflecting his childhood anxieties, Lynch often shows a
beautiful (sur)face to be merely a disguise masking corruption and perversion. Whereas his work
has mostly been categorized in genres like “horror, sci-fi, film noir and domestic melodrama”
(Andrew 41), Lynch’s motivations also fit the genre of the fairy tale. Interestingly, no other fairy
tale reflects his preoccupation with innocent outsiders and the deception of appearances as much
as “Beauty and the Beast.”
3.3 The Elephant Man and the Beast: Racial Otherness and Basic Humanity
Merrick’s appearance has been described in articles and reviews as “repulsive and
clumsy” (Chion 180), “a ruin in a literal sense” (Kember 24) and “a physically grotesque
incarnation of sickly, rotting flesh” (Andrew 49). Although the Elephant Man has in common
with the Beast that he is “ugly, but good,” the film like the fairy tale operating as a story about
recognizing inner beauty, his physical otherness marks an important difference. The Beast’s
“racial” otherness was inauthentic: he appeared to be a handsome man after all, but Merrick’s
beastly appearance is permanent. However, his deformed body is more than what Kember calls a
“[disability] to be borne and overcome” (22). Merrick is a “freak of nature” and lives in a society
that distinguishes these “degradations” or “perversions” from normalcy and even humanity.
22
According to literary critic Leslie Fiedler, historical “scientific” accounts of the human/animal
freak - initiated in the eighteenth century by Linnaeus - introduced “a new mythology of ‘race’,”
in which “homo ferus” was regarded as a “human subspecies” and deemed parallel “with
Americans, Europeans, Asiatics, and Africans” (154). However, freaks were not just compared
with blacks or other racial minorities. Rather, as Fiedler describes, freaks were regarded as
“humans more marginal than the poorest sharecroppers or black convicts on a Mississippi chain
gang” (17). The human/animal freak Merrick, also known as the ugliest male in history (Fiedler
170), can thus be seen to symbolize an extreme form of racial Otherness. Although neither
Merrick, nor Edward are racial Others such as black or Asiatic persons, this thesis will from now
on use the term “race” as a symbolic concept. The Elephant Man, then, is not so much a story
about the confrontation between the sexes like “Beauty and the Beast,” but a story about society
dealing with racial difference. Instead of seeking a wife, the innocent “Beast” Merrick desires
nothing more than acceptance from “normal” society.
Typically, Merrick’s “racial” otherness has put him in a slavish position. His master Bytes
exploits and humiliates him in traveling exhibitions. In line with the process of othering, Merrick,
like other “savages,” is considered a brute and an imbecile from birth. Even when rescued by the
humanitarian Dr Treves and introduced into London’s higher ranks of society, Merrick is
regarded by most people as repulsive and inferior. No longer exhibited at the circus, Merrick is
inadvertently just as much on display at the hospital, when he receives and entertains
“respectable” guests in his room.
In ways similar to Beaumont’s fairy tale, the film counters this othering by revealing
Merrick’s intelligence, innocence and basic humanity. Together with Treves, the film’s male
Beauty and Lynchian alter ego, the viewer soon discovers that Merrick is far from dumb and
dangerous. Instead, the Elephant Man, having lived a life of humiliation and oppression, turns out
as frightened of people as they are of him. Whereas the Beast was unable to exhibit intelligence
due to a wicked fairy’s spell, Merrick seems a mute because he is too nervous and afraid to
speak. Though proof of intelligence will allow him hospital admission, he messes up an interview
with the hospital’s House Governor and does not speak freely until he sees Treves’ defeated
expression. He then recaptures their attention by citing his favorite Psalm from the Bible. Merrick
is not just a literate individual; upon further acquaintance he also appears to be quite charming,
sensitive and good-natured. He holds Treves and his new friends at the hospital in high esteem,
23
treats women with courtesy and respect, and, “not used to being treated so well by a beautiful
woman,” even cries when Treves’ wife Anne is nice to him. After his kidnap, when Merrick is
returned to the hospital injured and ill, he tells Treves nevertheless not to worry about him,
because, he says, “I’m happy every hour of the day. My life is full because I know that I am
loved. I regained myself. I could not say that were it not for you.” He then calls him his friend,
repeating the words “my friend” to himself after Treves has left.
Just as the Beast served as a foil for false culture, Merrick’s humanity is emphasized by
being contrasted with “normal” people’s beastliness, not just exemplified by his exploiters but
also by a crude London society in general. The gritty black and white photography of London’s
polluted streets, bustling and hissing with machinery and steam engines, strongly emphasizes the
inhuman environment. Two interesting scenes occur during and after Merrick’s kidnapping. In
Belgium, Bytes throws his repossessed Merrick in a cage with monkeys. The next shot
conspicuously shows the animals gathering around him, hissing at a frightened Merrick ducked
away in a corner. When Merrick has escaped and made it to the London station, this scene is
paralleled in the form of a mob yelling and closing in on him, falsely accusing him of having
molested a little girl. The scene culminates with Merrick gasping in protest the famous, haunting
lines of the film, “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!” Indeed, Lynch is very
keen to portray human behavior, especially in groups, as animalistic or essentially primal and
reflexive. He establishes a similar parallel by comparing different kinds of “audiences,” blurring
the lines between vulgar voyeurism and charitable interests or scientific observation. As John
Pym argues in his review for Sight and Sound, “The society beauties and titled couples who
politely visit Merrick in his tiny room are in essence … really no different from the tipsy,
gawking hordes, led by the … [Night Porter],” or from the repulsed doctors gazing at him and
“applauding Treves’ ‘showmanship’” (Pym).
3.4 John Merrick and Women: A Motherless Beast
Folk and fairy tale scholar Antti Aarne categorized “Beauty and the Beast” as one type of stories
about “The Search for the Lost Husband,” since Beauty has to reconcile herself with the
archetypal masculine but almost loses him by “staying too long at home” (140). The Elephant
Man, however, has shifted the focus towards the male Other and takes in his viewpoint of
women. As John Alexander observes, “Merrick’s story is of a man attempting to integrate the
24
archetypal feminine” (59). To the ugly and insecure Merrick, all (beautiful) women are
mysterious and unattainable, and all he wants is their acceptance.
However, Merrick is never portrayed as a potential lover or husband, but as an innocent,
victimized and motherless child seeking nothing but acceptance. To him, the archetypal feminine
is his “lost” mother. He always carries a small framed portrait of his mother around with him, the
only thing that is left of her to remember her by. Although the film does not clarify whether
Merrick’s mother abandoned him or died prematurely, Merrick possesses nothing but the
sweetest memories of her. When he proudly shows her portrait to Treves and his wife, who stand
amazed at her beauty, he declares: “She has the face of an angel… She was an angel. She was so
kind, so kind to me” and, “I’m sure I must have been a great disappointment to her.” This is a
pivotal scene, in which Merrick voices his greatest shame and suffering, and declares his only
wish, as he continues, “If only she could see me now, here, with such lovely kind friends. (…)
Then maybe she would love me as I am. I’ve tried so hard to be good.” Whereas the Beast suffers
from his partner’s absence, Merrick thinks he has lost his mother’s affection.
Especially seeking feminine and maternal acceptance, Merrick is befriended by two
beautiful women who are nurturing, maternal characters: Anne Treves and Mrs. Kendal. He
shares a tender moment of mutual sympathy with Anne, a mother herself, when she admires his
mother’s extraordinary beauty and he studies in great delight the portraits of Anne’s children and
parents on the mantelpiece, complimenting her on their “noble faces.” On her first visit, Mrs.
Kendal presents Merrick a copy of Romeo and Juliet, from which they read a passage. Kendal
thus introduces him to the magical qualities of the theatre, opening up a fantasy world which can
transform even a Beast into a Romeo. Her overwhelming kindness comes so sudden that, as
Kawin observes, Mrs. Kendal “[in] her beauty and her magical acceptance … is most like the
figure of [his] mother” (24), whose “image … is a central vision of love and all that love means
[…]” (25). As another gift, Mrs. Kendal hands Merrick an autographed portrait of herself, which
he reverently places besides his mother’s portrait on his night table. The framed portraits of his
mother and Mrs. Kendal are icons of Merrick’s idealization of his mother and the maternal
feminine.
John Alexander observes an ambiguity in Merrick’s relation with his mother, arguing that
“Merrick’s evocation of the ‘feminine’ suggests desire rather than memories of maternal
nurturing.” (63) Merrick’s choice of passage from Romeo and Juliet to read with Mrs. Kendal is
25
indeed significant, as it is the part where Romeo cleverly seduces Juliet to kiss him. (“If I profane
with my unworthiest hand/ This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this,/ My lips two blushing
pilgrims, ready stand/ To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”). However, his desire does
not seem sexual at all, but is very romantic in a prepubescent way.10 Since Merrick had been
subject to frequent physical and even sexual abuse all his life, his craving for a tender kiss “to
smooth that rough touch” seems only to further imply his boyish longing for maternal love and
acceptance. In a following nocturnal scene, Merrick receives a completely different and
unwanted kiss, when the night porter brings a whore into his room to thrill his clientele. The
contrast with this obscenity enhances the innocence of the “love scene” staged earlier. Although
ignoring Merrick’s sexual maturity seems rather unreal and forced, Lynch does not want to tell a
love story, but uses Merrick’s relations to women as a means to further stress his purity and
innocence, as well as his drive for assimilation.
