Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd - A Post-Jungian Perspective

science ®ction, fantasy, horror, myth and mystery, and freely uses dark and
Gothic imagery.
His persistent use of simpli®ed mythological frames does not mean,
however, that he misses out on psychological complexity. The psychological
depth of Burton's ®lms is as intense as that of a S Ï vankmajer or Lynch ± but
his is the archetypal insight of a good fairy tale. Moreover, the lucidity of
his narratives allows the audience to access this psychological content
quicker, and appreciate it more fully. Far from being plain, downmarket
and populist, Burton's narratives are uncluttered, powerful and topical.
Neither does he seem to care whether his material is original, and to what
degree. His interpretations, however, are undoubtedly original and ± what
is more important ± personal. Whatever images he utilises ± be it the
Frankenstein monster in the form of a little dog, Dracula in the guise of
drug-dependent Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, or the Penguin man who, in this
version, behaves like a mistreated child ± the director always moulds them
into a story about a misunderstood, lonely outcast; or at least links them to
such a story.
People who interview Tim Burton often notice his clumsiness, his introversion
and his inability to express himself clearly and coherently. His
creativity clearly visual and not linguistic, he often looks at a loss when
trying to explain to journalists why and how he did a certain thing in his
®lm. And journalists, usually being watchful and perceptive, notice his
communication weaknesses immediately. One of his interviewers, David
Edelstein, wrote: `To quote him is not to get him right; you miss the air of
stoned melancholy, the spastically gesticulating hands and the sentences
that stop and restart and that you have to complete for him' (Fraga, 2005:
32). If Tim Burton is to be labelled an auteur, then he is the `auteur of the
symbol'.
Tim Burton in context
Introduction 17
It is interesting to compare Burton's handling of abstract imagery with the
work of other directors who have also depicted the world of the unconscious
in symbolic language. Symbolic cinema is not necessarily non-realistic
cinema ± one can make a ®lm based on a spiritual, miraculous or supernatural
idea, but use everyday images and objective representation techniques
to express it. Or, as the French ®lm theorist Andre Bazin wrote,
`realism . . . is to be de®ned not in terms of ends but of means' (Bazin, 1971/
II: 87).
Let us take a look at Andrey Tarkovsky. A proponent of dream-like,
iconic imagery, and advocate of narrative impressionism (his ®lms are
`poetically structured' rather than linear), Tarkovsky nevertheless considered
`the real world' the only possible visual and emotional base for a
®lm. In his view, realistic details, represented in a symbolic way, are the
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