“NOT VINCENT PRICE”: HORRIFIC MASCULINE CRISIS IN THE FILMS OF TIM

BURTON

A thesis submitted to the faculty of

San Francisco State University

In partial fulfillment of

The Requirements for

The degree

Master of Arts

In

Cinema Studies

by

Derek Andrew Domike

San Francisco, California

May, 2009

Copyright by

Derek Andrew Domike

2009

CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Not Vincent Price: Horrific Masculine Crisis in the Films of Tim

Burton by Derek Andrew Domike, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for

approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requests for the degree: Master of

Arts in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University.

_________________________________

Aaron Kerner

Professor of Cinema

_________________________________

Jenny Lau

Professor of Cinema

_________________________________

Jennifer Hammett

Professor of Cinema

iii

NOT VINCENT PRICE: HORIFFIC MASCULINE CRISIS IN THE FIMS OF TIM

BURTON

Derek Andrew Domike

San Francisco, California

2009

[FIND ABSTRACT]

I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the contents of this thesis

__________________________________________ __________________

Chair, Thesis Committee Date

iv

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my family and friends, especially Michelle Sanchez, for their love and

support, and for the guidance and assistance of my colleagues and committee. Without them,

none of this would be possible.

I would also like to thank Tim Burton for such rich texts to explore, and for those theorists

who came before me who inspire me daily.

This thesis was written first as an examination of a particularly idiosyncratic director whose

films have received little critical discourse, as well as in examination of the masochistic

aesthetic and looking for other varieties of visual pleasure.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1

“Pleasure in the Displeasurable: The Masochistic Aesthetic and Tim Burton”………………3

“The Years, No Doubt, Have Changed Me…”………………………………………………..9

“I, Too, Am Strange and Unusual”…………………………………………………………..16

“We Don’t Have A Permit. Run!” (The Masochistic-Abject Space)……………………….22

Concluding Statements……………………………………………………………………....29

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………....31

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“His mother said, ‘You’re not possessed, and you’re not almost dead.’

These games that you play are all in your head.

You’re not Vincent Price, you’re Vincent Malloy

You’re not tormented or insane, you’re just a young boy.”

- Vincent (Burton, 1982)

Tim Burton’s filmography is, first and foremost, highly idiosyncratic but has,

thusfar, received little in the way of theoretical attention. Beginning as an animation

student at Cal Arts, his stop-motion animation work eventually led to feature films (his

first feature length film being 1984’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) and continuing on to the

present, his most recent film being 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet

Street.

From his earliest directorial work to Todd, Burton’s work, despite covering

disparate material, produces a powerful discourse on the nature and development of

masculinity. This focuses, particularly, on the transition from childhood to adulthood,

and on emotionally stunted man-children who have in one way or another rejected

traditional cultural mores, to their social or narrative detriment. Abjection, the grotesque,

and a masochistic aesthetic all inform Burton’s filmic discourse and appropriately distort

and reject his protagonists. These influences may stem from Burton’s influence from the

horror genre (in particular the monster movie subgenre),) and contribute to creating a

discourse on the discourse textual architecture that informs the paradigm of masculinity,

in particular the conflict between growing up versus attempting to stay a child. This is a

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masculinitye that is, at its essence, simultaneously enforced in dominant norms but highly

questioning of it and is inevitably recompensed into the heteronormative family structure.

For the purposes of my studies, I will be focusing on three of Burton’s films, from

different points in his career: Beetlejuice (1988),) Ed Wood (1994,), and Sweeney Todd:

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007.). This trend is not as evidentweaker but

nevertheless still present in some of Burton’s more franchise-based or science fiction fare

(Planet of the Apes [2001,], Mars Attack [1996], and both Batman and Batman Returns

[1988 and 1992, respectively,], in particular both contain some elements of what I

discuss.). But in these films, from disparate points in Burton’s directing career, contain

the most poignant examples of the general trends of this masculine crisis.

And it is indeed a crisis, for this masculinity is one drawn through the curious

masochistic pleasures drawn in abjection. Masochism is first and foremost, in all its

permutations, a pleasure derived in punishment of transgression of the (paternal) Law, a

kind of transgression that the abject itself is similarly concerned with. It stands to reason

that some instances exist where masochistic pleasures are also themselves abject.

In examining the narrative relationship between abjection and masochism within

these particular examples, I hope to show examples of a larger trend, a larger resistance

against seemingly inescapable forces (adulthood and adulthood’s inevitable result, death.)

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Pleasure in the Displeasurable: The Masochistic Aesthetic and Tim Burton

WBut first, what is Tim Burton’s aesthetic and is it masochistic?

The discussion of this particular kind of masochistic aesthetic has its roots in

Gilles DeleLuze, working against Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten Essay,” in contrast to

Masoch’s “ Venus in Furs .” Carol Clover, in her “Eye of Horror” chapter inof Men

Women and Chainsaws goes into details about applying this [what is “this” – a

masochistic aesthetic?] aesthetic to horror, the slasher subgenre in particular, and Gaylyn

Studlar’s In The Realm of Pleasure makes similar arguments looking in particular at the

films of Marlenea Dietrich-leading films of Josef Von Sternberg.

The relationship between the abject and this particular masochistic mode, which

proposes a desire to reintegrate with this pre-Oedipal oral mother, might seem somewhat

contradictory. Abjection is a phenomenon primarily concerned with anxiety about the

solidarity of the self, and dissolution thereof might seem at odds with the desire for

reintegration that this masochism proposes. But, although not entirely logical, these

seemingly conflicting desires (solidarity versus incorporation) can exist side-by-side,

even as the masochistic subject might desire incorporation;, there is a reluctance, to some

extent, a resistance, which lies in this abject compulsiondesire to separate.

It is worth repeating and reinforcing the idea that Tim Burton’s filmography is not

as much horror as influenced by horror. They are arguably better described as “horror

masquerading as…” another genre: (comedy, biopic, and musical for Beetlejuice, Ed

Wood, and Sweeney Todd respectively. The one Burton film that seems to have nodoes

not fit neatly into any one genre hybridity is his 1997 Sleepy Hollow.)