3.5 Treves and Merrick: A Male Beauty and the Beast
Dr Treves and Merrick, though developing a friendship and not a romance, very much relate to
each other like a male Beauty and the Beast. Far from resembling a beautiful young girl, Treves’
character and looks, however, stand out in similar contrast to Merrick, as Beauty’s to the Beast.
Moreover, Merrick symbolizes a threat to Treves’ world, just as the Beast did to Beauty’s.
However, whereas Beauty not only grows spiritually but also saves herself and her family by
saving the Beast, Treves, as will be explained below, can save neither Merrick nor himself, and
acquires a higher, but hardly liberating, wisdom.
Merrick’s monstrous body, covered in rags and hooded with a large sack with one
opening for his eyes, starkly contrasts with Treves’ handsome face and healthy body, smartly
groomed and dressed in a black suit and tie. This difference “between the perfect body and the
imperfect body, between wholeness and decay” is an important theme in Lynch’s work and also
reflects opposite characteristics (Alexander 24). According to Alexander, in Lynch’s films, “[t]he
perfect body houses the rational man who expresses reason, but rarely feelings.” However,
10
See Holladay and Watt 869 for a discussion on “Merrick’s sexual desire, an issue that Lynch deflects by
portraying Merrick as a devoted son and associating him … with prepubescent boys.” This is not only exemplified
by Merrick’s presumption of having disappointed his mother and idolizing her image, or his admiration of Anne’s
portraits of parents and children, but also by Lynch’s “numerous close-ups on young boys.” Furthermore, and “most
conspicuously,” Merrick keeps a drawing of a sleeping child in his room, wishing he could sleep lying down like
that, and both the narrative and his life end with him emulating this icon.
26
“[w]ithin the imperfect body,” he continues, “dwells the irrational man; unpredictable and
imbued with feeling.” (24) This contrast is certainly true for Treves and Merrick, as Treves and
his profession stand for knowledge, scientific order and the power of the mind, while the
vulnerable Merrick and his creative facilities represent romance, feelings and the power of the
imagination. This somewhat resembles the difference between the educated, well-read, sensible
Beauty and the mysterious, witless and sensitive Beast.
Merrick’s characteristics, or rather their perceived perverted versions, are precisely what
is deemed so threatening and confronting about the Elephant Man, who is himself at first
mistaken by Treves for a “perverted version of a human being.” Reminiscent of Beauty’s journey
to “look where others would not” (Windling), and parallel to her “movement from civilized
society to [the Beast’s] secret retreat” (Hearne 126), Treves at the beginning of the narrative
leaves his bright Victorian world of order and decency to enter into the dark corridors of a circus
tent, conspicuously marked “No Entry,” to witness an illegal exposition of the infamous Elephant
Man. Since “physical deformity was regarded as a sign of spiritual corruption,” The Elephant
Man and his nighttime world of the carnivalesque are traditionally associated with obscenity,
anarchy, immorality and madness (Keller). Moreover, in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret
Self, Fiedler explains how especially a feral freak like Merrick (there being many other kinds of
freaks) functions like a mirror to the Self, reflecting a fundamental human insecurity about “our
status as more than beasts” (34). Thus, Merrick’s grotesque body not only confronts the doctor
with limits to (medical) science and scientific control, but also with society’s, and by extension
his own, perverse or ‘animal’ nature.
Beauty’s psychological maturation being the core “action” of the fairy tale, The Elephant
Man correspondingly is about Treves’s development, which “[i]n some ways,” Nochimson
writes, “is the real event of the film” (13). Just as Beauty was a dutiful daughter, Treves is a
dutiful doctor and initially only takes care of the Elephant Man out of a medical and supposedly
humanitarian interest. After his first physical examination of Merrick, Treves even confesses to a
colleague “I pray to God he’s an idiot…” When the tragic opposite appears to be true, Treves’s
expressions regularly betray wonderment at Merrick’s persistent enjoyment of his newly secured
life, despite the terrible limitations his body and society still place on him. John Alexander wittily
compares their relationship to the Victorian romantic and his “Noble Savage,” when he observes,
“Merrick’s creativity and desires feed Treves’ reasoning mind – Treves ‘lives’ through Merrick’s
27
delight in the theatre, in romance, the acquisition of a dressing set, building a model cathedral,
learning to articulate speech” (69). When Merrick eventually dares to ask Treves the dreaded
question “Can you cure me?,” Treves finally lets go of “scientific applications of control”
(Nochimson 13) and answers, “No John, I can’t. We can care for you, but we can’t cure you.” His
professional relationship with Merrick develops into a friendship that not only “saves” Merrick
but also enriches his own identity.
However, Lynch is more interested in the psychological duality Treves experiences
befriending the freak, than he is in portraying a reassuring and complementing friendship.
Treves’ journey is in this way more complex than Beauty’s, since his friendship with Merrick has
not just taught him to see beauty in the other, but also beastliness in himself. Although both
Treves and Beauty are portrayed as innocent outsiders, hardworking and caring as opposed to
respectively their snobbish colleagues and sisters, Beauty remains “something of a goody-goody”
(Griswold) while Treves also finds a great deal of fault with himself. When the Night Porter’s
exploitive practices are exposed, Treves calls him “the real monster,” echoing Beauty’s
observation that “there are many men more monstrous” than the Beast. At several times,
however, Treves is questioned about his motives for taking care of Merrick, and even doubts
them himself. When he accuses Merrick’s owner Bytes of only “profit[ing] from another man’s
misery,” Bytes returns the accusation, claiming Treves just “wanted the freak to show all [his]
doctor chums and make a name for [him]self.” During Merrick’s stay at the hospital, even the
chief nurse, Mothershead, reproaches Treves for inviting people with questionable intents to see
Merrick, shrewdly arguing that “he’s only being stared at all over again.” At home with his wife,
Treves utters his biggest concern that he is indeed “very little different” from Bytes and questions
himself, “Am I a good man or am I a bad man?” It is a question that, from the look of his
troubled, glassy gaze throughout the film, keeps haunting him. Even when Merrick expresses his
happiness and thanks Treves, the doctor uncomfortably answers, “And you’ve done so much for
me,” with a distant voice that, as Thomson justly interprets in his review for Movieline.com, is
“pierced by irony, and so the line is polite but terribly ambivalent.” As Thomson concludes,
“Treves’ face is whole and wholesome, but the mind behind it has learned such ugly things about
life and healing in the course of the story that he might be as hard-pressed as Merrick to look in a
mirror.” Lynch’s version of “Beauty and the Beast” thus uses to full extent the classic literary
device by which the animalist freak fills the Self with doubts over its own humanity.
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3.6 The Transformation: From Freak to Human?
Since Merrick only wants to be “normal,” to gain acceptance from others, his behavior is
completely directed towards “fitting in.” In order to achieve this, he copies the manners of the
“benevolent” world of the hospital and “refined” society. He tries to speak with an upper-class
accent, receives a tailor-made suit, gives tea parties in his room, and even his outbursts of
creativity project his need for emulation: he acts a part of Romeo and Juliet with Miss Kendall,
thus temporarily transforming himself into a (loveable) male icon, and constructs a scale model
of the cathedral seen from his hospital room window. For Treves and the hospital staff, Merrick
thus transforms from a frightened and introverted creature into a gracious and inspiring human
being. Moreover, Merrick himself claims to have “regained” himself by achieving what he
thought his mother wished for him: having friends, and feeling accepted and loved. He thanks
Treves for making this possible. Merrick’s fears, and his astonishment at having overcome them,
are summed up by his pleasant surprise after seeing a play: “I really did believe that the ogre
would never get out of the dungeon.”11 Similar to the Beast’s transformation, affectionate
treatment transforms Merrick into a human being.
However, as Lynch has both Treves and the viewer develop a disturbing self-awareness,
Merrick’s gradual transformation is paradoxically both affecting and sinister. The sight of
Merrick all dressed up, joyfully parading around in his new suit, reminded one reviewer for The
New York Times of “the fastidiously dressed Walrus in the Tenniel illustrations for ‘the Walrus
and the Carpenter’” (Canby, par. 12). Merrick is of course no deceitful Walrus, but, as another
reviewer noted in a similar strain, by copying “the manners of the society he can only join by
proxy,” they “slowly turn into a grotesque and … ironically accurate parody” (Pym, par. 1).
London society is presented as snobbish, insincere, and therefore less human than the innocent
Merrick. With a satanic twist, Lynch thus obscures Merrick’s transformation by allowing this
event to simultaneously mirror society’s “monstrosity”.
