Tim Burton is steadfastly concerned with the visual imbrication of the
patriarchal unconscious in the real. Insofar as he inscribes this problem into
contemporary cinema in a programmatic way, surrealism (particularly its
critique of representation) comes into razor-sharp focus as a point of reference for
his films. Often advanced through allegorical appropriations, especially of media
images, Burton's oeuvre recalls surrealism's historical critique because it likewise
involves the unsettling of identity by sexuality, and the unsettling of reality by
means of the simulacrum. Insofar as Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Edward
Scissorhands (1990), Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), have to do with
events in which repressed material returns in ways that play havoc with unitary
identity, aesthetic norms, and social order, they resonate with Burton's
penetrating comprehension of the historicity of the uncanny.
In Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Burton's camp deployment of psychosexual
disorder to disturb conventional pictorial space, object relations and (masculine)
gender identity models the outmoded cultural artifact as an enigmatic vestige of
a traumatic encounter or fantasy, equivocal in its restorative and incendiary
effects. Setting the text's syntax of symbolic castration against the back projection
of postmodern patriarchy's putative loss of a referent or an authentic domain of
being, Edward Scissorhands brings into focus the ideological alignment of sexual
and cultural disavowal. In Batman and Batman Returns, the makeover of
traumatic scenes into artistic origin myths is campily performed. While
surrealist fixations double as modernist tropes of setting up an origin in order to
institute a self and/or a style, surrealist primal fantasies wreak havoc on such
origins; the modernist search for roots produces rootless scenes.
No doubt inheriting a few optical cataracts from surrealist sexual politics
and insights into the hookups between psychic energy, landscape, architectural
form, and social mythology, Burton undertakes an archaeology of patriarchal
subjectivity as fossilized in (post)modern spaces. Unless our (de)realizing
postmodern dreamscapes (i.e., landscapes, cityscapes, and cinemascapes) are
considered a postmodern fulfillment of the surreal, Burton's camp-surreal is far
from defunct. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/3728 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Kennedy, Dick |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 5957324 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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