TIM BURTON

By Ken Hanke

Part 1: from Films In Review, vol 43 n 11-12, November/December 1992

Part 2: from Films In Review, vol 44 n 1-2, January/February 1993

Part One

Quite possibly the most visually gifted filmmaker we have, it is high time that we pause to take a serious look at the director's career thus far.

Now that it seems more than a little likely that Tim Burton is about to become Warner Bros.--and by extension, Hollywood's--favorite whipping boy thanks not just to the relative box-office "failure" of Batman Returns, but also because of the extremely vocal parental outrage leveled against the film by people who apparently cannot read words like PG-13 and Parents Are Strongly Cautioned, it is perhaps more than high time that we pause to take a serious look at the director's career thus far.

Despite a certain thematic slightness to most of his work (at least on a surface reading), Burton is quite possibly the most visually gifted American filmmaker of our time with only Woody Allen, Gus Van Sant, the Coen Brothers and, marginally, Barry Sonnenfeld offering any serious competition. (Cases will undoubtedly be made here for Martin Scorcese and Barry Levinson, but I maintain that the mere juggling trick of keeping the camera in a state of a perpetual flux of generally arbitrary motion is little more than window dressing.) More to the point, there is a thematic import--and certainly a consistency--to his work if we bother to go beyond the surface of some admittedly slender and often absurd storylines.

Thanks to Disney's long overdue release of Burton's short, Frankenweenie, it is possible to take the filmmaker's career back a step from Pee Wee's Big Adventure on something other than hearsay. Frankenweenie answers a number of questions about Burton, helps to dispel at least one popular misconception, and makes it very clear why he could not function within the confines of the Disney factory far better than his own statement that he "couldn't draw cute foxes."

Frankenweenie is, first and foremost, a kind of homage to James Whale's horror films. Shot in beautiful black and white against often stylized backgrounds, the little film perfectly captures the stark studio quality of Whale's original Frankenstein, right down to the painted sky backdrops. While Burton has made it clear that he dislikes and distrusts the concept of "being in touch with the child within," this is nothing more than a fantasticated piece of autobiographical work.

Nearly all modern filmmakers (that is movie generation filmmakers) start out (some never get over this!) by imitating films they admired in childhood, but Burton truly takes this a very important step further in Frankenweenie. He rethinks the model film in terms that recall both the early experiences of any kid let loose with a movie camera for the first time, and, more importantly, the essence of transforming your own surroundings into the glamorously mysterious world of the source film. As a result, a pet cemetery becomes a Gothic Whale set, an attic and array of seemingly useless junk is converted into Henry Frankenstein's tower, and a disused putt-putt golf course provides the climactic windmill setting. All this is very charming, but the point is something other than that, as anyone who ever "played out" last night's late show in the backyard of their own childhood can easily attest. We are here very much inside childhood in a way that less ingenuous filmmakers--from Disney to Spielberg--have never quite grasped. Rather than thrusting a child hero into an impossible adventure (though the re-animation of a dead dog is certainly fantastic), Burton transforms the everyday into an adventure in the same way a child does within the confines of his own mind. The results are the product of childhood imagination brought startlingly to life, and are almost certainly of greater interest and appeal to the adult who has forgotten than to the child for whom this personal fantastication is commonplace.

It isn't hard to understand why the Disney people were more than a little taken aback by this striking and unique film. Its simple story about a young boy filmmaker who brings his dead dog back to life is too savvy and lacks the proper ending for the mind-set that brought us Old Yeller. The mere fact that the neighbors (or villagers, if you will) recognize the error of their ways when the dog saves the boy from the burning golf course windmill and help bring the second time dead animal back to life (with jumper cables on their cars!) is at odds with the Disney outlook. It is as if the film was actually made by children, rather than for them. The theory that a film like Old Yeller teaches a child how to come to terms with the reality of death may hold water, or may simply be a measure of a kind of adult "I know what's best for you" sadistic mentality, but it is clearly an adult view. No child would make such a film. On the other hand, a child would make Frankenweenie if he or she had the technical grasp to do so. Indeed, children make this film every day of the week, but only in their own minds. Interestingly, Burton himself recognizes this, since the film-within-a-film childhood home movie, Monsters From Long Ago, is both an on-target recreation of the sort of over ambitious, charmingly inept film children do make, and a deft comment on the innate loneliness suffered by the creative child in that it features no actors, only the child's dog.

Also out of keeping with the Disneyized approach is the film's portrayal of the well meaning parents. Not only do they not know best (the parents in any teenage-meat-on-the-hoof horror film are about as bright), but they are singularly distracted and remarkably uninvolved. It isn't that they are evil. They're merely uninterested until it becomes impossible not to take notice of the situation. In this regard, too, the film is at odds with the studio policy--almost to the point of being subversive.