Furthermore, the film problematizes society’s acceptance of Merrick and thereby his
transformation. The pre-final scene, showing Merrick’s first-time visit to the theater, is in this
11
Merrick’s remark is, however, peculiar with regards to the performance, which, although it is filmed as an
impressionist and dreamlike collage of fairy tale images, can be identified as the story of “Puss in Boots.” This
French fairy tale narrates how a cunning cat tricks a gullible ogre king into transforming himself to a mouse, so the
cat can kill him and claim the throne for its master. Has Merrick been watching an alternative version (in which the
ogre was somehow captivated but also released again) or has he interpreted the play wrongly? Maybe Merrick was
not referring to the play at all, but merely to himself.
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respect pivotal. The outing, organized by his well-meaning friends Mrs. Kendall and Treves, is
important to Merrick in several ways. For Merrick, the theater represents a new world of beauty
and fantasy, as opposed to the circus, his former world and a site of ugliness, fear and repulsion.
Moreover, for the first time Merrick is now part of the audience instead of being the spectacle. In
this way, the theater also constitutes a private experience, contrasted with the public experience
of the freak show. Thus, to Merrick it is a magical event. However, the scene closes with the
film’s most ambiguous moment, when after the performance Mrs. Kendall ascends the stage to
dedicate the evening on behalf of her and the theater company to Merrick, her “very dear friend.”
The audience starts to applaud him. Treves then encourages the still somewhat insecure Merrick,
“Stand up, John. They want to see you,” and, “It’s alright, stand up.” As Merrick rises, so too
does the audience, now giving him a standing ovation. Michel Chion identifies this moment
significantly as the last of
three occasions when [Merrick] is asked to stand up: first as the freak at the fair, then as a
medical phenomenon before an amphitheatre full of doctors and, lastly, at the theatre
where he is summoned to receive the crowd’s acclamations. The last occasion is the most
troubling, for no one knows exactly why or what they are applauding! (55)
Partly triumphant, as Merrick for the first time dares to show himself unmasked amidst “normal”
people, thus overcoming his fear of rejection, and this audience is “applauding rather than gaping
and hooting” (Kawin 24), the occasion also painfully illustrates the fact that he remains a kind of
spectacle. Moreover, the applause seems rather self-congratulatory, and the perceptive viewer
might sense that “Lynch makes us accomplices, lauding and validating the voyeur within us”
(Alexander 67).
3.7 Suicide
The film’s ending further complicates Merrick’s already ambiguous transformation, as he
commits suicide when he gets back home from the theater. Martha Nochimson interprets his
death as a result of “hallucinations” produced by the “sweet poison of the pantomime” (145-146).
According to her, the pantomime represents Victorian culture’s perilous “idealization of emotions
that creates idols to which [Merrick] is eventually willing to immolate himself” (144). Although
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she is right to point out the danger of Victorian (and popular) culture’s sentimental idealization of
beauty, leading to self-objectification and unattainable standards of ‘normality’ (something that
Lynch is indeed aware of), it stretches the point to call him a sacrificial victim or a dazzled
puppet on a string during his last moment of agency. His joy from having seen a beautiful play
for the first time, in itself not an unimaginable emotion, can hardly be called delirious. Having
shared his enthusiasm about the play with Treves and bid his friend goodnight, Merrick rather
exudes an introspective calm. As Chion notes, “Everything about his life is in order” (176). His
model cathedral is finished, and he signs his name at the base. He then casts a glance towards the
drawing of a sleeping child above his bed, representing a wish he had long before he had been
introduced to society, namely to be able to sleep like a normal human being. It seems to Merrick
his wish for friendship and acceptance has been sufficiently fulfilled, but the experience has also
worn him out and he is dying. No longer having to “stand up” and make a good impression,
Merrick now decides to lie down, and removes the pillows that used to prevent this. The suicide
he thus calmly commits, seems rather a conscious act of letting go, than an act of deadly frenzy.
When Merrick is falling asleep, the camera pans out over the picture of his mother on his night
table, towards his cardboard model in front of the window, and finally out the window, into a
boundless and starry sky in which the face of his mother appears, speaking soothingly about
eternity. No longer someone Merrick believes to have disappointed, she has become a kind of
guardian angel, which according to Rodley is an important motif in Lynch’s work (88). He
explains:
These guardian angels may be what Lynch refers to as “abstractions”; creations from the
minds of his characters, and/or actual manifestations from another place . . . A place
beyond fear, violence, loneliness and darkness. A place not crawling with red ants. (88)
Although death hardly can be called a reward, the scene grimly intimates it is the only place
where Merrick finally is at rest. If the theater experience provided the final magic to complete the
transformation of Lynch’s Beast, it occurred not in the eyes of society, but in his own mind.
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3.8 Context and Reception
Although set in a black and white past of Victorian England, The Elephant Man did strike a chord
with contemporary American concerns about race and otherness. As Fiedler writes in 1978:
We live at a moment when the name “Freaks” is being rejected by the kinds of
physiologically deviant humans to whom it has traditionally been applied . . . To them it
seems a badge of shame, a reminder of their long exclusion and exploitation by other
humans, who defining them thus have by the same token defined themselves as “normal”.
(13)
According to Fiedler, many freaks thus no longer wished to be regarded as special, but aspired
assimilation (14). Although some critics were frustrated by Merrick’s submissive behavior and
overwhelming aspiration to normality, which is dealt with in more detail below, Chion
importantly points out that still
we cannot criticize him for not revolting or rather, for being someone who, in his only
moment of revolt, screams his desire to be like everyone else, ‘a human being.’
Particularly in countries where racism is rife, this is the legitimate claim of
millions of people who aspire to the right to be considered ordinary men and
women. (56)
Reflecting this concern, according to Richard Keller, the early 1980’s produced a number of
films that criticized “the traditional association between the anarchic and the deformed” and
“sought to establish the basic humanity of the deformed individual.”
This trend can be viewed as part of a larger cultural movement that propagated equality
and assimilation through positive, humanizing pictures of others, although not unambiguously. In
Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in American Film, Davies and Smith explain how the
prevailingly assimilationist discourses in the 1980’s were reflected by mainstream “liberal 1980’s
films [that] invested in a model of integration to smooth over difference” (9). However, these
films often also “wittingly or not, reinscribed white patriarchal power” (9). Even “positive”
images of Others such as African Americans and women, Davies and Smith argue, often only
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contributed in favor of a white, middle-class, capitalist ideal, by developing this ideal “as symbol
of racial egalitarianism” and as the “dominant model of inclusiveness” (5). As Robyn Wiegman
explains:
Such ‘positive’ images [of Others]… are … mediations for a reconstruction of
hegemonic power, offering – through the very visibility of [their] inclusion – a
seemingly nonhierarchical culture in which all political and social interventions can be
contained through a discursive nod to ‘you’ve come a long way.’ (qtd. in Smith and
Davies: 5)
Reflecting this criticism, a few critics, including the film’s admirers, were troubled by Merrick’s
conformist and submissive attitude, “seeing in it a defense of bourgeois self-righteousness”
(Chion 52). Joe Kember, for instance, disapprovingly notes that Merrick’s social adaptation and
inclusion only legitimizes “a bourgeois intolerance of difference” (27).
However, Lynch’s dark portrayal of London society as hypocritical, repressive and
closed, and his consciousness of voyeurism suggest the opposite. Merrick’s inclusion is hardly
presented as an unambiguous success, as the film reveals rather than hides society’s persistent
intolerance. The fact that Merrick is subject to the public gaze both day and night points out that
he remains an oddity and is denied the anonymity that normal people enjoy. Moreover, even
though Merrick himself feels accepted, the film problematizes this acceptance. Lynch’s main
concern is the ambiguity of people’s motivations. Not making any class judgments, he shows
“respectable” people to be motivated by the same curiosity, fear and wonder as the “vulgar.” In
the end, everyone subconsciously or consciously wishes to profit from Merrick, either
economically, professionally, but most of all socially and psychologically. In pretending to
accept the Other, Lynch shows, society mostly feels good about itself.
3.9 Conclusion
In its dealing with a severely deformed person around which many racist mythologies have been
constructed, The Elephant Man can be viewed as a racialized version of Beaumont’s “Beauty and
the Beast.” Lynch’s film deconstructs the myth that aligns physical abnormality with spiritual
depravity, by showing Merrick’s basic humanity. Like the Beast, Merrick is a gentle soul trapped
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in a brutal body, pines for acceptance, and, owning intelligence, is tragically aware of his shortcomings. Merrick’s strong emotional attachment to his mother signals Lynch’s primary
identification of Merrick as a childlike innocent, which, although this makes him unrealistically
chaste, further emphasizes Merrick’s purity and urge for acceptance. Similar to Beauty’s
development in the fairy tale, Treves’ attitude changes from revulsion to responsibility to respect.
However, instead of focusing on the harmonizing effects of friendship, Lynch makes the
“innocent” outsider Treves fret over his own humanity. Indeed, Lynch is more interested in
establishing a sharp contrast between Merrick’s purity and the grim reality of “normal” people’s
hypocrisy, since exposing the shadow side of civilization has always been his favorite subject.
Merrick’s physical or “racial” otherness remains an obstacle for the people who view him.