9

Barring the simple syllogism – (assuming Tim Burton has a horror-influenced

aesthetic, and accepting Clover’s argument that horror i’s influenced byrooted in

masochism, and thus drawing the concludingsion that Tim Burton has aemploys a

masochisticm-influenced aesthetic,) which holds true on a basic logistical level, – one can

also see the importance of suffering in Burton’s work. Suffering is important both in the

physical acts of pain perpetrated, but also in the social suffering of the outcast

protagonists. Although at times highly pleasurable for purely aesthetic reasons, there is a

certain schadenfreude that permeates Burton’s work, as we watch people suffer (many of

whom we want to see suffer).) Although that desire may initially seem sadistic (and in

fact might be a more traditional view of spectatorship in Burton’s films),) this is not a

purely sadistic gaze of scopophilic pleasure in the suffering of others. It is not assumed

here that Burton’s films are not totally without sadism, but that it is not the principal

device at work. Pleasure comes here from the suffering of those characters who we

identify with, and from their eventual punishment. Tim Burton’s protagonists typically

do not win in the traditional sense of the term, and none of these characters have any real

victory (the titular lead for Beetlejuice is prevented from performing the transgressive act

of staying permanently in the living world and forced to live as he was from the

beginning, essentially trapped between the worlds of the dead and the living,1, Sweeney

Todd is murdered, and Ed Wood is resigned to a postscript of alcoholism and eventual

death).)

1 If one is concerned for the Maitlands, or Lydia, who might appear for all narrative and schematic purposes the protagonists of the film, they are allowed an, at best, tenuous resolution, but in terms of where the locus of interest seems to lie for filmmaker and audience is in Beetlejuice himself.

10

An aspect Clover in particular zeroes in one as a feature of the horror narrative,

the compulsion to repeat, to “retell the same stories decade after decade, sequel after

sequel – stories that are often age-old and close to worldwide to begin with” has its routes

in a psychological process “Wiederholungszwang,” which is defined by Laplanche and

Pontalis as an “ungovernable process originating in the unconscious…” where a person

“deliverately places himself in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old [but

unremembered] experience” (p78.) Clover notes that Wiederholungszwang “thus has its

roots in unpleasure.”[citation] Laplanche and Potalis, note that Wiederholungszwang has

its roots in historical suffering – a suffering that has more or less been sexualized as

“erotogenic masochism.”[citation]

Burton himself has a strong compulsion to repeat, often retreading onreturning to

previous properties (barring his shorts, Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before

Christmas, all of his other projects are based on pre-existing properties,), as well an

upcoming project like a remake of a short film Burton made while still in art school

(Frankenweenie.). With that in mind, perhaps the masochistic, as traditionally rooted in a

genre and relying on a condition often linked therein, can then almost assuredly influence

his aesthetic.

But we must be careful not to confuse our terms. Masochism has been defined

and redefined by various scholars. Laplanche and Pontalis, as psychoanalysts and

disciples of Freud, are more interested in what Silverman terms “feminine masochism,”

which is rooted primarily in Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” essay, and the (male)

masochistic subject’s dream of being his mother being beaten and achieving pleasure by

first becoming the father beating the mother and (according to Freud) identifying with the

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mother. Deleuze’s theory, grounded in the original Masoch novels (like Venus in Furs,),

instead does not discuss identification with the mother, but, rather, a fear of Selfhood

being devoured by the “oral mother.” The relationship between (male) child and mother

does not lie as much on identification as it does on desire for her, a desire that is

forbidden and is supposed to be resolved but can permeate other aspects of the psyche, as

it does in this instance. The masochistic oral mother here is not castrated and remains a

central figure of authority, unlike the post-Oedipal mother who is deemed subservient to

the patriarchy.

This physical resemblance Todd and Beetlejuice share (which will be touched on

in a subsequent section),) also calls to mind Burton’s own appearance (pale with frayed

hair.) This kind of commonality might show some kind of link between filmmaker and

protagonist, again fitting into the highly subjective nature of the kind of masochistic and

abject power plays at work here. Similar to Ed Wood, who struggles (and fails) to make

the kind of movies he wants to make in an uncaring Hollywood, these films could also be

seen to be a vindication of the freewheeling individualistic artist. However, even keeping

in mind that spirit, it is never the place for these artists to overcome their obstacles.

There is no real victory for Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Todd, or any other Burton protagonist

other than the most temporary. The victory for them, and for the audience as well, seems

grounded in the pleasure achieved struggling, in failing, the narratives are essentially

boundless and exist primarily to showcase the warped protagonists and their own

challenges.

In examining this kind of pleasure in displeasure, we can also see the highlights of

a visual pleasure rooted not in scopophilia and sadism, as traditionally asserted, but rather

12

in exhibitionistic spectacle. The hierarchy of the gaze, men as bearers of the gaze

looking at women, seems to break down. The male characters in Burton’s films, for all

their spectacle (singing, joking, wearing drag, etc.) are, as appropriate to masochism,

soliciting the gaze and calling to attention their loss and meaning from the Otherlack.

There are examples in each film of the traditional scopophilic power dynamic where a

female character is positioned aswoman looking into the scene of the transgression, of the

site of the future problem. In Beetlejuice, Lydia stares in with her camera into the open

attic window, although both the Maitlands (and by extension the audience) are unsure at

first if she sees anything. Shortly thereafter they see an ad on the TV for Beetlejuice’s

“freelance bio-exorcism” services. For Ed Wood, when Dolores goes to check for her

sweater, we do no’t so much see her looking directly at Wood, but an interesting

subversion. Wood is in bed, facing the audience, while Dolores is behind him in the

sweater. As she looks away, Wood looks towards us, staring out in terror at the thought

of being discovered. In Sweeney Todd there’s the crazed beggar woman, staring at the

smoke coming from Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, muttering to herself and screaming for

something to be done. The feminine presence here is one that is gazing on the masculine,

and on the horrific events related to the masculine;, it is not something of scopophilic

pleasure but rather a look of horror.