As the cornerstone of Burton's work, Frankenweenie is both stylistically and thematically important. It establishes him as the logical successor to James Whale in a way that his subsequent films have done somewhat less overtly. The typical Burton hero (the only Burton hero) is somehow outside the realm of society. He is mentally and often physically different than those who make up the "normal" world. This is exactly the case with every James Whale hero (and villain, for that matter), and despite the fact that Whale's attraction to those who are different was almost certainly an extension of his homosexuality, the distance between Whale and Burton is almost unnoticeable. The major difference between the two filmmakers (apart from the fact that Burton is not as yet quite the showman that Whale was) is that Whale could be termed Studio Gothic, while Burton, in spite of often astronomical budgets, would be more properly pegged as Backyard Gothic.

As a filmmaker, Burton is more than slightly at odds with his cinematic brethren. There really is no one like him (just as there was no one like Whale) working in film today, and, indeed, his unique mixture of childhood and adulthood, combined with his empathy for the alienated characters that people the world of his films probably bring him far more in alignment with the more serious side of the pop music world. It is hardly surprising therefore that all of his feature films have been scored in collaboration with Danny Elfman, the founder and driving force of the rock band Oingo Boingo, who, under Burton's auspices, is currently on his way to becoming a filmmaker in his own right.

The connection to Elfman goes far deeper than might be imagined on the basis of filmmaker and film scorer. In interviews, Elfman always speaks of their working relationship in terms of collaboration, indicating that Burton very clearly does not simply hand him an answer print of the final cut and ask him to put music to it. The release of Frankenweenie with its sweeping score by Michael Convertino and David Newman makes it obvious that this is so, since it is but a small step from this to the Elfman scores. It is, however, a very important step. The similarity in approach between the Convertino-Newman soundtrack and those of Danny Elfman is simply in the type of music. Elfman's scores are far more creative, far more in line with Burton's combined sense of charm, irony, and absurdity, and generally just better music.

Elfman himself tends to minimize the connection between his movie scores and his work for Oingo Boingo, but this is at least partly a bit of self-deception. Orchestration differences are not composition differences, and while Elfman's scores are richer and more varied than his rock music, the core of Oingo Boingo is always just around the corner. This is not a bad thing, though, since it is part of what keeps Elfman's work from crossing over into the realm of John Williams' sub-Wagnerian big-for-big's-sake scoring. The blending of such diverse influences as 1930s jazz/pop music with high energy rock and a taste for ornate film scoring produces an effect as unique as Burton's visual sense.

For Burton the connection to Oingo Boingo may well be more pronounced than either he or Elfman would care to admit, especially if one carefully examines Burton's first feature, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. A passing familiarity with the distinctive album cover art that adorns the Oingo Boingo work immediately attests to a striking influence on the design of the film, while an even more obvious design and approach can be found in Danny Elfman's brother's (Richard) 1981 avant gardist film, Forbidden Zone, for which Danny composed the music (including Oingo Boingo songs this time) and even played the part of Satan (or Satan rethought as Cab Calloway in a Max Fleischer cartoon). Richard Elfman's low-budget cult classic, a homage to the world of Max Fleischer prior to the Production Code, is very much at one with Burton's work, even though it is far more overtly sexual than Burton has thus far allowed in his own films. Where Burton was bizarrely out of step with Disney, he would have been quite at home with Max and Dave Fleischer in the early 1930s, and his own "cartoonish" qualities, like those of Richard Elfman, are distinctly more Betty Boop than Mickey Mouse.

It would be unfair to say that Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is a sanitized knock-off of Forbidden Zone. It would also be incorrect, but the connection is undeniably present--not so much cleaned up as made more overtly mainstream. The curious thing about this is that ultimately Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is the more subversive of the two films, simply because it can and does pass muster as a mainstream personality work for the singular talents of Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee Herman). And those talents are so central to the film that Burton's exact creative position on the project is not as easily defined as on his other works. In fact, it is more than a little possible that Reubens had a good deal to do with the hiring of Danny Elfman and the overall Oingo Boingo influence, thereby bringing the composer and the filmmaker together. Whatever the case, the results are quite a remarkable film, and the subsequent artistic and commercial failure of the follow-up film, Big Top Pee-Wee, attests to the fact that Burton was a key factor in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure's success.

The basic concept of the Pee-Wee Herman character is bizarre in the extreme. Presented as a cross between an overgrown child and a seriously demented kiddie show host, Pee-Wee is a nightmarish role model of contradictions. It is impossible for any rational parent to object to his basic decency and the obvious object lessons of accepting one's self, enjoying life, and relying on a generous nature and a good heart.