Although the theatrical experience provides a kind of catharsis for Merrick, the ovation he
receives is highly ambiguous. Merrick dies contentedly, but his suicidal sleep provides the rest he
could not find alive. Unlike “Beauty and the Beast,” The Elephant Man does not have a happy
ending; Merrick does not turn into a prince. In Lynch’s hands, Merrick’s story is not “Beauty and
the Beast” reworked as a 1980’s success story of climbing up the ladder of social acceptance. The
Elephant Man not only reveals a stubborn core of racist intolerance in all layers of society, but
discloses “humanist” attitudes towards the assimilation of Others as feeble attempts to reinforce
our own superiority.
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4. Edward Scissorhands: Handy Otherness
4.1 Introduction
Released in December 1990, Edward Scissorhands was hardly a quintessential Christmas movie.
Although it received much public adoration as “an utterly enchanting fairy tale” (Hicks), it
nevertheless conveys “a darkness that would be surprising in a relatively mainstream release were
it not the work of Tim Burton” (Davis). Indeed, Tim Burton’s modern-day fairy tale of a
Frankensteinian Beast in American suburbia is sweetly absurdist yet relentless in its outcome.
Borrowing from various monster movies as well as “Beauty and the Beast,” Burton deems the
latter source imperative, since, he explains, “all monster movies are basically one story. It’s
Beauty and the Beast” (Rolling Stone). This chapter will thus examine Edward Scissorhands’
revision of this fairy tale, centering on the beastly Other and its treatment. Moreover, as Ben
Andac notes, “Scissorhands is nothing less than Burton’s spiritual autobiography – a fairy tale of
the ‘otherness’ felt by every outsider” (par. 12) Therefore, an insightful overview of Burton’s life
and work will also be given.
Edward Scissorhands opens with a prologue: an old woman tells her granddaughter a
bedtime story about the origin of snow. The story of snow, she muses, starts with “a man who
had scissors for hands.” The man, Edward, was created by an old inventor who died before he
could give him hands. What follows is the central film narrative. Set in a timeless and allAmerican suburb, the story introduces the local Avon lady, Peg Boggs (Dianne Wiest), who is
selling cosmetics door-to-door. After various unsuccessful visits, she spots a gothic castle in her
rearview mirror, standing on a mountain top just at the end of the main road, and decides to find a
customer there. Outside the castle, Peg discovers a beautiful topiary garden; and inside, its
creator: a pale, scary figure with long scissor blades for fingers. Her maternal instincts soon
awaken when she learns he is a shy and lonely orphan called Edward (Johnny Depp). The goodhearted Peg takes Edward with her to provide him with the warmth of a family home. Edward is
welcomed by most bored and curious neighbors as an interesting diversion, especially when his
“handicap” turns out to be his talent. Moving on from topiary art, he establishes himself as a
wizard hairdresser of dogs and their owners, becoming an overnight sensation and even
appearing in a local talk show. He sadly has more trouble winning the affection of Peg’s daughter
35
Kim (Winona Ryder), whom Edward has fallen in love with. Kim’s brutal boyfriend, Jim, bullies
Edward and ultimately sets him up in a robbery scheme, which also involves Kim. Edward gets
arrested, but fails to snitch on Jim in order to protect Kim. While Edward’s selflessness finally
opens Kim’s eyes, the town, however, quickly turns against him and demonizes its former deity.
During Christmas preparations, Edward professes his love for Kim by sculpting her angelic
likeness out of ice, the ice flakes creating a snowfall in which she dances enchanted. The
cathartic scene infuriates an intruding Jim with jealousy. Acting as the town’s agent, he chases
his rival away, whereupon an angry and disillusioned Edward retreats to his castle. Not satisfied
with his withdrawal, however, the town and Jim set out to destroy him, thus propelling the story
into its violent climax. Inside the castle, Edward kills Jim in a final confrontation, spearing him
on one of his blades. Afterwards, Kim protects Edward from the mob outside by displaying an
alternative scissor hand to them as proof of his death. Edward returns to isolation in his castle,
where he vigorously continues his ice sculpting art. In the film’s epilogue, the old woman,
apparently an older Kim, finishes her story explaining that “before he came down here, it never
snowed. And afterwards it did.”
4.2 Tim Burton
Timothy William Burton was born in Burbank, California, on August 25, 1958. Situated near
Hollywood and housing major film studios like Disney and Warner Bros, Burbank nevertheless is
a typical working-class suburb, embodying what Burton disapprovingly describes as “Anywhere
USA” (Burton 1). The blandness of these surroundings strongly contributed to his stark sense of
alienation as a child, as the quirky and artistic Burton felt disconnected even from his parents and
younger brother. Elaborating on his lonely childhood, Burton describes Burbank as a passionless
“semioppressive, blank palette,” containing “a very strong sense of categorization and
conformity” (Rolling Stone). An introverted misfit kid, who moved in with his grandmother at the
age of twelve (also in Burbank), Burton took refuge in drawing cartoons and consuming large
quantities of B-movie horror and science fiction. Unlike others, Burton fully related to the
movies’ monsters, seeing them as sensitive and misunderstood, and associated the heroes, “these
bland actors with no emotion,” with suburbanites (Rolling Stone).
Burton went on to study animation at the California Institute of the Arts, writing and
directing shorts such as Stalk of the Celery Monster, and found work as an animator at Disney
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shortly after graduation. Although Burton “soon found himself stifled creatively by [Disney’s]
production-line mentality” (Salisbury xvi), he managed to direct two of his own, rather unDisneyesque shorts. The first one, Vincent (1982), was a comical macabre animation narrated by
Vincent Price, renowned horror actor and Burton’s idol, about a miserable little boy who
fantasizes about being Vincent Price, much to his mother’s distress. The second was the liveaction Frankenweenie (1984), again about a suburban boy, who, grieving over the loss of his dog,
unleashes Frankensteinian terror by bringing his dead pet back to life. Despite receiving limited
release, the films brought Burton a small fan base and he was enabled to leave Disney and direct
his first two features, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988), for Warner Bros.
Unnoticed by the critics, the surreal comedy Beetlejuice was, however, “a tour de force of
imaginative design” (Salisbury xvii) and an unexpected box-office hit. Burton’s stunning popgothic visual flair next earned him directorship for the historic blockbuster Batman (1989). Not
his own project and critically flawed, in Burton’s hands it nevertheless brimmed with “dark
power and gothic mystery” (Andac) focusing on his favorite theme of the alienated and isolated
outsider.
Batman’s success provided Burton with the opportunity to direct Edward Scissorhands, a
“deeply personal project he had first conceived as a teenager” (Rolling Stone). Indeed, regarded
“in many ways [as] the masterpiece in Burton’s opus,” Edward Scissorhands “speaks to the
teenage isolation, which was so clearly a part of Burton’s early life, and to the fear shared by
many creative people that what makes them special also sets them apart” (Andac, par. 11, 12).
Although Burton himself denies any full identification with Edward, Johnny Depp, reminiscing
about his audition, describes his first impression of Burton as:
A pale, frail-looking, sad-eyed man with hair that expressed much more than last night’s
pillow struggle. (…) I remember the first thing I thought was, ‘Get some sleep’, but I
couldn’t say that, of course. And then it hit me like a two-ton sledgehammer square in the
middle of my forehead. (…) This hypersensitive madman is Edward Scissorhands.” (x)
From then on, Burton wrote and directed other mesmerizing films about eccentric
characters, who, “misunderstood and misperceived, [are] misfits very often encumbered by some
degree of duality. They operate on the fringes of their own particular society, tolerated but pretty
37
much left to their own devices” (Salisbury xiv). Highlights include the stop-motion animationmusical and “technical marvel” (Andac) The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993, directed by
Henry Selick but written and designed by Burton) and the commercial flop but critically
appraised Ed Wood (1994). Nightmare and Ed Wood respectively deal with a Halloween skeleton
protagonist longing to become a part of Christmas celebrations, and the biopic of Edward D.
Wood Jr., a horror and sci-fi filmmaker from the 1950’s and 1960’s who later became known as
the “Worst Director of All Time.”
In several interviews, Burton returns to the purpose of fairy tales to explain the absurdity
of his work and his attraction to the horrific. In “The Rolling Stone Interview,” for example,
Burton explains that for him “the power of fairy tales” lies in their profound existentialism and
ability to present “a kind of extreme, symbolic version of life”:
Who are we? How are we created? What else is out there? What happens when you die?
(…) It’s weirdly complicated. And I find that fairy tales acknowledge that. They
acknowledge the absurdity, they acknowledge the reality; but in a way that is beyond real.
Therefore, I find that more real.
In his view of monsters as more human, sensitive and real than the mundane, it is not surprising,
then, that his most personal film about the archetypal misunderstood Other, Edward
Scissorhands, is really Burton’s revision of “Beauty and the Beast.”