Carol Clover writes about the use of eyes in horror films: “the eye of horror works

both ways. It may penetrate, but it is also penetrated… The open eye of horror is far

more often an eye on the defense than an eye on the offense.” (Clover, 104.). It is a

vulnerable eye threatened, one that could be gouged out or attacked. It is also an

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inquisitive eye, one that is injured by what it has seen. Burton’s work tends to avoid

physical attacks on the eye, so the latter idea seems to be the dominant one.

This mechanic is interestingly subverted in shot-reverse-shot eye on action, a

typical central focus of the gaze. The male protagonists in Burton’s films are often

looking away. Some good examples of this include in Ed Wood when Wood describes

first meeting Bela Lugosi, in Sweeney Todd where they first begin planning their plot

(and spend their time looking at, and considering to prepare, men for their meat pies,),

and in Beetlejuice when Lydia goes looking for Beetlejuice in the graveyard. There are

other examples as well, as if the narrative is desperately trying to create or preserve any

hint of the gaze that might possibly exist. There is a nervousness about the gaze, and

often it’s the women who are doing the looking.

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“The Years, No Doubt, Have Changed Me…”

- Sweeny Todd, Sweeney Todd

The presence of the grotesque is a consistent feature in Burton’s films, no surprise

given his influence of horror in his work, and thus the presence of monsters and the

monstrous, a gateway to the grotesque. There are two kinds of phenomenon at play here:

the first is the straightforward physical grotesqueness in its literal sense with hybrid

characters sharing both realistic and fantastical elements, a trend more noticeable

amongst Burton’s outcast protagonists. However, in the world of the filmic text, the

grotesque permeates every element, elements which instill a sort of terror and dread into

even the characters designated “normal” characters. Of the two types of the grotesque

that [FIRST NAME] Dorrian outlines, combination applies primarily tofor the

protagonists (as mentioned in terms of hybridity),) however, distortion will play a part for

both the normal and the abnormal alike.

Beetlejuice’s hybridity stems from his relationship between the living and the

dead, but, barring in addition to his blatant and explicit grotesqueness as a walking

corpse, there are other elements at work. He seems the most capable of interacting in

both the worlds of the living and the dead;, in fact, he’s the only character to actually

speak with both living and dead characters. Also, through his highly ritualized linguistic

summoning, he is able to physically transition from the world of the dead to the world of

the living, a feat that seems to be extremely difficult for other characters. For example,

the Maitlands in their one attempt near the end of the film seem to disintegrate from their

normal non-decayed appearances to brittle cadavers, while Beetlejuice is never worse for

15

wear. This also plays into the other living dead displaying some distortion of the body

reminisecentreminiscent of how they died, visible markers of death like open still red

wounds, charred bodies, shrunken heads, or having the same shark that ate a scuba diver

still consuming his body save for his feet. In these displays of hybridity, Beetlejuice

shows his grotesque nature.

Ed Wood’s grotesqueness primarily applies through his transvestitism, exhibiting

traits of both genders in one, and although identifying as male, still enjoying wearing

women’s clothing (often to the shock and dismay of many of those around him).) In this

way, he might seem a literal representative of the Oral Mother, but it falls into more

masochistic grounds. Wood’s pleasure in transvestitism seems to come to him from all

the ways Silverman discusses the masochist’s pleasure. Similarly, Wood’s general circle

of friends seems something of a menagerie of freaks and rejects, with a literal transsexual

(Bunny Breckenridge, although he spoke often about the procedure but never began it),)

and people who had otherwise been fringe elements of the Hollywood scene (tThe

Amazing Criswell, and at the time long out of favor Bela Lugosi.). They are a group of

symbolic “monsters” (in the sense of the social acceptance) making monster movies.

Even barring setting-aside his relative normalcy, Wood’s macabre tastes add a

certain morbidity to the film, which opens first on Criswell rising from a coffin, and then

a run through a miniature cemetery with each actor’s headstones, blurring the distinction

between life and death (which ties also into the latter scene of Bela Lugosi trying

coffins.).

In Sweeney Todd, on the other hand, this grotesqueness is not as blatantly

obvious and is much more stylized, generally attempts to mar or scar an otherwise

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beautiful, perfect, or “untouched” human form. People have things that, although

commonplace for Victorian England, seem grotesque to contemporary viewers: twisted

teeth, thick-lidded bags under the eyes, premature shocks of stylized hair, excessive

pallor, feminine bodies squeezed into corsets, that the grotesque comes into play: they are

bodies twisted and shaped, molded almost, into their final bizarre forms. But they are

forms that seemingly have been designed, which helps to simultaneously (depending on

how its down) mediate or heighten the kinds of changes the body undertakes.

Discussing the victim-hero characters in horror films, Carol Clover notes the hero

is also, “always understood as implying some degree of monstrosity,” (Clover, 4.).

Sweeney Todd is probably the best example of Burton playing with this particular kind of

character type. Johnny Depp is a reoccurring actor in Burton’s films best known for this

sort of part, as the tortured monster in Edward Scissorhands, the sexless investigator

Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow, or even the disturbingly chipper titular Ed Wood or

Willy Wonka as the reoccurring center of these masochistic abject fantasies, although the

details of the exact scenario may change, the rest often remains the same.

Helena Bonham Carter has a similar look as Mrs. Lovett. She is extremely pale,

with a mop of frizzy dark hair, and the same dark bags under her eyes as Mrs. Lovett.

Although other characters might seem pale or caricatured, but none more so than Todd

and Lovett. This mark may link her to Todd (or as co-inhabitant of the place of their

eventual crime,) or, more explicitly, like the Mark of Cain, a marker of their criminality.

The resemblance here between Todd and Lovett and Beetlejuice (pale skin, frazzled hair,

17

dark bags under the eyes) is noteworthy, cementing their connection to morbidity in their

shared signification with corpses.2.

At the end of the film Toby, a street urchin who moves in with the two as they

begin their venture (after killing his previous master,), kills Sweeney Todd at the film’s

climax, he shows the same pallor and heavy bags under the eyes as Todd and Lovett.