However, his appearance and demeanour are another matter. Despite a basically sexless pose (to the degree that a pose incorporating the idea of a grown man stuck in a latency period can be construed as sexless), the character insists on wearing indelicately tailored trousers that are quite at odds with his "safe" image. Worse, he wears lipstick and make-up that makes him look like a female impersonator in training, and his relationship with the young boys in his neighborhood is clearly tinged with pederastic overtones. "There are a lot of things about me you don't know anything about," he tells his borderline girlfriend, adding, "things you wouldn't understand; things you couldn't understand; things you shouldn't understand." Long before Reubens' personal legal troubles made this line of thought take on a new resonance, the words carried a curious sense of saying more than was apparent on the surface. Here lies the tantalizing appeal of Pee-Wee Herman. He could not be objected to, yet it was always obvious that he was neither quite "normal," nor quite "safe." (Parents objecting to his irritating voice, laugh, and mannerisms, which may well have been an intentionally distracting smokescreen, were in reality alarmed by something else they either could not or would not see.) Here then was the perfect Burton hero.

Owing to his borderline status as a weirdly androgynous man masquerading as a boy, Pee-Wee provided Burton with a character who successfully straddled the boundary between childhood and adulthood, allowing the director to cross over from the child heroes of Frankenweenie and his stop-frame animated Disney short, Vincent. Moreover, the character's status as someone outside the realm of normal human existence brought him fully into line with the director's innate empathy with the "different." It would be a mistake, though, to take the resultant film too seriously. It is very much a "fun" project and an enjoyably obvious--and quite successful--attempt by the filmmaker to dazzle the viewer and Hollywood with his technical panache. The subversive nature of the Pee-Wee character, the sharp (and again very anti-Disney) insights into the adult world's often imbecilic attitude on how to deal with children (the satirical tour of the Alamo alone is worth the price of admission), etc., are really icing on a cake that exists primarily to make the viewer go, "Wow!"

Burton's stated attraction to the project--that he immediately identified with Pee-Wee's obsessive behavior toward something (a stolen bicycle) no one else cared about or understood--is what gives the film the little weight it has. What remains with the viewer, however, is the insane pop art sensibility of its design, the over-the-top poster-like colors of the photography (which bears no relation to the usual work of cinematographer Victor J. Kemper and must be attributed to Burton), and Burton's boundless creativity in presenting both very original scenes and pastiches of the work of his cinematic ancestors and indeed his own work. The amazing sequence that follows the theft of PeeWee's bike is, in three minutes, a better evocation of Hitchcock (blithely dismissed as "that fat guy on television" in Frankenweenie) than the entire running time of Mel Brooks' High Anxiety. The climactic drive-in premiere of Warner Bros.' film of PeeWee's story is an assured bit of Felliniesque filmmaking. (In both cases, Elfman's score comes through, offering ersatz Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota respectively.) At the same time, there's the purely Burtonesque bonus of Pee-Wee running riot on the Warner lot and destroying the production of a Godzilla movie (complete with Japanese director and crew) that is nothing more nor less than young Victor Frankenstein's Monsters From Long Ago out of Frankenweenie! For that matter, the sequence where Pee-Wee ends up preferring to jump from a moving train rather than be subjected to the further cacophonous singing of a hobo seems more than a little like a satirical jab at Frank Capra's most forced homespun sensibilities. A more assured feature film debut is hard to imagine.

The success of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure led to Burton's more controlled and direct involvement in Beetlejuice, which might be viewed as a greater success than PeeWee's Big Adventure, if only because it doesn't hinge solely on one's taste for--or toleration of--the pre-packaged Pee-Wee Herman character. Unfortunately, this undeniable plus is slightly offset by Burton's obvious inability to give a damn about the painfully dull and normal Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis characters. When the film is good, it is very good indeed, but that is mostly when Michael Keaton, Sylvia Sidney, Winona Ryder, and, to lesser degrees, Glenn Shaddix, Catherine O'Hara, and Jeffrey Jones are in the forefront. He responds well to Keaton's outrageousness, Sidney's sharpness, Ryder's morbidity, Shaddix's prissy snobbery ("Deliver me from L. L. Bean!" sneers Shaddix upon discovering a too, too folksy den, and this could well be Burton's own attitude toward the film's normalcy factor), O'Hara pretentious bitchery, and Jones' hopelessly wrong headed pursuit of a "normal" existence. There is something of Burton in all these characters, but not a trace of him in the romantic leads, and when they take the reins the film lies there and dies there.

The leads all too often threaten to be reduced to buffoons, though some of this is done with engagingly on target satire. That these almost willfully dull characters meet their demise while driving their safety-minded Volvo and wearing their seatbelts is certainly no accident. The problem is that they never seem to grow as a result of any of their experiences, and we leave them pretty much as we found them--a couple of stiffs in flannel and calico.