4.3 Edward Scissorhands and the Beast: Racial Otherness, Individuality and Cultural
Heterogeneity
Burton’s Beast, played by teen idol Johnny Depp, is definitely not ugly. His looks are, however,
at first scary and menacing. His scarred face and lack of hands mark him as a physically
deformed person, whose physical abnormality seems all the more threatening because of his
weapon like prosthetics. Unlike the Beast, Edward embodies an authentic physical otherness in
the sense that his looks remain the same and cannot be “transformed”. Moreover, in Burton’s
fairy tale the Beast is not a natural born man but was created by an eccentric inventor, thus even
further challenging the notion of his humanity. Since the film employs Edward’s grotesque
38
Otherness, lying between man and machine, to challenge notions of normality and humanity,
Edward, like Merrick, can be interpreted as a symbol for an extreme kind of racial Otherness.
Furthermore, Edward’s appearance not just indicates physical difference. Clad in tight
black leather with metal accessories and un-groomed with a wild hairdo, his looks remind one of
1980’s punk subculture (Merschmann 49). Edward is not just a “freak” because of his unnatural
deformity, but he also exemplifies a “freak” in the popular sense of the word, which, as Fiedler
described in 1978, “is being claimed as an honorific title by the kind of physiologically normal
but dissident young people … otherwise known as ‘hippies,’ ‘longhairs,’ and ‘heads’” (14).
Though he is not from the 1960’s or 1970’s, Edward indeed reflects adolescent alienation and
punkishly sub-cultural traits. Edward, however, does not take pride in his difference, but suffers
from the isolation his otherness has forced him into and insecurely tells Peg on their first
encounter: “I’m unfinished.” He therefore feels more like a failure than a cultural rebel. His
scissor hands are a perfect metaphor for his sense of social otherness, as they cannot touch
without inadvertently hurting others. Besides their damaging potential, however, Edward’s hands
also contain his creativity, expanding the notion of adolescent otherness to that of artistic strength
and alienation; the power to create as well as destroy. Edward’s dilemma is, however, much more
tragic and complex than a teenager’s or artist’s anxiety, as will be shown later. His creative and
socio-cultural differences therefore add a deeper layer to his “racial” Otherness, symbolically
marking Edward as a racial Other with different and encumbering, yet meaningful cultural
values.
Like other social outcasts, Edward lives “on the edge of civilization” (Kempley, par. 2),
which is in this case in solitary confinement in his gothic castle just outside suburbia. When the
unsuspecting Peg Boggs discovers this shy creature by chance, she benevolently attempts to free
him from solitude and exclusion to include Edward in her family and the community. Strangely
and funnily enough, her neighbors are not the least bit shocked by his strange appearance but are
rather positively intrigued. While the women whisper in adoration, “He’s so… different,
mysterious,” the men good-naturedly joke about his scissor hands and include him in their
barbecue activities, using his spears as shish kebab skewers. Peg’s son Kevin and other kids gasp
admiringly when they consider his karate potential, “One chop to a guy’s neck and it’s all over.”
A crippled war veteran confides in him, “I have my own infirmity. Never did me a bit of harm. . .
. Listen, don’t you ever let anybody tell you, you have a handicap.” Despite, or rather because of
39
his difference, Edward soon becomes a cherished community member who is seen as unique and
exceptional.
As Edward’s introduction to society is (or seems) a quick success, Edward Scissorhands
develops the humanizing theme of “Beauty and Beast” more intricately. Further comparisons
with “Beauty and the Beast” are difficult at this point, because, in a way, Edward Scissorhands
starts where “Beauty and the Beast” ends: with the Beast’s (Edward’s) acceptance. Whereas the
Beast was merely a humanized, but flat character, Burton cares more to establish Edward’s
individuality, thereby also providing a mild social satire of suburbia. Rather than focusing on the
way the newcomer fits in, he shows how Edward stands out. While most of the townspeople,
especially the stereotypical bored and nosy housewives, excitedly “treat him like a visiting
celebrity” (Ansen), Edward maintains a pleasant poise and remains an introverted, shy person, or
as Peg lovingly puts it, “[his] own sweet self.” Although he blossoms with all the attention he
gets, Edward does not copy their gossipy speech and social habits, or much less shares their
interests in traditional leisure activities like bowling and card games (not considering that his
scissors would also stand in the way of this). Most of the adults and youths seem rather
materialist and superficial characters, as they dream of new kitchens, high-tech equipment and
bigger cars, while Peg’s husband Bill during dinner moralizes about the satisfactions of hard
work. Edward, however, does not understand these sentiments and his only passion lies in his art,
appropriating his sculpting talents to the town’s gardens and hairstyles. Thus, like the Beast
served as a contrast to brutal marriage partners, Edward’s individuality starkly contrasts with the
town’s superficiality. As Michael Wilmington observes, “it is the freak who seems real and all
the human denizens of the comical flatland suburbia below who seem false or grotesque.”
Edward’s eccentric character and individuality not just set him apart from his suburban
surroundings in ways that make him seem more real and human than the rest of community, but
are also presented as culturally enriching. Before Edward’s arrival, everything in the town looks
empty and identical. The homes are all in pastel-colored tints and have the same geometrical
shapes, “like they were made on an assembly line” (Griffin). The interiors are sparsely decorated
and merely designed in terms of functionality. There are no gardens, only far stretching and
freshly mowed lawns. When Edward helps Peg’s husband prune a plant, he gets carried away and
to Bill’s bafflement miraculously turns it into a Godzilla-dinosaur. Edward not only embellishes
the neighborhood with other “wildly kitsch topiaries” (Burton 89) but also starts trimming dogs
40
and styling women. His haircuts are, as Merschmann notices, daring, asymmetrical creations in a
kind of 1980’s new wave style (50). Edward thus individualizes and adorns the town and
everyone in it. Burton’s Beast not only turns out to be a distinct Beauty, but also creates
distinctive beauty. Not only commenting on social customs and values, Edward Scissorhands
also criticizes cultural values of homogeneity.
4.4 Edward and Women: Beauties and the Beast
Like the lonesome Beast, Edward desperately longs for love and contact. When Peg first sees
him, he looks terribly sad and literally and figuratively wounded, as his facial scars, the result
from accidentally cutting his own face, can be seen to represent his emotional anguish over his
inability to touch others and establish meaningful contact (Sampson, par. 4). Edward’s first words
to Peg are conspicuously: “Don’t go.” When Peg brings him to her home and shows him her
family photographs, Kim’s picture is the one that draws his immediate attention. Kim, an
unattainable popular high school girl with a jealous jock boyfriend (Jim), similar to the fairy
tale’s Beauty fails to recognize Edward’s beauty immediately. With the addition of Jim, Burton
carries out what Warner describes in her article “Beauty and the Beasts” as “splitting the male
into the good beast and the bad beast” (11). This not only “adds needed drama to the story” but
also “helps define by contrast the possibility of a superior, virtuous brand of masculinity,
embodied by the Beast” (11). However, the budding romance between Edward and Kim is in
itself a minor component of Burton’s film and “easily the least interesting” (Davis, par. 4).
Moreover, unlike the Beast, Edward has other suburban beauties swooning for him and trying to
win his favor. It is therefore more interesting to contrast these different women’s treatment of
Edward, in which a distinction between truer and falser modes of “love” and acceptance can be
detected. Burton’s version does not so much concentrate on Beauty learning to pick the right guy,
but on the Beast being embraced by society for different reasons.
Avon Lady Peg is the emblematic sympathetic mother figure, who optimistically yet
naively undertakes the task of relieving Edward’s emotional suffering next to people’s cosmetic
distress. While she fails to sell any products to the townspeople, she finds in Edward an eager
victim to test her makeup foundations. Peg neither wants to change him nor dispose off her
products, but the various humorous attempts to conceal Edward’s scars can be seen as an
innocent but naïve way of trying to improve the quality of his life. If he would only use an
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astringent, for instance, “as this will help to prevent infection.” She also provides Edward with a
regular “suburbanite” outfit to further ease his inclusion. When Edward expresses his wish for
regular hands in a talk show, a woman in the audience disappointedly responds that then “[he’d]
be like everyone else.” Peg, however, considers his sweet and sensitive character as a more
intrinsic part of Edward than his looks when she benevolently replies, “No matter what, Edward
will always be special.” She accepts Edward for no particular reasons other than that his boyish
sweetness kindles her maternal instincts. However, by “matronizing” him she fails to
acknowledge the complexity of Edward’s Otherness, just as she does not notice that his scars run
more than skin-deep, but rather silly-headedly blames it on the ointments (“Darn this stuff!”).
Acting as a sort of well-meaning chaperone, she tragically oversees the fact that, especially to the
town, Edward’s Otherness is not just physical, until it is too late.
The other women, on the contrary, do not take any interest in Edward’s selfless character,
but rather in what his hands can do for them, in more than just practical ways. Although there is
one religious madwoman who calls Edward “the perversion of nature,” the town’s desperate
housewife Joyce simply remarks, “Why, isn’t that exciting?” During the barbecue party that the
Boggs have organized to introduce Edward to the neighborhood, Edward’s “exotic” topiary art
makes such an impression that women stand in line for him, feeding him “ambrosia salads” and
fighting with each other over whose garden will be treated first with his “green thumb.” To most
of them, Edward is merely “a helpful, handy household item” (Burton 90). However, one that
also inspires a great deal of sexual curiosity, as Joyce fantasizes, “Do you imagine those hands
are hot or cold? Just think what a single snip could do,” and another woman jokes, “Or undo.”