Prior to this, and Toby realizing his complacency in the crimes of Todd and Lovett, he

does not show this extreme paleness or condition. It is also curious, then, to think of the

three as a kind of impure or improper family. A family that, instead of being centered

around life or procreation (Todd seems, at best, unaware of Mrs. Lovett’s romantic

overtones,) is based on death. The only thing that is produced by this improper family

are these corrupted pies.

But no one is safe from this corruption. The mocking ridicule the so-called

“normal” individuals in Burton’s textual worlds shows implicit and implied

grotesqueness in those who seem the most normal, even as it showcases the differences

of its protagonists. Even for Lydia in Beetlejuice, when she quotes the Handbook for the

Recently Deceased, “The living tend to ignore the strange and unusual ’… I too am

strange and unusual,” there is some demarcation of strangeness, of grotesqueness, in even

the most mundane and banal characters, elements left unignored[?] within the narrative

world, bizarre commonplaces that make the world of the ordinary seem far from it. The

distortion they suffer is not as immediately physically visible, but is one of mental or

spiritual distortion, of a human psyche stretched in such a way that it becomes almost

unrecognizable.

2 More on Todd, Lovett, Beetlejuice, and their resemblance to Tim Burton on pages 5 and 6.

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In Beetlejuice, besides the recently deceased Maitlands (who are still acclimating

to their state of death,) the only other example of normalcy would be Lydia’s family, the

Deetzes. However, coded as New Yorkers (a sculptor step-mother and investment banker

father,) they seem as different and bizarre to the Maitlands as Beetlejuice does. Similar

markers of differences, other kinds of aberrances, mark or marrmar taints the otherwise

normal characters of Burton’s world. Interestingly, Delia is Lydia’s stepmother, as a new

part of that family, that seems to introduce these bizarre elements, almost as if a blended

family or second marriage could be a type of grotesque experience, (a family missing a

component and having something dissimilar attached in its place.) Her abstract

sculptures call to mind twisted organic forms, which Beetlejuice subsequently animates,

one resembling a brain attached to a rock, dragging itself along, and the other aligns its

spines to the ground to walk like some kind of insect, each one seems almost a twisted

parody of the represented world of the natural. She’s also involved in the Bohemian New

York art scene, and brings in the Otho character, himself existing outside the family

structures and, as a gay character, is coded as one of the “strange and unusual” people

who seems more sensitive to the paranormal activity in the house. By the end of the film,

when the Maitlands and the Deetzes reach some kind of symbiosis, Delia’s shows off her

latest creation, a stair banister made in the likeness of Beetlejuice (when he had

transformed into a giant snake and threatened the family.). This might show that, using

these two mediating figures (Beetlejuice more on the side of the dead, and Delia on the

side of the living,), that there can be a way of embracing, attempting to reintegrate and

recompense, a possible happy ending and conclusion for at least that family, although this

happy ending is, as noted earlier, one denied to Beetlejuice.

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Although the cast of characters Ed Wood surrounds himself with might be seen

most visibly as freaks, the entire studio system in Hollywood, populated primarily by

overweight sweating men in suits, are also monstrous in their own way. From the cigar-

smoking executives hysterically laughing during the screening of Glen or Glenda, or the

regional distributor screaming on his phone, these Hollywood moguls and businessmen

seem no more human than the monsters in Wood’s movies. Their physical distortions are

minor, but these people are still presented as something aberrant or bizarre, like the

characterization of many Hollywood executives who make their livings from art but are

reluctant or fearful of just how it works, and seemingly unappreciative of Wood’s

individuality or creativity.

In Sweeney Todd, on the other hand, the most grotesque characters besides Todd

and Lovett themselves embody the patriarchal normalcy. First, we have Judge Turpin

and his agent, Beadle Bamford. They are agents of the law, and as such, agents of

patriarchy. They are highly defined by external relationships and circumstances, both to

their functions within the justice system, and for their hypocritical relationship within.

For Turpin to his ward (Todd’s daughter) Johanna, there is an improper, borderline-

incestuous, attraction that, after she spurns his advances, he leaves her in Bedlam. As for

Bamford, his first major action on screen (besides leering next to Judge Turpin) is

attacking the young sailor Anthony on Turpin’s orders. Both men speak about upholding

the law, but seem incapable of preserving it. Amongst their other acts, Turpin acts

without impunity in his treatment of both Todd’s wife and daughter, and most damning,

is their seeming inability to even notice the implicit murder plot.

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Both are physically distorted in minor ways, Turpin seems to be almost always

disheveled, the Beadle is rotund with cross-eyes and a crooked tooth, although this

doesn’t compare to the more extreme appearances of Todd and Lovett.

Another example of this is with the rival barber, Pirelli, the first of Sweeney

Todd’s victims. If Turpin and the Beadle are more examples of hypocritical normalcy,

Pirelli is a complete sham. An Englishman who has adopted an elaborate persona as an

elixir-hawking celebrity barber, “Pirelli” is violent, short-tempered, and manipulative, as

illustrated right before his murder trying to blackmail Todd after being humiliated by him

earlier. If Turpin and the Beadle are hypocrites, Pirelli is an example of crime run

amuck, or a blatant criminal who remains unpunished and seems to flaunt his immorality

even as he maintains only the slightest façade of propriety. Similar to Turpin and the

Beadle, he also has some minor physical distortion: his tight bright blue costume (with

long vertical stripes along the side) and curled mustache seem to exaggerate a sense of

thinness. However, like Turpin and the Beadle, Pirelli’s distortion is more spiritual than

physical.

Burton seems inpreordinately interested in the monstrous, finding the hints of the

grotesque (and by extent the monstrous) in nearly every aspect ofthing in his fictive

worlds. What that might mean will be further explored in the idea of the Masochistic-

Abject Space.

Noteworthy, for the link between the grotesque and abjection, Kristeva notes that

“the body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper to be fully

symbolic.” (101.). While no speaking body is fully symbolic, hence Kristeva’s instance

upon the heterogeneity of language, what makes Burton’s (masculine) bodies monstrous

21

is that they expose the traces of the bodies indebtedness to nature, to the pre-symbolic,

These bodies then are bodies that are not fully symbolic and, thus, can exist in a pre-

symbolic state, like that proposed by Deleuzean-style masochism.

