Tim Burton: The Phantom of the Playroom

"But this isn't exactly a normal world, is it?"
‑Michael Keaton to Kim Basinger, Batman

The executives at Walt Disney Studio already knew that it wasn't going to be a typical test screening. After all, it was not everyday that a major studio lavished a million dollars on a short children's film by a young and totally unknown filmmaker. Tim Burton was only 24 years old and he still had the shy, boyish features of a reclusive teenager. But some people in the animation department thought that this kid was a promising talent and Disney was on the prowl for fresh directors.

On the other hand, the movie was filmed in black and white for crying out loud. It also had the warped title of Frankenweenie. (There had to have been a note to PR: Is this a Freudian joke or something?) Of course, no one really had a clue as to what would click with a kid in 1984, so what the heck. The men in suits only knew for certain that Burton was chronologically closer to the intended audience than they were.

Or was he? As the first few tykes came streaking out of the theatre, they could ignore the kid's terror filled fit. Some kids freak out during Snow White. But as the first trickle turned into a steady stream of hysterical youngsters, the Disney people realized that they had a major problem.

Though the Frankenweenie incident is a mixture of fact and fiction (contrary to some reports, most accounts indicate that only a few children were really going ballistic), it neatly summarizes the weird underlining to Burton's career. He is a filmmaker who has the magical gift of a child's wondrous imagination. But Burton also has the repressed rage and nasty humor of an evil Peter Pan.

This odd combination has actually been crucial to Burton's enormous success in Hollywood. It has also been a problem. Even people who didn't particularly like the original Batman nonetheless went back to see it four or five times. But Batman Returns was too cold and distant for even the film's defenders, few of whom were willing to risk a second viewing.

It would be an understatement to call Burton's career meteoric. He has risen higher, and fallen faster, than a modern day Icarus strapped to a rocket. Despite the $60 million dollars that Warner Bros. was willing to lavish on Burton's current production of Mars Attacks!, he is a filmmaker teetering on the brink.

No one in Hollywood ever understood how Burton's Beetlejuice became the surprise hit of 1988. Most studio executives couldn't even understand what the movie was even about. They only understood that Tim Burton had a weirdo's version of the Midas touch. Beetlejuice was a potentially gruesome black comedy with a title character who was a boorish motor mouth with a chalky white face that was continuously twisting into a non‑stop display of leers, jeers, and sneers.

There was little in Beetlejuice that could have been termed normal. Even the "nice" dead couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) were so normal as to be utterly abnormal. The whole movie presented death as if it were an old TV situation comedy reassembled by a bratty kid who was feeling bored in some brainless but sunny, ghastly yet affordable American 'burb.

Which means that Tim Burton is indeed the poet laureate of Burbank, California. Born in 1960, Burton grew up in that uniquely American twilight zone of little box houses and pink flamingos. Though Burton is never very forthcoming on personal matters in his rare interviews, he seemingly spent a large portion of his childhood glued to the TV tube. To this day, he takes great pride in his extensive TV Guide magazine collection.

Burton also acquired an extensive familiarity with horror movies (especially the films of Vincent Price) and cartoons. He began creating his own animated productions and displayed enough early promise to earn a Disney fellowship to the California Institute of the Arts. Burton quickly became a master of stop‑motion animation. Elements of this technique surfaces in most of Burton's movies, ranging from various effect scenes in Batman to the jerky movements of the Martians in Mars Attacks! George Lucas may devote his time to developing incredibly advance techniques, but Burton has persisted in fine‑tuning the cutting FX edge of the 1960s.

The atavistic nature of his technical passion is just one of the unusual traits that distinguishes Burton from many of his contemporaries. The other is the singular (even monotonous) obsessions that have repeatedly turned every movie by Burton into an oddly autobiographical text. Tim Burton is the most supremely ironic creature in Hollywood: an avant‑garde performance artist hiding behind the mask of a budget busting movie director.

Which may explain why Burton often seems oblivious to his audience. The self‑indulgent qualities so readily apparent in such movies as Batman Returns and Ed Wood are the results of a filmmaker who quite simply isn't concerned with the tastes of the mainstream audience. In each instance, Burton was busy pursuing some elusive vision from his own childhood that seemingly defied any open engagement with the outside world. At times, the result echoes the subconscious arrogance of a coach potato who keeps hogging the remote control.

But Burton has occasionally demonstrated a remarkable ability to connect with an audience as well. Despite its jumbled narrative, Batman successfully unleashed a quirky but raw sense of operatic grandeur that struck a primal emotional chord among many viewers. Likewise, Edward Scissorhands successfully enthralled enough otherwise jaded sensibilities to qualify it as a demented successor to the weepy throne of Now, Voyager.

Ironically, Burton's successes and failures are both firmly rooted in his intense preoccupation with freaks and monsters. Just as he clearly prefers the villains in the Batman movies, Burton is intensely drawn to anything that appears contrary to the standardized rigidity of a typical suburban existence. Perhaps it could be termed The Rocky Horror Picture Show Complex (though Janet‑damnit Syndrome may be a more apt title). Either way, this is the source of his visionary inspiration and the cause of his extreme state of alienation. No wonder audiences have such a love/hate relationship with his movies.

However, audience indifference is the current problem facing Burton. Despite its record‑breaking opening weekend, Batman Returns quickly dropped from the chart. Ed Wood received much critical praise and very little viewing. With Mars Attacks!, Burton seemingly has to find an audience or else. The poor American reception for the movie does not bode well for a director whose sensibilities tend to display a distinctly American sense of adolescent psychosis.

Curiously enough, the apparent rise and fall of Tim Burton bears some resemblance to the one filmmaker in Hollywood history who clearly has influenced Burton. From the mid‑1920s to the mid‑1930s, Tod Browning scored a weird and spooky hold over viewers with such oddball movies as The Unholy Three (from which Burton derived the make‑up for the Penguin), Freaks (also referenced in Batman Returns), and Dracula (starring Ed Wood's pal, Bela). Like Burton, Browning was morbidly fascinated with pathological behavior and unusually sympathetic to the emotional angst of deformed outsiders. In many of Browning movies, the villains were the real center of emotional engagement. Likewise, normal people were often vindictive figures who deserved their cruel fate.

But Browning's popularity quickly vanished during the later years of the Great Depression. By 1939, he retired from film‑ making, placed a bogus obituary notice in Variety and entered a 30 year state of seclusion in his Santa Monica home. Until he died in 1962, Browning devoted his final years (according to most accounts) to heavy drinking and excessive TV watching.

Most likely, he was already watching most of the movies that Burton would catch on the tube a few years later. Heck, Browning even directed some of them.

And Santa Monica is only a half hour drive from Burbank.