Soon Edward’s talents as a hairdresser are also discovered, leading to a hilarious scene in which
Joyce has an orgasmic haircut. Joyce then steps forward to act as Edward’s business agent, as she
arranges for him to establish his own beauty parlor, which she proposes to call “Shear Heaven.”
This way, Joyce not just personally exploits Edward’s Otherness and talents, but also
commodifies them. In using Edward as their hairdresser and gardener, his female neighbors
pretend to celebrate his unique vision while, of course, they are merely incorporating and
instrumentalizing his Otherness.
Excepting the town’s stereotypical madwoman, Kim is the only one who initially is
abhorred by Edward’s appearance. When she returns from a camping trip unannounced and
earlier than intended, she has not yet been introduced to Edward and is scared witless to find this
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bizarre guest in her bedroom. Edward in turn is frightened to death by her screams, accidentally
punching leaks in her waterbed. Not considering what Freud would think of this, it is clear that
Kim immediately suspects Edward’s harmful potential and she treats him rather warily. She does
not care much for his topiary work either; to Kim, his fantastical sculptures are just “creepy.”
However, when she finally realizes his innocence and selflessness, Kim is the only one who
genuinely accepts and loves Edward. Moreover, she does not oversimplify his Otherness as a
physical ordeal or cultural exoticism, but recognizes that Edward and his scissor hands represent
“a disruption to the harmony of uniformity” in her town (Johanson). When Peg is resolute to act
as if nothing has happened and throw a neighborhood Christmas party, right after an incident that
has made Edward’s presence disturbing to the community, Kim expressly asks her, “Mom, do
you really think that we should be having this party?” Having experienced the absurdist fears that
he might inspire in others herself, Kim is the first to grasp the impending tragedy of Edward’s
“racial” Otherness.
4.5 The Transformation: From Individual to Freak
Although Edward is strongly motivated to gain acceptance, he does not particularly want
to change himself or his appearance. Rather, his social adaptation is mostly driven by others’
well-meaning but rather ridiculous expectations. Especially Peg thinks he will fit in nicely, as
long as he wears the right clothes and make-up to cover his awkward physique. However, the
blouse and trousers she gives him are oversized, and her various mixtures of concealing cream
only produce purple smears on his face, making poor Edward look like a strange clown. Other
comic scenes illustrate Edward’s clumsiness with the town’s etiquette, like his nervous attempt to
try and eat peas with the knife and fork Peg has laid out for him, or the cutting of meat, for which
he aptly uses his scissor hands, which is then however deemed unhygienic by others. Though he
has extraordinary talents, he is, as Sampson notes, unable to perform “everyday activities, such as
dressing, using eating utensils, or turning a doorknob.” Sampson cleverly argues that his scissor
hands not just represent physical but also social impairment. However, he unfortunately narrows
Edward’s problem down to a certain psychological disorder, severely overlooking the greater
plight of the film. Linked to a generic reading of racial and cultural otherness, Edward’s
difficulties with normal activities and modes of conduct suitably represent the frustrating
challenges a newcomer experiences when trying to integrate in a new culture or community.
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Edward’s difference is in this respect, unlike Sampson suggests, not a real physical or social
handicap, but functions as such in for him unknown territory. Just as Peg cannot conceal his
scars, his “racial” Otherness cannot simply be erased and Burton shows it is rather laughable and
blunt to expect the opposite.
While Edward stands out in many positive ways, the ignored paradox of his hands finally
puts him into trouble. Although his talents, the “handy” part of his difference, save him from
unanimous mockery, the town’s acceptance of Edward as a “unique” individual is, unlike his
scars, only skin-deep. As Peter Travers notes, “As in Burton’s other films (…), the outsider soon
becomes the outcast, and the laughs are soon tinged with melancholy.” When Joyce ultimately
tries to seduce Edward to have sex with her, he is shocked and runs away. Furious and
embarrassed about having failed in her sexual overtures, Joyce is the first to denounce Edward
and in her revenge she spreads the malign rumor that Edward tried to rape her. On top of all this,
Jim exploits Edward’s affection for his girlfriend, when he makes Kim ask Edward to rob a house
(so he can buy a new car) under the false pretense of retrieving something that belongs to Jim.
The consequences are fatal for Edward, as Jim’s scheme implodes and Edward gets arrested,
while Jim and Kim manage to flee. Although he is soon released from jail by an understanding
and benevolent officer – significantly also the town’s only black inhabitant – his initial
“transformation” from stranger to a kind of demigod immediately proves a bubble. Like one
reviewer aptly sums it up, “Edward faces a public who has a thin veneer of xenophilia over a
deeper core of xenophobia” (Leeper, par. 3). The same war veteran that had encouraged Edward
not to see himself as a handicapped person now refers to Edward as “that cripple.” People no
longer admire his scissor hands for their creativity or uniqueness, but suddenly regard them as
weapons and raping tools, thus switching from an allegedly positive to an outright negative
othering of Edward’s “impairment.” Thus, the film’s denouement steers toward Edward’s
transformation from a supposedly accepted individual into a “freak, a fake, a demon” (Travers).
Interestingly, Edward Scissorhands is a “Beauty and the Beast” in reverse: Burton’s story starts
with Edward’s so-called acceptance, but ends with his demonization.
Peg and her husband are the only ones in town, besides Kim, who welcome Edward back
after his release from jail and remain loyal. Bill, however, ignorantly tries to teach Edward about
distinguishing right from wrong, while Peg also blames herself and their family for having set the
wrong example in their materialist impulses. Both remain unaware of the real cause of the
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incident. In the end, Peg remains proud enough of Edward and after Bill’s moralizing lessons she
leaves it at that. With the upcoming holidays, Peg continues arrangements for her Christmas
party, for which she still intends to invite all her neighbors despite their distrustful attitude
towards Edward, as she naively argues, “I mean as just what we need is just to calm things down
and then everything will just go back to normal.” Jim, however, unsurprisingly spoils everything
and refuses to comply with leaving Edward thus “unfinished.” Due to his abusive treatment of
Edward, he has – finally – lost Kim and so Edward poses a double threat to him as dangerous
“freak” and romantic rival. This way, Jim is placed in the position of the town’s agent, as both he
and the rest of the town get caught up in a racist frenzy and convene to expel Edward. In ignoring
Edward’s real dilemma and the social tensions that his presence has ultimately invoked, Peg and
Bill Boggs thus inadvertently open up the way to Edward’s persecution by the town. As Warner
observes in “Beauty and the Beasts,” “[Edward’s] weapon hands (…) cut him off from the
desirable aspects of the human, which derive from what is perceived as natural, as animal. The
further the cinematic outcast lies from the machine, the more likely his redemption” (11). Even
when Kim utters the supposedly magical words “I love you” to Edward, nothing happens of
course. Not even Beauty’s love can save Burton’s Beast from society.
4.6 Isolation
Unlike the Beast in Beaumont’s fairy tale, Edward finally is expelled instead of accepted. When
Jim comes over to the Boggs’ home in a desperate attempt to reclaim Kim and chase Edward
away, scolding him and calling him a freak, Edward snaps and runs away. As Ansen observes,
“Like many saintly outcasts before him, Edward is too pure for this world, and he becomes
infected with its rage” (par. 4). Roaming the streets of suburbia in a rebellious raid, he tears off
his suburbanite clothing, destroys his fantastical garden sculptures, and constructs a new one of a
grimacing demon opposite the madwoman’s window, “giving a perfect schizo gloss on her
paranoia” (Potter, par. 9). Bewildered and disillusioned, Edward thus denounces the town’s
empty values, and, “as he learns about society whose opinions and empathy [are] as fickle as the
weather, he realizes how much better off he is in seclusion” (Griffin, par. 6). Peg, too, finally
realizes she has “unwittingly [opened] a crisis within the unreal reality of her neighborhood”
(Potter, par. 8) when she admits to Kim:
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You know, when I brought Edward down here to live with us, I really didn’t think things
through. And I didn’t think about what could happen to him, or to us, or to the
neighborhood. You know, I think that maybe it might be best if he goes back up there.
Because at least there he’s safe, and we’d just go back to normal.
When Edward almost gets cornered by a mob of townspeople, Kim is stricken with terror and
emphasizes his only option as she implores Edward, “Run!” Edward is not only forcibly expelled,
with Jim and the town on his heels, but he has also become painfully aware of the town’s
shortcomings and significantly demonstrates he refuses “to prostitute [his] scissors” (Kempley,
par. 9) any longer. Whereas the Beast changed from a powerful brute into an amiable husband,
Edward already was a good character, and becomes disillusioned with his Beauty: society.