22

“I, Too, Am Strange and Unusual”

- Lydia Deetz, Beetlejuice

Abjection, as outlined by Julia Kristeva, influences materializes in the overall

thematic material of Burton’s work. First, in the choices of physical subject matters (the

material abject of difference,) as well as in the idea of abject characters (often

transgressing Symbolic law,) these elements further reinforce the problematic elements of

the narrative, as well as provoke the kind of powerful responses related to suffering.

The material abject, those things that remind us of the limits of life and the human

body, are present in Burton’s films, things like corpses (animate, in the case of

Beetlejuice, or not, in the case of Ed Wood or Sweeney Todd,), blood (especially true for

Sweeney Todd where blood seems to flow in excessive amounts,), and unclean foods

(again Todd is an excellent narrative-focused examine, but Beetlejuice is often seen

eating cockroaches.). And this abject material abject would provoke a greater sense of

unease except it is often mediated through symbolic language (as is true of many films,

horror and otherwise, or other artforms that cannot always project the sense of dread,

disgust, and limitation, one can experience at seeing a corpse or similar moments of

material abjection.). This is definitely an important part of the focus of Burton’s work,

but it is on a symptom of the larger symbolic power play at work here.

In addition to the abject material abject, the embodiment of the milk skin Kristeva

describes, the , we have more of a moral or character abjection, which connects to her

connection between the abject and Biblical abomination, the abject as a ritualized

distancing and rejection from the pre-symbolic mother towards language and the

23

symbolic order of the father. Burton’s protagonists, in addition to this previous kind of

abjection, also are trying to realign themselves within the symbolic world.

Although primarily an anarchic figure, Beetlejuice is just as bound by rules as

anyone else. As Juno the caseworker notes, he can’t materialize “unless you say his

name three times.” Beetlejuice himself, wanting to exist both in the lands of the dead and

the living, needs to be bound by marriage in order to do so without the use of ritual and

language. As Beetlejuice himself notes, “it’s not my rule, come to think of it, I don’t

have any rules.” Likely unintentional, its here that the crux of the matter is laid, it’s

through a move away from the mother (the abject-masochistic womb-space of the

afterlife) through the symbolic and ritualized activity marriage that Beetlejuice would be

able to mediate and eventually show dominance over the feminine. The only proposed

break from his existence, trapped in a stifling and bureaucratic underworld, and from his

suffering is through this new stasis, however, it isn’t to be, and Beetlejuice’s suffering,

even if made light of, is there.

Ed Wood might not seem as much of a transgressive in terms of defying the

divine law (other than blending the boundary of Self, both with his missing teeth and his

transvestitism.). However, it is in the language he speaks, of filmmaking, in particular

science fiction and horror filmmaking, where his abjectness is called out. This is not just

in his desire to direct in drag, but in the material itself, and Bela Lugosi notes the

reasoning behind this is to Wood earlier in the film. “The women prefer the traditional

monsters,” he tells Wood, “the pure horror it both repels and attracts them because in

their collective unconsciousness they have the memory of childbirth. The blood! Blood

is horror.” Although we can always call Lugosi’s veracity into question, for Wood these

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words seem to ring true. And these traditional monsters, this form of sacrifice that Wood

proceeds to discuss in his films, are itself the kinds of punitive sacrifices towards Order.

Arguably, however, these traits are to be contradicted, however, with his more

positive character traits: his earnestness and his almost unflagging optimism in the face of

rejection and failure. This might be due to the fact that Wood already deals in the realm

of the symbolic, in more than words or brief bursts, in a whole language that he has

difficulty finding the venue to express, but never the words. Although fractured and

disjointed and seeking wholeness, he is closer to that goal than perhaps most other

Burtonian protagonists, which makes the post-script at the end of the film, about Wood’s

real life alcoholism-related death and pre-mortem obscurity all the more tragic. For

Wood, then, has begun the process of sacrifice to forestall taboo, but he seems incapable

of outrunning it, and thus doomed to failure.

Sweeney Todd’s abjection is rooted in very Western (and Judaeo-Christian in

particular) dietary values, in particular the kinds of dietary distinctions outlined in

Leviticus. His transgression comes, first, as a murderer, as creating the abject (the

corpse) and processing it for consumption into (assumedly) purer bodies.

One interesting parallel worth discussing is the death of Mrs. Lovett at the end of

the film. After her relationship to Sweeney Todd seems to be cemented with the death of

his wife, Todd tosses her into the oven where she burns alive, screaming as the oven door

closes on her. She’s the only character to be disposed of in such a matter. The corpse is

given special priority, every other character who perishes in the film, including Todd, is

killed when their throat is slit. Although many of those characters end up in the oven as

part of a meat pie, Mrs. Lovett is the only character burnt in the fire. If Kristevan terms,

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looking especially at Biblical Abomination, due to her connection with the most impure

or improper element of the crimes of the film (the cooking of human flesh into pies,), she

is the sacrifice to the symbolic order to allow some kind of stasis to return.

At first, this might all seem like a bit of a stretch, given the generally pleasurable

nature of Burton’s films, but how these elements are mediated, however, is where the

more interesting and complicated relationships of narrative and spectator are forged.

Another common trait worth examining here is how language serves as a way of

mitigating or relating with the abject. Beetlejuice is forced to trick people to say his

name three times, Sweeney Todd expresses (fitting within musical genre conventions) his

truest feelings through song, and Ed Wood reveals his own anxieties through the

narrative language of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. In a wider sense, then, genre

itself can serve as the language of taboo forestalling sacrifice for Burton’s films, the

genre “masquerading as” horror to forestall its own sacrifices, to preserve its own taboos,

to laugh at the abject, to preserve it in history, or to capture it through song.