A mixed experience, Beetlejuice is nonetheless notably more personal than its predecessor. Danny Elfman is, of course, back on hand with an even better score than before. Replacing veteran cinematographer Victor J. Kemper is Burton's own Thomas Ackerman, who had shot Frankenweenie, and the production design is now in the hands of Bo Welch in the first (so far) of three brilliant collaborations with Burton. On this level, Beetlejuice is an unqualified success, if only because it registers as something approaching the mature Burton of his two most recent films.

Part 2 of this article will appear in the next issue of the magazine.

Part Two

There is talk of a third Batman film. It would be a pity to see one of our most original film-makers accepting such an assignment at a time when his work shows such promise.

Beetlejuice is notable for establishing certain Burtonian trademarks on both a stylistic and thematic level. The film's opening, for example, has become a Burton staple--a sweeping travelling shot across a skillfully constructed model that serves to literally waft the viewer right into the film. Burton's approach here is what might be called radical-reactionary, utilizing model work in much the same manner one finds in early talkies like Roland West's The Bat Whispers (1931) and Archie Mayo's Svengali (1931). Perhaps this is merely a small step from the Whalean pet cemetery and golf course of Frankenweenie, but it is nonetheless startling and refreshing in modern cinema where this almost forgotten, visually stunning approach has long been limited to science fiction films and oversized adventure epics where its use is dictated by necessity, not aesthetics. It's interesting to see Burton's careful evolution of the effect. Apparently not quite certain whether modern audiences will accept that which their filmgoing ancestors took for granted (check out the slick, offhand use of models in Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932) and Frank Tuttle's The Big Broadcast (1932)), he stages the effect here as a gag with the payoff being that we are supposed to be looking at a model all along. Lightweight cameras, helicopter shots, high speed film, and generally greater flexibility had replaced the use of models for elaborate travelling shots, despite the fact that this more realistic approach still didn't allow for the full effect of the earlier method, which was often only detectable as model work because we knew the shot was otherwise impossible.

Beyond this most obvious trademark, there is a sneaky thematic undercurrent here that will crop up again and again in Burton's work--and which his earlier work had already suggested. It is significant in retrospect to consider the fact that there is no sermonizing attached to young Victor Frankenstein's re-animation of his dog, no trace of "things men should leave alone," no moral about "tampering in God's domain." In Beetlejuice Burton offers us an afterlife that has no relation to anything religious. "Are we half way to heaven? Are we half way to hell?" asks Geena Davis, only to have Baldwin tell her that their copy of the Handbook For The Recently Deceased "doesn't mention heaven or hell." The afterlife offered by the film is a fantasticated fun house bureaucracy presided over by suicides (the punishment for which is eternity as a civil servant) where a false step out of your assigned space lands you on the Dali-esque surface of Saturn. It's an engaging enough notion, but the point of it all is distinctly that of a secular humanist sensibility. Its inclusion in a comic-fantasy framework tends to allow it to be overlooked, yet it is very much present and quirkily somewhat out of step with our conservative era. Not surprisingly, when Burton makes his first wholly personal feature, Edward Scissorhands, the humanistic subtext emerges with much more force, since the artificially created hero's possession of basic goodness or a soul is never in doubt, and the film's marginal villain is the neighborhood religious fanatic, who is presented as destructive, foolish, and none too bright.

Moral questions of quite a different sort arise in Batman, namely the filmmaker's own apparent discomfort with the fascistic overtones inherent in any superhero. Having originally reviewed this film within the pages of this publication, I now tend to think that I slightly overrated the film's quality in the main (this may be mostly by virtue of the hindsight offered by the two far superior Burton works that follow it). However, I maintain that the basic concept of a film that quite rightly questions the motives of its hero is correct. The Burton-Michael Keaton Batman is a far cry from Adam West's campy TV hero. In his stead we find a deeply troubled individual who is easily as dark tinged as the film's nominal villain. Burton constantly presents him in a questionably heroic light, even going so far as to stage one of the most strikingly mythic images of the character so that he is directly in front of the equally powerful neon sign for Axis chemicals.

Batman is a rich film filled with powerful images and Burton's own sense of fun and cinematic invention. It is also an uneven film as its creator is himself all too willing to point out. The title sequence is a marvel with Burton's camera prowling around, through, and finally out of a sculpted Batman symbol (the Burton travelling shot-model work opening turned into an abstraction), and Elfman's score is his best work for the director up to this time. The opening is similarly assured, but also hints at one of the film's most troubling aspects--the gap between Anton Furst's production design and Burton's own visual style.

Putting aside the pop art day glo colors of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Burton's only collaboration with designer David L. Snyder), the director's signature color is clearly blue (even Pee-Wee hints at this in Burton's now-typical bright blue skyscape backgrounds, and his cool blue night scenes). Anton Furst's was not. Furst's designs are predominantly brown and grey, while the sets themselves are often so smokey as to come across as refugees from a Ridley Scott picture. The upshot is that Batman, handsome as it is, looks like a Tim Burton picture once removed. (Indeed, a case could be made that Barry Sonnenfeld's heavily Burton influenced The Addams Family looks more like a Burton film than does Batman.) Occasionally, the purest of Burton shines through--the travelling shot up Jack Palance's office building, the scenes in the batcave, the Axis chemical sequences, a wonderful trip through a stylized forest at night--but the film's look verges on the schizophrenic if we judge it as a Burton film.

