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.

Tim Burton"s The Nightmare Before Christmas

Let's set the record straight. This isn't a film by Tim Burton. It's directed by his old chum Henry Selick; Burton produced the movie and authored the story its script is based on. He also provided the inspiration for the visuals, which are faithfully copied from his other movies, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns.

What Burton didn't invest in this film was his own weird brand of gifted dementia. The Nightmare Before Christmas tries for that odd mix of grotesque manners and genuine feeling that infuses Burton's best work, but it only succeeds in being a second-rate imitation that lacks the crazy drive and energy of Burton's own movies.

What it does have is some great puppet-model animation, a very minor story and a numbingly dull musical score. It's the music that really grates on the nerves: the movie is virtually a non-stop musical based upon one melodic line and a lot of bad rhymes. The net result sounds as though it should be called Andrew Lloyd Webber's Nightmare Before the Opera.

The animation is impressive, but The Nightmare Before Christmas needs more than visuals – it needs a unique spark. When Burton's special brand of black magic works, it can be brilliant. When it doesn't, you're left pondering the self-indulgent nature of adolescent obsessions.

Cabin Boy

Chris Elliott’s humor is an acquired taste.

Unfortunately, lots of people have trouble acquiring it. After all, his TV series, Get a Life, was canceled because of low ratings – and this was on the Fox Network for crying out loud.

He has earned a cult following, however, as a result of the Fox show and, first, because of the success he scored as a comic-writer and performer on David Letterman’s show. His new movie, Cabin Boy, is banking on the questionable size of his admiring audience.

The plot to this sucker isn’t intended to make much sense in print. It doesn’t even make much sense on the screen. Elliott plays an arrogant, condescending nitwit who’s just graduated from the Stephenwood Finishing School. He’s such a jerk that he gets bounced out of his own limo by an angry chauffeur.

Left on his own, he successfully screws up and lands on the S.S. Filthy Whore, a fishing boat that’s so grubby, even its drunken crew can’t stand it. They also can’t stand Elliott. Especially after he shanghais the ship into Hell’s Bucket – a realm populated by mansharks, six-armed sirens and colossus-sized hardware salesmen with bad attitudes.

Despite all of this, Elliott is actually good at what he does. But his shtick is based on smirks and weird ironies piled higher that the ship’s foremast. Even the funniest bits in Cabin Boy are such an uneven mixture of conceptual comedy and old-fashioned stupidity that it’s hard to know where the punchline is. And every time you laugh, you want to slap yourself for having done so. (But I have to admit that I slapped myself quite a few times during the movie.)

Cabin Boy, essentially, is a Pee Wee’s Playhouse for jaded and immature men. Not surprisingly, the movie was co-produced by Tim Burton. What is surprising is David Letterman’s cameo. He’s even more condescending than Elliott – and that takes some doing.

Mars Attacks!

Hundreds of tacky looking space ships attack the earth. Thousands of rampaging, bug‑eyed Martians ruthlessly zap humanity in a mindless extermination campaign. The U.S. Congress, a herd of cows, and Tom Jones' band are all fried to a crisp. Gee. It's a shame about those cows.

This just about sums up Mars Attacks!, the latest tribute by director Tim Burton to his childhood fondness for bad movies. Unfortunately, Mars Attacks! also invokes the current (and extremely advance) state of Burton's own sense of arrested adolescence. The film plays like a simple‑minded gag thought up by an obnoxious five‑year‑old. Even during its funnier moments, Mars Attacks! barely rises to the level of a cheap giggle cooked up in the back row of a school room.

Of course, a lack of subtly is not surprising since the focus of the movie's extended homage are the zanier B science‑fiction films of the 1950s. Though the plot is loosely lifted from Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, the trashy feel of Mars Attacks! is closer to the cruder sensibilities of such non‑classics as Invasion of the Saucer Men (a movie so poorly budgeted that a pre‑Batman Frank Gorshin was the major star). But Mars Attacks! lacks the rude zestiness of a good drive‑in movie. Heck. Mars Attacks! even lacks the genuine, raw badness of an Ed Wood movie.

Though some advance word had suggested that Mars Attacks! would play as a kind of Dr. Strangelove antidote to Independence Day's jingoistic seriousness, the comparison is thin. In many respects, Independence Day is actually a funnier film. It was also a more affectionate homage to the genre. Mars Attacks! has a weird, distracted feel to it and often suggests that Burton never really liked these lousy movies in the first place. Maybe he only watched them because he liked seeing people blow up.

Which is basically the sole focus of the movie. For reasons that are never explained, the entire population of the Red Planet charges toward earth. A blathering dolt of a US President (Jack Nicholson) stumbles around, hoping to make peaceful contact with the Martians. Then they start blasting everyone who comes within firing range. An utter dope of a scientific advisor (Pierce Brosnan) successfully argues that the Martians deadly behavior is simply a cultural misunderstanding. Then they wipe out Congress and beat the stuffing out of the scientific advisor.

Meanwhile, a crooked and extremely drunk real estate developer in Las Vegas (Nicholson again) has some vague scheme of getting the Martians to check‑in at his new casino. The developer's wife (Annette Bening) has abandoned booze in favor of New Age mysticism and Sixties style retro fashions. At the same time, the always horny presidential press secretary (Martin Short) finds himself incredibly attracted to a Martian female. The rest of the movie's long list of well‑known performers stand around with little to do until they get blasted.

OK. So once again Burton demonstrates that he doesn't give a hoot about narrative. Besides, what do you expect from a film that is based on a set of bubble gum cards briefly distributed in 1963(and pulled from circulation because of their excessive violence). Besides, both Burton and his screenwriter (Jonathan Gems) freely admit that they didn't realize that the cards even had a story. They thought that the text on the back of the cards were just advertisements (which suggests that neither of these guys can read).

Burton's best films (i.e. Batman and Beetlejuice) have usually gotten around the narrative problem by creating surprisingly strong characters and monstrously effective villains. But the human characters in Mars Attacks! are all weakly written and severely underdeveloped. Brosnan has a few daffy moments as a kind of inverted Hugh Marlowe as his smug scientist deftly misinterprets every known fact about the invaders. Likewise, Jim Brown imparts a few precious moments of dignity in his role as a ex‑boxing champion turned Vegas lounge greeter. On the other hand, Nicholson manages the unique feat of giving two of his worst performances ever in the same film.

Ironically, only the Martians have any limited appeal. Maybe its their goofy, wide‑eyed looks. Or perhaps it is the sight of their enormous, silly brains. More likely, they become sympathetic by default. After all, the Martians have no pretense of being anything other than a pack of ill‑bred fraternity boys running wild on an especially nasty set of pranks. As they make yapping noises while stitching human heads onto the bodies of Chihuahuas, the little green mirth makers are almost capable of stealing your heart. While they are at it, they will also help themselves to your kidneys, spleen, and liver.

Thanks to the superb CGI work provided by Industrial Lights & Magic, the Martians are also the most brilliantly satiric reference made in Mars Attacks! to the B movies of yesteryear. Designed to move in a slightly jerky manner like old fashion stop‑motion animated models, these pesky marauders glide about with spooky mechanical precision as they smirk their way through every slaughter.

Too bad they don't have a better film to star in. But good film making is seemingly something that Tim Burton is now determined not to do. Instead, he has become an aging prankster looking to indulge himself in minor gags that might vaguely amuse the pre‑teen set("heh heh, that was cool"). Likewise, he seems insistent on making movies that are completely lacking in any real sense of fun.

Which is one of the reasons why Mars Attacks! is a long and charmless bore.