The relation between the masochistic and the abject was touched on most

interesting in Kaja Silverman’s look in Ma le Subjectivity sculinity at the Margins on the

subject of the former. In her examination, looking at the phenomenology of the

masochistic portrayal, she notes the acting out “in an insistent and exaggerated way the

basic conditions of cultural subjectivity, conditions that are normally disavowed.” These

are conditions that are often cemented in abjection: (“meaning com[ing] to him from the

Other,” soliciting the gaze, “exhibit[ing] his castration for all to see,” and “revels in the

sacrificalsacrificial basis of the social contract.”) In an exaggerated manner then, the

masochist, according to Silverman, reveals a gaping psychological wound that is often

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repressed or recompensed in cultural hegemony (or, a “negative inimical to the social

order.”) (Silverman, 206.). In Powers of Horror Kristeva notes, “as in true theater,

without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in

order to live.” (PG #?). The similar function of the corpse to theater, and thus to Burton’s

work (often requiring makeup and masks to enhance the spectacle and resemblance to the

corpse,), shows the sacrifice of the abject, and just exactly what has been thrust aside for

life, calling heed to the very same social contract that the masochist cannot seem to stop

calling attention to. And thus, this display of masochistic pleasure plays into the same

phenomena: the masochist refuses to be culturally recompensed from the “damages” of

abjection.

But the greatest connection between abjection and Deleuzean masochism is found

on page 101 of Powers of Horror, in particular discussing the nature of childbirth, talking

about the fantasy of anal birth, a fantasy:…

“…which links him to the ab-ject, to that non-introjected mother who is

incorporated as devouring, and intolerable. The obsession of the leprous and

decaying body would thus be the fantasy of a self-rebirth on the part of a subject

who has not introjected his mother but has incorporated a devouring mother.

Phantasmatically, he is the solitary obverse of a cult of the Great Mother: a

negative and demanding identification with her imaginary power.…”

This “Great Mother” Kristeva describes here seems only visible in half-forgotten

glimpses for Burton. There are sparse representations of mothers (i.e. women who have

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born children) in Burton’s films, the suburbanite Avon Lady of Edward Scissorhands is a

noteworthy exception, as are the disapproving mothers in Mars Attacks and Corpse

Bride, but most children in Burton films appear to be motherless. In fact, the anal self-

rebirth phantasy seems just as valid a reasoning as any for their creation, since sex and

procreation, unlike death, is a subject not gleefully breached in Burton’s work. These

non-mother female characters tend to absorb a great deal of, possibly psychologically

transferred, hostility, either characterized as rude or cold and unsympathetic (like Deelia

Deetz in Beetlejuice, or Dolores in Ed Wood,), or flat-out killed by the film’s end (Mrs.

Lovett tossed into the oven at the end of Sweeney Todd.).

Earlier on Kristeva also notes abjection is often “placed or displaced” by

“laughter” and joissance. Which would fit into the idea of Burton’s films being

pleasurable. Burton often relies on a morbid dark sense of gallow’s humor;, darkly comic

elements are often present in his work, with traditionally dark subject matters like murder

and death, disease, drug addiction, being made light of. But although it is thought of as

funny and humorous, this humor is more of an intellectual sign, like Kristeva’s example

of the flatline of an encephalograph to signify death, and not an actual referent of humor.

It links to the actual emotion of humor, but this kind of dark comedy is to cerebral to

provoke real laughter the way more direct comedies might.

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“We Don’t Have A Permit. Run!” (The Masochistic-Abject Space)

- Ed Wood, Ed Wood

Trying to tie Tim Burton’s work to Deleuze’s particular theory of masochism,

linked to a pre-Oedipal “oral mother,” might seem at first to be a difficult prospect.

Mothers are, as a whole, few and far between. The women in Burton’s works tend to be

childless, as though the very thought of making that terrible distinction between woman

and mother (or desire and mother) provokes such crisis that it must immediately be

negated, repressed. But, in terms of psychological repression as much for physical

repression, something cannot be displaced without producing some kind of rupture.

For Burton, then, the desired masochistic mother has been pushed to the side, into

the very spaces of the film itself. The DeluzeDeleuzean oral mother is thus not so much a

person as a space, something boundless and unrepresentable, and stands not only for the

maternal, but also, as a masochistic nexus, stands in for the paternal Law that must be

repudiated but ultimately is reinforced. These spaces are initial sites of conflicts, like

Sweeney Todd’s London, Beetlejuice’s afterlife, and Ed Wood’s Hollywood, but,

ultimately, each is repudiated for their attempts to transgress normalcy and is inevitably

co-opted or destroyed, even if via postscript.

There is a relationship, then, between abjection and masochism (in the

transgression of Law, abjection in the construction of law (and, in particular, patriarchal

law,), masochism in the pleasure we receive for watching those transgressors invariably

being punished.). This relationship between the strict regiments set about Kristevan

Abjection, and the pleasurable displeasure of suffering brought about by its transgression,

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in DeluzeDeleuzean masochism, also brings about a sort of bizarre marriage between

patriarchy and the devouring feminine.

This marriage, if you will, between the Oral Mother and Patriarchal Symbolic law

might seem at odds, but since the Oral Mother is a pre-Oedipal one and, thus, an

uncastrated one, she can claim the same phallic power than the patriarchal law clings to.

This marriage between the symbolic, physical, and mental, dimensions allows the

psychodrama to play out through allegory, almost like a dream. Appropriate to the

masochistic phantasy, however, this is one that can be endlessly repeatedly, with changes

of scene dressing or details, but remain a similar scenario.

When describing Proust, Kristeva writes, for Proust “that if the object of desire is

real it can only rest upon the abject, which is impossible to fulfill. The object of love

then becomes unmentionable, a double of the subject, similar to it, but improper,

becomes inseperableinseparable from an impossible identity. Loving desire is thus felt as

an inner fold within that impossible identity, as an accident of narcissism, ob-ject, painful

alteration…” and similarly how “Sade’s scene integrates: it allows for no other, no

unthinkable, nothing heterogenous.” (Kristeva 94.? – this citation I believe is from page

21) Masochism, on the other hand, calls to existence the existence of the Other;, in fact

flaunts our repressed unspoken requirement on the Other. These spaces are needed,

because they are the site of origin for this trauma, the bizarre characters of Burton’s films

canno’t make sense out of the context of their own bizarre worlds.