Equally disturbing is Batman's basic inability to suggest that Gotham City itself extends much beyond its single big street set. For a production this big, the film often seems cramped, and the casual use of matte paintings to increase its sense of size don't much help. It is ironic, but not inapt, that two of the film's most striking visuals, the shot up the office building and the trip through the forest, are Burton's reworkings of shots from Roland West's The Bat Whispers. It's almost as though Burton's ability to communicate with Furst and cinematographer Roger Pratt worked best when he could direct their attention to something "outside" his own style, even if that something had already been absorbed and filtered into his personal vision.

Moreover, Burton was clearly uncomfortable with the move to a project of this size with this much pressure attached to it. In this, its amazing that he left his fingerprints on the film as much as he did, and that so much of the work is good and vital. Unfortunately, one of his most accomplished bits of filmmaking was subverted by the film's high pressure advertising campaign. The build up to our first look at Jack Nicholson's Joker is a fine throwback to James Whale's slow build up introduction to the Frankenstein Monster (with perhaps a passing nod to the fire scarred Peter Lorre in Robert Florey's The Face Behind The Mask [1941]). Alas, the image of the Joker was just too tempting for the advertising department so that the careful avoidance of letting us see him is technically impressive, but minus the pay off.

Regardless of any reservations one may have about the film it was undeniably a popular success of almost unheard of proportions--something that is not easy to grasp in light of the fact that it's long, rather slow paced, thoughtful, and as concerned with elegance as action. And, in fact, it does not play all that well with an audience. Having seen the film in its theatrical release a number of times, I was invariably struck by the fact that the audiences grew quite restless (occasionally to the point of milling around the back of the theatre!) during the climactic encounter between Batman and the Joker--the pace of which is perhaps best judged by the title of Elfman's music for the scene, "Waltz To The Death."

What then appears to hold the film together for an audience is Nicholson's Joker, and while this is undeniably a tour de force, it is also perhaps detrimental to the film as a film. All too often there is a sense of the film turning into little more than Nicholson spouting one liners. Worse, his bravura theatrics threaten to swamp the rest of the cast (does anyone really think that Jack Palance wasn't making up for this with his hysterically hammy villainy in Tango And Cash?).

The best of the script lies in its exploration of the duality of Batman and the Joker, and the implication that the hero is just as crazy--and potentially just as dangerous--as the villain. Whatever else it is, Burton's Batman is a universe or so away from Richard Donner's Superman and its progeny.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film lies neither in the script, nor the performances, but in Burton's sense of time frame. The proceedings seem to take place in the present day, but not exact/y. Rather, the film exists in a time of its own that roughly seems to encompass the period from Burton's childhood to the present. Curiously, this skewed presentation of time first clearly surfaced in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where it was used to make a more overt point about Reaganism's manufactured (and one might say Disneyized) hallucination of an idealized 1950s. Just prior to Batman it had surfaced again in Ken Russell's The Lair Of The White Worm--a film with a distinctively Edwardian flavor that is filtered through a clearly 1960s sensibility, yet featuring a villainess with a taste for heavy metal head-banging music and a very modern state of the art CD player. Russell's film, too, seems to be taking a snipe at 1980s materialism, since it is only the villainess who is up to date. Burton's approach differs in that it seems more pathological. Burton's "every time" is less utilitarian, more personal, and mostly used to create to a separate world. The everytime concept did not reach full flower for Burton until his next film, Edward Scissorhands, the director's most personal feature to date and his best.

Edward Scissorhands is one of the most original, striking, romantic, and charming works to come out of American film in decades. Unfortunately, its unique qualities tended to be overlooked on the critical front owing to its fantasticated subject matter and the commercially shrewd casting of Johnny Depp in the title role. (This so nettled some reviewers that the claim was made that it was impossible to determine whether or not Depp could act since he had so little dialogue--a judgment call that very neatly disposes of Boris Karloff's Frankenstein Monster as non-acting, too.)

Interestingly, the film came not from Warner Bros. (for whom Burton had created three money makers in a row), but from Twentieth Century Fox, who seemed more receptive to Burton's personal vision--even to allowing the film to boast its own version of the studio logo (with snow falling on it and without the traditional fanfare). This is even more striking when one stops to consider that Fox, on the whole, has tended to contribute more to popular culture than the art of film over the years. And, despite a quotient of studio sets and the usual Burton model work, the film is largely not a studio oriented project. Shot in a tract housing development (slightly rethought by painting the houses in solid, bright, kitschy colors) in Lutz, Florida (a small town a few miles north of Tampa) with side trips to Lakeland for a very 1960s shopping center location (presented exactly as it exists!), Burton and designer Welch create a kind of generic suburbia that more or less dovetails with the time frame of Burton's own adolescence.