After Jim’s tragic death, as Edward was forced to kill him out of self-defense, Edward has
to say goodbye to Kim. She has to convince her town that Edward was also killed, and so she too
can never see him again. Burton thus has revised “Beauty and the Beast” in gothic romance
fashion, presenting two “storm-crossed lovers against the world of social conventions” (Potter,
par. 20). Although he has to return to solitude, Edward is, as Potter analyses, no longer
unproductive in the sense that before his public introduction his “tasks never [extended] beyond
keeping the hedges trimmed in a garden no-one but Edward sees.” Although Edward has not
transformed and was unsuccessful in his attempt to touch others, he has created a meaningful
contact with Kim, expressed by the brief magical moment on his last day in town when he sculpts
her figure out of ice. Back at his castle he continues his ice sculpting, thereby magically
producing snow to fall on Kim’s town and thus somehow maintaining their connection, as the
older Kim professes to her granddaughter, “Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it.”
Despite the fact that “snow belongs to the saddest season” (Kempley), emphasizing the dystopian
outlook of Edward Scissorhands, Edward at least manages to create a significant reminder of
both his love for Kim and the sad truth of his fate. This, in turn, is preserved by the storytelling of
Kim, the only one who knows Edward’s secret. As Potter beautifully concludes, “From the
shreds of these fabrications,” by which he means Edward’s art but which can also refer to Kim’s
storytelling, “snow descends on us all, the snow of our doing – and undoing.” Although Burton’s
revision has resulted in the Beast’s isolation and expulsion, a flickering hope seems to lie in the
power of art, of storytelling, and of fairy tales, to confront and open our eyes.
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4.7 Context and Reception
Just as The Elephant Man could be put into the cultural context of the 1980’s, criticizing then
contemporary ideas of assimilation, Edward Scissorhands can be examined against the light of
1990’s culture, criticizing popular new notions of multiculturalism, as will be explained below.
The film’s reception, however, often failed to see the film in this context, and focused on rather
constrictive interpretations of Edward. Many critics focused on an interpretation of Edward as
both a quintessential misunderstood teenager and censored artist, whose story in this light seems
somewhat ill-purposed to result in expulsion and murder. The film’s critique and Edward’s own
dismissal of superficial suburban values have also prompted understandable comparisons with
countercultural efforts. MaryAnn Johanson, for instance, recognizes in Edward aspects of the
early 1990’s countercultural variant of “Generation X.” Generation X, like other “oppositional
subcultures of the white middle classes,” consists of young people who idealistically denounce
dominant values such as materialism, capitalism and social conformity by opting out of society
(McDonald 220). While a gloomy vision of Edward as troubled teenager, artist and even cultural
outsider can account for his ultimate resort to isolation, it does not underpin the town’s, and
Edward’s, ultimate resort to violence and murder. Moreover, Edward’s story starts from a
significantly different perspective to merely allow an interpretation of him as a teenager, artist or
a sub-cultural emblem. Edward is not an insider stepping out of society, but a “monstrous” Other
entering a new world. At first allegedly embraced, the strange newcomer is just as quickly
scapegoated and expelled when his monstrosity becomes suspect. Therefore, his peculiar looks
and initial deified but unfair treatment by others can be seen to reflect many contemporary
concerns about race and ethnicity.
While many mainstream films in the 1980’s reflected assimilationist ideas and bourgeois
values, the post-Reagan 1990’s produced films that precisely disputed these interests. Benshoff
and Griffin provide the essence of this dialogue as they explain:
Assimilation remains a contested issue to this day. While many people … support the idea
the idea that Americans should strive to assimilate into the dominant (white) way of life,
others find that proposition disturbing. Some people feel that racial and ethnic cultures
should be celebrated and not phased out of existence, arguing that one of the basic
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strengths of America is its very diversity of cultures, and – hopefully – cinematic
representations. (57)
Reflecting the popular notion of celebrating multiculturalism and diversity, according to Davies
and Smith, these films “employed more complex and overlapping constructions of identity” and
were “less interested in resolving difference” (9). Moreover, Davies and Smith argue that
One of the major developments discernible is that the ‘bourgeois ideal’, seen as the
dominant model of inclusiveness . . . , has lost prestige, such that in many films it is
represented as dysfunctional. Instead, identity is increasingly represented in terms of
individuated ethnicity, gender or sexuality . . . . (5)
Burton’s dismissive attitude towards the “American dream” and the Reaganite family ideal fully
reflects this observation, as he proclaims in an interview with Rolling Stone:
In our culture, what you were taught about America in school is the way things should be
– success and family, what they call traditional family values – and things are not that
simple. So when it’s not working, rather than going, ‘This isn’t working, this is fucked,’
people just feel like they are failures.
Indeed, Edward’s individualizing and enriching effect on the town, and the Boggs family’s
ridiculously looking attempts and final inability to assimilate Edward reflect these
multiculturalist and anti-bourgeois perspectives.
However, despite its celebration of difference and critique of cultural homogeneity,
Edward Scissorhands’ does not present a simplistic and optimistic outcome of multicultural
harmony. Rather, it exposes the falsehood of mainstream culture’s “celebration” of Otherness,
which represents nothing more than a mere incorporation and instrumentalization of difference
similar to the treatment white subcultures undergo. Moreover, the film condemns society for the
violence and criminality that result from this racism and exploitation. It even mocks benevolent
social authorities, exemplified by the Boggs family, as their naive overlooking or oversimplifying
the social dilemma of racial Otherness results in a catastrophic outcome. While Edward’s
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neighbors so keenly admire their newcomer’s uniqueness, the tragic outcome points out that their
“open” attitude only hides an ever pervasive racism that continues to “other” marginalized
people. Edward’s individuality and final rebellion against the community parallel Keller’s
observation in 1995 that, while filmic representations of the grotesque Other previously “sought
to establish the basic humanity of the deformed individual (…), films from the past five years
have explored the potential deviancy of this socially marginalized group.” This “deviancy,” or
Edward’s individuality and Otherness, is first seen as exciting but develops into a perceived
threat, which then becomes a real threat as Edward responds to this racism by vandalizing the
town and killing Jim. Edward’s tearing hands thus mirror his eventual disintegration, compelled
by a society that only accepts the Other’s difference so long as it comes in handy.
4.8 Conclusion
Burton’s “Beauty and the Beast” pushes aside the romantic love story in favor of issues of racial
Otherness, as Edward Scissorhands concentrates on a deformed and even non-human outsider
and his attempted integration in an American suburban neighborhood. Interestingly, Burton’s
version begins with the Beast’s inclusion and ends with his demonization, thus operating as a
(racialized) “Beauty and the Beast” in reverse. The film not just shows Burton’s Frankensteinian,
but gentle Beast to be more human than others, but through the ambivalent metaphor of his
scissor hands also stresses his creative individuality and enlivening as well as disrupting
influence on an otherwise homogenous society. Edward’s teenage-like alienation and artistic
character emphasize his sense of social and cultural Otherness. While Peg instantly adopts him as
her would-be son, and the other stay-at-home women prize his styling talents, they respectively
and both catastrophically ignore and exploit his racial Otherness. Peg’s daughter Kim is the only
one in this tale whose attitude, like Beauty’s, changes from abhorrence to real love and truly
embraces Edward’s difference. The ambivalence of Edward’s “talent” and “handicap” expresses
his contribution to, as well as his ultimate clash with, mainstream society. When Edward refuses
to render sexual services to one of his admirers, and the town’s bigoted and jealous antagonist
Jim gets him into trouble with the law, the town abruptly casts Edward out and turns him into a
scapegoat. Burton’s version culminates in Edward’s transformation into a “freak” and his
disillusionment with society’s narrow-mindedness and xenophobia. Although he ends up in
isolation and the film holds no utopian promises, Edward’s confronting fate is connected to a
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fairy tale and as such remembered and passed on between generations. Although reflecting
pluralist and countercultural concerns, Edward Scissorhands is not a “Beauty and the Beast”
story of multicultural harmony and alternative social success. Rather, it attacks mainstream
culture’s popular celebration of difference as merely a feigned interest, belying a perpetual
subordination of others and handy incorporation of difference.
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5. Comparison and Conclusion
5.1 Introduction
The previous chapters examined the revision of “Beauty and the Beast” in American popular
culture, exemplified by the films The Elephant Man and Edward Scissorhands, focusing on the
films’ monstrous outcasts and their construction of racial Otherness. Essential and relevant parts
adapted from the original fairy tale have been discussed, such as the representation of the filmic
Beasts Merrick and Edward, their Beauties, the eventual transformations and the stories’
outcome. Interesting similarities and differences emerged, of which will be given an overview in
the following section.
5.2 The Directors and Their View of Otherness
The Elephant Man and Edward Scissorhands are significantly influenced by the directors’
personal lives and views. Lynch and Burton both show a remarkable fascination with melancholy
topics related to personal alienation as the result of social and cultural wrongs. Although this
alienation stems from different experiences and their interests are personal rather than political,
the films importantly represent existing social hierarchies and dominant civilization’s cruel and
exclusive practices towards marginalized Others. Both films deal with deformed outcasts that
challenge boundaries between normality and Otherness, thereby operating as revisions of the
fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” which famously interchanges these positions. Reflecting their
personal anxieties, Lynch identifies with an alienated Beauty (Dr Treves), whose encounter with
the innocent and civilized Beast Merrick confronts him with personal and social hypocrisy,
whereas Burton identifies with the alienated Beast (Edward), as his encounter with a hypocritical
society eventually leads to social havoc. Although the filmic perspectives in this way greatly
differ, the films are nevertheless similar in their sharp criticism of society’s unreasonable dealing
with Otherness, and precisely this aspect gained them critical applause.