By examining some of the settings of these films, there are some startling

similarities. The first of these being the importance of home, and of traditionally

feminized spaces made simultaneously terrifying or inexorable. Haunted houses,

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Hollywood sets, and mixtures of mortuary, abattoir, and kitchen each lend their own

touch to this abject space.

This construction makes particular sense when examining both the

DeluzeDeleuzean masochistic scene and the abject scene because both concern infant

development. To the perspective of an infant the immense body of an adult mother

would seem all-enveloping;, it was the initial site of genesis for the self. The child is

nursing on the mother, dependent on her for existence, with perimeters beyond the

infant’s ability to trace. We lack the capacity for speech (in fact, the symbolic processes

of language arise later according to this theory,), so the infant is incapable of knowing or

understanding the mother at this point. If the protagonist by extension is that infant, the

mother couldn’t exist in an inter-character relations between two individuals, the mother

would have to be something desired but unknowable and unapproachable, an object.

Abject.

In Beetlejuice, barring the beginning and ending of the film, which show people

traveling to or from it, the majority of the action is set in the Maitland’s home or in the

Underworld connected to it. Even if these spaces are vastly disparate (the doorway to

Saturn that exists for the Maitlands should they try to leave, or the town-in-miniature in

the attic that Beetlejuice routinely haunts.). For this story, the dominating space is this

haunted house, which, although it is not unbounded and infinite in terms of its space and

its scope, seems to entirely contain the entire narrative universe and the action therein.

Even those parts of the outside world (the nearby town) can be found inside the house,

and ways in and out are made as easily be drawing a chalk outline of a door and knocking

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three times. The house, like the Symbolic Order and the repressed Oral Mother, are

things that cannot be escaped even partially without ritual and recompense.

Hollywood has been the focus of the movie industry’s own self-reflexive

omphaloskepsis on multiple occasions, especially looking at the post-Depression/pre-

television “Golden Age” of the industry. Ed Wood, starting slightly before the release of

Glen or Glenda (Wood, 1953,) chronicles the film industry’s underbelly, showing the

typically neglected world of the smaller-scale distributors, the backlot, backstage, or the

secretarial pool, with only fleeting glimpses of the screening rooms and major studios.

This is not the traditional signification of the world of Hollywood, of the world of glitz

and glamour, yet, at the same time, it does no’t come across as the seedy underbelly of

corruption and decadence that is the typical alternative. The world of Hollywood for Ed

Wood is the Oral Mother, cold and distant and authoritative, one that continually rejects

the protagonist despite his best intentions.

The opening number in Sweeney Todd has its protagonists darkly intone, “there’s

no place like London.” And the dark world of Victorian London does seem to be unique,

as Todd notes. Even though there are many exterior settings, the sky is oppressive and

gray, the buildings at times seem crooked, leering in on its inhabitants (an extension of

Burton’s own influence from Expressionism,), and the crowding and congestion of

people and things seem, first and foremost, of things trapped inside. Even in the opening

sequences, of the city skyline during a rainy day, the raindrops begin falling, tinted red

like blood, confusing purity with the impure (and vice versa.). One splatters on the

windowpane a dark red. The next shot is inside the center of the action (Todd’s shop,),

first framing a Victorian silhouette-painting turning a dark red and seeming to melt into

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the wall as drops of water-blood roll down Todd’s chair. There isn’t an open window

visible in the shot and no clue as to how the water got inside, except that there’s some

kind of unseen permeability, or the boundary between inside and outside is just as

confused for. As the substance coalesces in the chairs of the gears, it is clearly blood.

The next clips show the (human) meat in the grinder, blood pooling on the floor, after a

shot of the illicit pies baking, the blood falling down the drain and pooling into the

sewers, not clear blue water, but an oily red and black mass that finally pours out a grate

into the ocean.

Although the spaces are, in and of themselves, interesting from an aesthetic

standpoint, what is more interesting is their relationship to these characters. Each is a

product of their place, inexorably tethered to location, be it Beetlejuice to the afterlife, Ed

Wood to Hollywood, or Sweeney Todd to London. And there is a link between these

places and their inhabitants;, almost like a womb, a birthing place of the grotesque, and

those things which, as Kristeva said, stand “outside of God or science.”[citation] Those

who have sacrificed to the symbolic order and the paternal law and not physically marked

the same way as those who have yet to pay. Normalcy then, or the appearances of it,

comes as a sort of symbolic castration, a sort of removal of passion or soul, or a

lobotomy.

Similarly, Kristeva notes regarding the abject that, for that which is not fully

separated, becomes “a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered.”[citation]

Although its literal interpretation speaks for itself, the issue of memory is also just as

interesting. For the masochist, constantly reliving, there would be a constant

remembering, an obsession almost, of the site of trauma, of the place where suffering and

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pain hold their greatest sway, for Burton, the sites of death and failure. Beetlejuice hangs

around in the Maitland’s model cemetery, the symbolic referent where the dead still exist.

Sweeney Todd’s home is a literal abbatoirabattoir, the sole site of the murder and

subsequent preparation of the corpse, although prepared into palatable pies instead of

painted corpses in coffins. Still mediated, but watching the unknowing patrons eat the

corpse-pies provokes a sense of unease,; the transgression one that can be felt (literally

and figuratively) in the gut. Ed Wood, although it never is explored in great detail, has

some reasoning behind his compulsion to dress in women’s clothing, a ritual that one can

only assume has some deep psychological roots (even if he finds wearing angora

pleasurable to the levels he seems, it must notn’t be purely for the tactile response or else

he would have stopped his involvement given the increasing social stigma his lifestyle

has on his work and his relationships.)

What is equally telling is these characters’ desires for a reintegration with the

structures of this space. Ed Wood, despite his failures, longs for acceptance (along with

his desire to emulate the critically acclaimed paragon of traditional cinematic artistry.).

Sweeney Todd, as soon as he returns to London, feels the “once familiar city shuttered to

[him,],” desiring a return to the idyllic past with his wife and child before his conviction

and exile, and can only find succor at Fleet Street, in his old home.