Once again, the apparent time frame is far from exact, and thrown off even more by the film's framing story where an old woman tells the story of the film to her granddaughter. The interior of the grandmother's house is costly old fashioned with oversized furniture and an even more oversized fireplace, yet it turns out to supposedly be a home in the housing development of the central story--or perhaps a child's eye view of one. Moreover, this Grimm's fairy story setting is ultimately shown to be taking place 60-odd years after the events of the film, despite the central film's late 60s-early 70s ambience, which in itself is combined with the more modern accoutrements of CD players and VCRs (and as in Russell's film these items seem to exist solely in the realm of the film's villainous characters). Rounding it all out is the incongruous (especially in geographically flat Florida) Inventor's Castle perched high atop a mountain at the end of the street (thanks to an old-fashioned glass shot). This is the Backyard Gothic of childhood imagining from Frankenweenie with a vengeance. What, after all, is the castle at the end of the street but a literalized version of the one creepy house that seems to exist in every neighborhood, and about which children imagine the most mysterious, fantastic and horrific things? The result is Burton's most successfully realized "everytime."

Apart from the more romantic and fantastic elements of this deceptively simple work, Edward Scissorhands is a gem of suburban observance. Making sport of suburbia is easy, though Hollywood has always tended to aim for a more upscale version of it than Burton does here. Despite its fantastication, this is much nearer reality both as a setting and as a state of mind. Apart from the imaginary castle, there is nothing in Burton's neighborhood that couldn't be purchased in any discount store in America--from the tacky knick knacks that festoon the sets to the bunny Christmas wrapping paper Conchata Ferrell uses in one scene. The minor characters are of necessity rather broad caricatures, but none of them (with the exception of O-Lan Jones' religious looney tune) are fools.

Burton's characters are generally both believable and likable. There is a sense of autobiographical remembrance in Alan Arkin's wonderfully distracted father (a character that seems at least partly modeled on Burton's mother, judging by remarks he's made in interviews). Dianne Wiest's role as the mother in the film is even better. The character in Wiest's hands manages to be absurdly optimistic and nice without ever once becoming irritating. In Burton's view, you have to admire anyone who can go on being the neighborhood Avon lady year in and year out despite the fact that no one ever buys anything from her, while her innate goodness (no sooner does she meet Edward than she decides to simply take him home with her) is leavened with a degree of perception and a ditsy quality that prevents her from slipping into the stick figure boredom of Geena Davis in Beetlejuice. The rest of the adults in the film are pretty much types, but they're realistic types with the vestiges of actual lives outside the plot of the film. Strict urbanites may not recognize them, but anyone who has ever lived in a neighborhood like the one in the film certainly will. The over-sexed, stretch pants clad single lady, the hefty, nosey-but-nice woman down the street, the back-slapping husbands, the upscale family (heard about but never seen), the war veteran who never tires of discussing his shrapnel-ridden leg--all have the stamp of truth on them.

The children are perhaps a bit sketchier, especially on the villainous side. Anthony Michael Hall's character is thoroughly unlikable, for example, and there is some (perhaps justifiable) criticism that he becomes unbelievable. However, the validity of that complaint exists only if we insist on applying objective terms to a subjective fantasy. The popular jock character with the cheerleader girlfriend would seem every bit this ghastly (possibly more so) to an outsider like Burton, whose artistic introversion and gawky demeanor would have made him a natural target for such a person. In subjective terms, Burton knows whereof he speaks. It might be more to the point to criticize the fantasy projection of Winona Ryder's character. Burton's assertion here that the popular cheerleader type would, if exposed to him rather than her boyfriend, have a spiritual awakening at the hands of a sensitive young man like Edward (by implication, Burton himself) is actually more suspect. But this is his fantasy, and there's no denying that he presents a moving, if not objectively convincing, picture.

The title character is, of course, Burton's onscreen alter ego (though to some degree this may be said of the little brother character). Part Frankenstein Monster, part Cesare from The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Edward is the eternal outsider. Created from a combination of mechanical chopping devices and a heart-shaped cookie by Vincent Price's inventor (a character who exists solely in relation to Edward--or perhaps Edward's imagination), Edward is almost classically too good to live. Yet, thankfully, this wondrously creative and imaginative soulful being has a darker side. There is a threat of (ultimately real, if justifiable) violence in his very being--a danger that lurks beneath the surface. Where Burton himself played out his frustrations in drawing, Edward creates fantasy topiary sculptures with his scissor hands--a clear indication that artistic ability is as much a curse (because it makes you different) as a blessing. Burton merely externalizes that difference. That Edward is potentially dangerous when put into society is in itself a comment on the inherent dangers of art and the artist. The best art and the best artists are not safe. They turn things upside down, leave us different from the way they found us, make us see the world in their own skewed fashion. Perhaps Warner Bros. should have studied Edward Scissorhands before entrusting Burton with Batman Returns.