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5.3 Merrick and Edward: Freakish Beasts as Racial Others
The most striking difference between Beaumont’s Beast and Merrick and Edward, is that the
latter two, being malformed freaks that do not transform into princes, inhabit an authentic
physical Otherness and as such are marginalized Others. Whereas the Beast was a powerful male
inspiring fear in the helpless woman that was given away to him, Merrick and Edward are social
outcasts. Merrick is a freak of nature, whose deformity has inspired a great deal of extremely
racist mythicizing in society. Edward is not only deformed, but even unnaturally born, thus he too
represents an extreme form of racial Otherness. However, Edward’s “racial” Otherness is more
complex than Merrick’s. Whereas The Elephant Man stresses Merrick’s basic humanity, as he is
a civilized man like everybody else, Edward Scissorhands stresses Edward’s individuality.
Edward’s clothing, interests and behavior mark him as kind of social and countercultural “freak.”
His sociocultural difference therefore deepens his racial Otherness. Correspondingly, Merrick’s
introduction to society only further stresses his perfect humanity and civility, contrasted with
“normal” people’s impolite voyeurism and even animalistic behavior, while Edward’s initial
inclusion also bears fruits to the town’s otherwise bland social and cultural uniformity. Their
different creativeness is in this respect pivotal, as Merrick produces an astonishingly accurate
miniature copy of a cathedral, while Edward creates wonderfully fantastical sculptures. Both
“freaks” resemble the Beast in the respect that they are foils for false culture, but Lynch’s version
limits this “false culture” to racism and social hypocrisy, while Burton also criticizes mainstream,
homogenous cultural values.
5.4 Society Beauties and Their “Acceptance”
Whereas Beauty was more or less given away, or voluntarily sacrificed herself, the Beauties in
the films meet and acquaint with their Beasts of their own accord. Doctor Treves’ curiosity leads
him to Victorian culture’s underworld of the carnival, while Avon Lady Peg Boggs transgresses
suburban boundaries to find a new customer.12 Both are affected by the creatures they find, and
take up either a humanitarian or maternal responsibility to care for them. Their main interests are
to provide Merrick and Edward respectively with a more humane existence, freeing them from
respectively exploitation and isolation. Merrick and Treves develop a male friendship, in which
12
Kim’s role as Beauty is rather limited and, as explained in the previous chapter, functions only as a romantic aside.
Rather, her mother Peg is the film’s Beauty that finds and takes care of the Beast.
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the emotionally restrained and rational doctor learns a great deal from the sensitive Merrick,
while Peg and Edward develop a simpler mother-son relationship. However, Lynch’s film does
not focus on Treves’s acceptance of Merrick and a congruous friendship, but on the trouble
Treves starts having to accept himself. Confronted with Merrick’s somewhat similar cruel fate in
the hospital and wondering about his own motivations for taking care of him, The Elephant Man
shows Treves grow quite anxious over his humanity, even though Merrick is happy with his
social change. In a way, both Peg and Treves finally start to wonder whether they have done the
right thing in taking Edward and Merrick with them. Peg, however, does not doubt her own
motivations but regrets the fact that she has not considered the consequences of Edward’s effect
on the town and the danger that he is ultimately put in.
Women play an important role in both films. The Elephant Man shows Merrick’s
romanticized perspective of women, connected to his idealized image of his mother. His childlike
relations to women stress his innocence and desire for assimilation, as Merrick completely lives
up to what he thought his mother wanted for him. The women in Edward Scissorhands are
significantly less romanticized. They are not so much charmed with Edward despite his
Otherness, but because of it. In their eyes, his “perversion” is exciting and his scissors prove
more than handy instruments. However, by using him as their personal gardener and hairdresser
they merely exploit part of, and therefore incorporate his difference. Whereas Merrick willingly
lets kind and cultivated women domesticate him, Burton’s suburban beauties instrumentalize
Edward’s scissors.
5.5 The Transformations
In his submissive attitude and urge for acceptance, Merrick greatly resembles the agonizing Beast
who just wants Beauty to love him. Merrick’s overwhelming drive for acceptance and
assimilation significantly distinguishes him from Edward. Although Edward is just as lonely, he
is more desperate for contact than acceptance, and it is the naïve Peg who tries to assimilate him.
While the sight of Merrick’s monstrous body in suit and tie is a little sinister, inadvertently
parodying “normal” people, Edward in suburbanite trousers and blouse looks plain ludicrous. The
makeup Peg gives him makes it even worse. Moreover, whereas Merrick has no trouble acquiring
proper customs, Edward is greatly struggling with social etiquette. Because his “racial” otherness
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is more complex than Merrick’s, Edward seems completely out of place and Peg’s attempt to
assimilate him comes across as unintentionally blunt.
While “Beauty and the Beast” eventually results in marital harmony, neither of the films
ends in a similarly harmonious social utopia. Although Merrick rejoices in his new life, Lynch
obscures his “transformation” from freak to a human being by showing how society has merely
turned him into a mascot and is congratulating its own magnanimity in accepting him. Although
Lynch does not condemn John Merrick’s aspiration to normality, he does criticize society’s
proclaimed humanism as hypocritical. Edward’s town, on the other hand, turns their peculiarly
equipped demigod into a demon, as soon as malign rumor has it he is a rapist and a criminal.
While Merrick’s basic humanity is never genuinely acknowledged, the town’s admiration for
Edward’s uniqueness turns out to be just as shallow. In different ways, both Lynch and Burton
thus show how these Others in the eyes of society remain freaks.
5.6 Unhappily Ever After?: Suicide and Isolation
Although both films ultimately do not result in anything near an equivalent social “marriage”
between dominant society and its outcasts, they end on significantly different tones. Even though
Burton’s story drives towards a climax of horrible violence and Edward’s rebellion, Lynch’s
vision of a “racial” Beast and its place in society seems much darker. While it seems that the love
and care of the hospital and his friends Dr Treves and Mrs. Kendal have finally led John Merrick
to accept himself, and his suicide is not committed out of despair or self-objectifying sacrifice,
the scene of his death sleep is carried out extremely grimly. Precisely because he dies in his (first
and last) sleep as a normal human being, death seems to provide him with the most humane
experience and sole moment of repose. Merrick dies contentedly, but Lynch leaves the film’s
audience behind in a disturbing awareness of a fatal rigidity of society’s social norms that seems
to be as eternal as Merrick’s sleep. Although Edward’s fate is more deplorable (as his rebellion,
expulsion and retreat leave him in a far from untroubled isolated existence), his sculpting work,
causing snowfall, and meaningful contact with Kim still manages to enchant both her and her
audience, as she assumes the useful and instructive role of storyteller. Burton’s fairy tale thus is
slightly less sad then Lynch’s, leaving a glimmering hope of a future where people will be better
informed of and more able to respect each other’s differences.
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5.7 Conclusion: From Founding Myth of Sexual Difference to Racial Allegory
The Americanized revisions of “Beauty and the Beast” as exemplified by The Elephant Man and
Edward Scissorhands have shifted the fairy tale’s target of social critique from gender inequality
and the dilemma of arranged marriages to present day interests for racial inequality and the
dilemma of integration. The Beast’s evolution from powerful male in early animal bridegroom
tales to subjugated racial Other can be explained by Beaumont’s early feminist perspective,
weakening the Beast’s position in marriage in favor of feminine empowerment. The films,
however, greatly differ from each other in dealing with the issue of race, as they reflect diverging
contemporary concerns. The 1980 film The Elephant Man presents a “normal” human being
handicapped by his “racial” Otherness in his aspiration to assimilation, which is enhanced by his
somewhat sentimental and unrealistic rendition as a child. While many other films of the 1980’s
sought to reinforce dominant culture’s superiority by presenting self-congratulatory outcomes of
the successful assimilation of Others, Lynch presents an interesting counter-perspective. As the
monstrous Elephant Man represents a borderline experience of racial Otherness, his ambiguous
assimilation reveals the hypocrisy of 1980’s “benevolent” impulses to humanize Others. The
1990 film Edward Scissorhands, however, introduces the outcast’s point of view and presents a
“unique” individual being both competently equipped as well as hindered by his racial Otherness
in his drive to establish contact. His individualized teenage characterization and artistic impulse
stress the complexity of a racial Other that is ultimately both unable and unwilling to conform.
Although Edward Scissorhands fits in with popular pluralist views of the 1990’s that celebrated
individuality and difference and attacked cultural homogeneity, stressing the harmfulness of
social and cultural conformism, Burton at the same time reveals this popular celebration of
difference to scarily resemble mainstream culture’s incorporation of subcultures, using
“Otherness” for its own convenience. In both films the Beast’s disenchantment, depending on
society’s attitude, does not manifest itself, as racism unfortunately seems to powerful a spell to
break.
55
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