But to what end is this space constructed?. Kristeva actually outlines this in her

section “An Exile Who Asks Where.” The abject non-subject, the deject in her terms,

tries to separate and remove himself, who:

“therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing.

… Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaen, he divides, excludes, and

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without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware

of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself among them, thus casting within

himself the scalpel that carries out his separations. [citation]”

This is not unlike the Burtonian protagonist, who tries to escape his bounds (Beetlejuice

the Underworld, Ed Wood the metaphorical escape of obscurity, and Todd from his past.)

She continues: “instead of sounding himself as to his ‘“being,’” he does so

concerning his place: ‘“Where am I?’“ instead of ‘“Who am I?’” (Kristeva, 8).” For the

space that encloses the deject is excluded is never one, nor homogenous, nor totalizable,

but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territory, languages,

works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines – for they

are constituted of a non-object, the abject – constantly questions his solidity and impel

him to start afresh. … He has a sense of the danger, of the loss of the pseudo-

object,”[citation?] in this case, the DeluzeDeleuzean devouring pre-symbolic Oral

Mother “attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very

moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.”[citation?]

For Burton’s protagonist then, the pre-symbolic self is an Exile Who Asks Where,

and the “where” in this space is a barrier, a buffer, from the self against the non-object

unrepresentable dDevouring DeluzeDeleuzean Oral Mother, the unrepresentable site of

terror. Like the layers of calcium carbonate encircling a piece of grit in a clam to form a

pearl, the abject-masochistic space is something that has been created, it is not real space

in the sense that it is constructed, rebuilt, a symbolic attempt to physically represent a

pre-symbolic mental space (its grotesqueness could attest to its difference from reality.).

It is a site where the abject has not been forgotten only displaced, and even if the

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protagonist wants to break free, or acts like they want to, in reality they are sabotaging

their own attempts, suffering for their own sake for fear of success. They are

constructing the womb, but it is an abject womb, for the kind of anal birth that Kristeva

links to desire to the pre-symbolic mother (the same mother) a birth they struggle to

prolong indefinitely, creating the kind of suffering of trying to maintain self-stasis in such

a manner. The tension here is internal, it is of the subject who, in true masochistic terms,

wants to return to the realm of pre-symbolic, but has created a grotesque mockery of a

half-forgotten world he longs to return to. But for the character, as for the self- longing

for dissolution, there is no real return, but the promise of that kind of incorporation is

equally terrifying, leading to a buffer between devouring and being devoured.

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Tim Burton has, at least in part due to the influence of the horror genre on his

work, a masochistic aesthetic. This masochism is also informed by abjection and the

grotesque, and it leads to the creation of a sort of meta-narrative: a protagonist, victim,

hero, and monster all in one, doomed to suffer and failure, unable to recompense his loss

and rejoin into the patriarchal and symbolic order. The cruel, devouring Oral Mother is

not physically present but her influence permeates the very space and memory the

character inhabits, the marker of difference that the subject longs to return to but is

simultaneously terrified to rejoin.

Kristeva notes how the writer is “metaphorizing in order to keep from being

frightened to death; instead he comes to life again in signs.” (Kristeva 38.). And indeed,

in this particular world, the artist, and the filmmaker involved (here a special case,

visually playing in the world of systematized signs in a way similar to the writer,), is

again one who is frightened to death only to live again. Through the complex mediation

of form, of the highly ritualized aspects of this struggle, the kind of symbolic sacrifices

Kristeva describes to stave off biblical abomination come into play: by acknowledging

the abject, in the mediated form of this devouring Oral Mother abject-masochistic space,

and by rejecting it, the protagonist has marked himself as not being part of it.

I feel there are definitely other avenues along this research I am interested in

exploring. First, looking at the portrayal of femininity, or lack thereof, in Burton’s films,

and how that might play into this power play, (perhaps there are no “female” characters

in the truest sense of the word, or in terms of gendering the viewer-viewed relationship,

or not ones that carry the typical signification of loss or lack? This will definitely need

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revising after Burton’s 2010 release of Alice in Wonderland, which might prove to either

support or completely subvert what I’ve been discussing.) Alternatively, exploring issues

of class and how that may or may not play a factor in the development of these norms and

anxieties may be an interesting avenue of research, especially looking at the vastly

different levels of wealth or class standing of the characters and how important that may

seem to the particular narrative. There’s also the possibly of expanding this work and

seeing where it might fall apart and what alternatives might arise (looking especially

close at Big Fish [2001] and Sleepy Hollow [1997]?)? Finally, I am very much interested

in exploring the idea of the Masochistic-Abject Space in wider theoretical terms, and to

see if it can be found in other masochistic and/or abject narratives, which will require

further inquiry.

For many of the male characters in Tim Burton’s films, the chiding words of

Vincent’s mother ring true, or at least half-true. These emotionally fractured man-

children, who long for the unfeasible return to simpler pre-symbolic understandings but

simultaneously reluctant to achieve their goal, are not the monsters of their own making,

but, rather are lost between the binaries of childhood and the power of the maternal and

adult patriarchy and unsure which polarity draws them further. It is almost as if there is a

pleasure in suffering, brought about by the creation of rules meant to be broken and by

asking “Where?” instead of “Who?” For the world Burton created for his protagonists is

one of great physical distortion, one that calls to mind the inescapable rules of reality

even as it tries to mitigate them.

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Bibliography

1. Beetlejuice, Dir. Tim Burton, Warner Bros., 1988

2. Clover, Carol, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,

Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1992, pp. 4-5, 12, 80, 191, 212

3. Dorrian, Mark, “On the Monstrous and the Grotesque,” Word & Image, Vol. 16, No. 3,

July-September 2000, p310-317

4. Ed Wood, Dir. Tim Burton, Warner Bros., 1994

5. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press,

New York. 1982.

6. Silverman, Kaja, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Routledge: New York. 1992

7. Studlar, Gaylyn, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the

Masochistic Aesthetic, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988

8. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dir. Tim Burton, Warner Bros.,

2007

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