Technically, Edward Scissorhands is Burton's purest, most seamless creation. Nearly everything about it is inspired--from Welch's designs to Elfman's score to newcomer Stefan Czapsky's photography. Czapsky proves here (and again on Batman Returns) that he is exactly who Burton needed to best realize his vision. The skyscapes of Burton's earlier work--aided by the flat Florida landscape which lends itself to angles accentuating the sky as the only interesting "geographical" feature--here become the magical backdrop against which the exteriors are played. The Burtonian blues of the first films are here deeper, richer, purer in the film's studio created sections. There is an effortlessness about the film's imagery that makes its seemingly offhand creation of resonant images that smack of the truly mythic all the more astonishing.

By all rights, Batman Returns should have been a triumph--and artistically it is. The absurd things that have been said about it will fade into insignificance with time. The film will not. Even so, Burton here seems doomed to play out the worst aspects of Edward's dilemma. It's as if Burton's previous work equates to Edward's topiary sculptures and avant gardist hairstyles, while Batman Returns is Burton as Edward after he comes to be viewed as dangerous. In essence, Burton warned us of this potentiality in his previous film, but no one took the hint. The resulting film is dangerous and disturbing--and brilliant.

Gone is the muddy production design of the first film. In its place is a totally convincing stylized center set that manages to convey a sense of being part of a great city, rather than a single huge set that reduces the city to one street. Everything is sharply defined and crisp. As in other Burton works, the accent is on blue, and, like Edward, the film makes canny use of a snowy setting, the better to reflect Burton's blue lighting scheme--and a telling bit of the magically unfamiliar for a Southern California born and bred filmmaker. The cinematography flows in the sequel in a way it never did in the first film. The Burtonesque opening--detailing the birth of the Penguin and his descent into the sewers--carries the sweeping pull-the-viewer-into-the-film opening to even greater extremes. The characters are considerably more complex, appealing, and real than in the first film, which, along with the dark and consistent tone of the film, is the source of the film's box office and public relations troubles.

Undoubtedly, Batman Returns is not a film for four-year-olds-and a damn good thing, too, since any film aimed at a four year old isn't going to be of much use to anyone else. Its PG-13 rating should have been sufficient to warn parents of this fact, but it did not, and the upshot of protest frankly says more about the parents than it does about the film. That young children are going to find the film disturbing (especially in its first violent scene) is to be expected, but this is a hard area to judge in any case. As a four year old child, I sat through Journey To The Center Of Earth without a twinge, but was found cowering under my seat due to a Donald Duck cartoon with a depiction of hell in it (so much for the safety of Uncle Walt on a subjective level!). Moreover, Burton didn't make his film for four year olds. Warner Bros. marketing is to blame for that.

One of the more obscure complaints about the film on a parental level are those directed at the script's innuendo ridden dialogue. And again, Burton is taking the heat, which seems curious since, although he was certainly involved in the development process, he did not write the script. Beyond that, am I to seriously believe that no one at Warner Bros. read this script, viewed any rushes, or saw a rough print? This strains my credulity more than a little. Regardless of this, the film's innuendos are unlikely to be understood by even the most worldly pre-teen (and if they are, it seems equally unlikely that there's much potential corrupting influence on so savvy a child). But perhaps the most curious aspect of all this comes from a comparison of the basic set up of the first film with the second.

In Batman, the Batman character and the Vail character meet, have dinner at his mansion, and promptly jump into bed together. No eyebrows were raised over this. In Batman Returns, Batman in his normal state meets Catwoman in her normal guise, they have dinner at his mansion, and do not jump into bed. Indeed, their love is never consummated. Yet this film has been attacked for its sexual content. The reason, I suspect, is more psychological than actual. Batman gave us as pretty traditional (read: acceptable) lady in distress in Vicki Vail. Batman Returns offers a much less palatable, much more feminist point of view in Catwoman, who transforms herself from victim into self-styled avenger. This is no lady in distress, and, indeed, she ultimately rejects Batman's advances to be Mrs. Bruce Wayne. "I'd love to live with you in your mansion, but I couldn't live with myself," she tells him. It is this attitude, I suggest, that is unacceptable to the reactionary mindset, not any actual physical content. We may have come a goodly distance in our accepting a "liberated" heroine--after all, Vicki Vail was supposedly a talented career woman photographer--but, by and large, this acceptance only exists so long as the heroine takes a subservient role to that of the hero in the final reel. Note carefully, Batman concludes with Vicki Vail playing maid in waiting to our hero, who seems to prefer striking a dramatic pose to riding off with Miss Vail. Batman Returns concludes with Batman rescuing a stray cat, riding into the night with his butler, Alfred, talking about the season of "good will toward men--and women," while Catwoman is the lone mythic figure on which the film ends.

Controversy to one side, Batman Returns is almost pure Burton where its parent film was maybe 70% Burton, and the film is all the stronger because of this, if only because it boasts a single, strong point of view. This isn't surprising. What is surprising is that the second film's narrative is far less muddled--an oddity in that dramatic construction has never been Burton's strong suit, a fact Burton seems only too willing to recognize. To date, none of his films have been actually scripted by him, though Frankenweenie and Edward Scissorhands are from Burton stories, yet they all bear his stamp and are clearly written to his ideas and specifications. In the case of his least personal film, Batman, this is mostly evident in bits and pieces--not all of them good. Burton's work has always shown an engaging willingness to veer off on a digression, combined with a somewhat less desirable cavalier attitude toward narrative. The most glaring example of this is in Batman where--without thought or build-up--Alfred happily waltzes into the "secret" Bat Cave with an unannounced Vicki Vail in tow (a narrative gaffe that invariably sends a buzz of whispering through the audience, and which serves as the source for a withering in-joke in the second film). There is also every reason to believe that Burton is responsible for the slow pace of the first film. In Batman Returns where he was in charge of the development, we end up with a film nearly 15 minutes longer than its predecessor that seems much shorter, moves in a reasonably straightforward fashion, and is constructed for maximum dramatic impact. Indeed, Batman Returns suggests that it is perhaps time for Burton to write his own material.

The effortless mythic quality of Edward Scissorhands crosses over into Batman Returns. The occasionally startling images of Batman are here almost constantly bombarding the viewer, and, in fact, it would be safe to say that Batman Returns is far more closely related to Edward Scissorhands than to its source film. Elfman's score combines some of the original Batman themes with the wordless choir of Edward, while the snow-covered setting clearly links the two. Most interestingly, though, is Burton's concept of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. If we take Edward Scissorhands as Burton's on-screen alter ego in that film, then we must also accept Catwoman as the most clearly defined personification of Burton in this film. Even her costume--sewn together out of an old raincoat--is designed to resemble that of Edward. Again, Burton provides the clue the studio might have grasped--Catwoman is the embodiment of the dangerous side of Edward Scissorhands, and by implication of Burton himself. But where Catwoman goes on a campaign of revenge, Burton merely creates a troubling and, for the studio, troublesome film.

Burton, however, does not limit himself to Catwoman, since he obviously identifies with the Batman and the Penguin as well. The first Batman character was frankly something of a stiff. Apart from his aberrant behaviour and mental instability, his personality was about as interesting as Alec Baldwin in Beetlejuice. This round he is more savvy, more aware of his own quirks, and a lot more fun. Burton could better identify with the Joker, except that the Joker never really became a character. He was stubbornly Jack Nicholson in a purple suit. The script's reference to his aptitude for art seemed more in line with Burton than the character on the screen, while the Joker's claim that he is "the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist" seems equally Burtonesque. In Batman Returns Danny DeVito gives Burton a performance, where Nicholson gave him a stand up routine, and the result is more clearly defined relationship between filmmaker and character.

Regardless, the script is at pains to make another point. In their climactic fight, the Penguin sneers, "You're just jealous because I'm a real freak and you have to wear a mask!" "Maybe you're right," responds Batman. This is the crux of both the film and perhaps of Burton's career. His strong identification with characters who are both mentally and physically different suggests that this is a moment of personal catharsis. Burton as a lonely, imaginative child enmeshed in a world of old horror movies on television could identify with those films' monsters and misfits. He knew he was more like them inside, but, of course, the perception of his parents and the rest of the world was something else again. They saw and expected a normal young boy, since the things that made him different were not physically apparent. It is hardly a wonder that this desire for externalized "freakishness" would find its way into Burton's art. And this by itself is a large measure of what is disturbing about Burton's work in general and Batman Returns in particular.

That this rich, dense, dark film should be the subject of a controversy is as regrettable as it was inevitable. Batman Returns isn't quite as secure as Edward Scissorhands, but it only just misses that mark, and perhaps makes up for it in its disquieting ambience. The worst of it is that its lack of acceptance may well damage Burton's career. There is talk of a third Batman film (which, truth to tell, we need about as much as a Friday The 13th, Part IX), either without Burton, or with a properly subdued and contrite Burton subjugating his own vision to the mentality of corporate filmmaking. Hopefully, this will not happen. It would be a great pity to see one of our most original--and, so far, constantly evolving--filmmakers reduced to this level at a time when his work is looking ever more promising. With any degree of luck or justice, Burton will instead get the chance to deliver on that promise.