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

Introduction 23
signi®er and the signi®ed is, indeed, highly arbitrary. Drawing upon Jung's
democratic position of `anti-exactness', Don Fredericksen argues:
We must understand that Jung's distinction between sign and symbol
ultimately elaborates two distinct modes of apprehending and explaining
the psyche and its products ± not just two distinct psychologies but
two distinct ontologies and philosophies of value.
This point is succinctly illustrated by Jung and Freud's differing
explanations of, and attitudes toward, incest fantasy and symbolism.
Freud interpreted the incest fantasy concretely. [. . .] Freud labels the
distorted or disguised expressions of the incest wish `symbols', incorrectly
so according to Jung. For the latter, Freud's `symbols' are in fact
signs, standing for the putatively known, albeit repressed, desire of the
patient to have physical intimacy with a parent. Their meaning can be
completely explained by Freudian analytic procedures that reduce them
to their underlying cause.
(Hauke and Alister, 2005: 19)
For Jung, the symbol is always bigger than the sum of the dreamer's (or the
author's) biographical details, and signi®cantly deeper than any literal or
pre-existing meaning.
Even though I ®nd the biographical material priceless, and sometimes
mention it in relation to Burton's imagery, I have no intention of reducing
his ®lms to his childhood complexes. The symbolic core of his cinematic
imagery ± the abandoned child±monster ± cannot be discussed entirely in
biographical terms. Any uninterrupted analysis of Burton's ®lms in terms
of his introversion, failure to communicate or his poor relationship with his
parents would be ethically incorrect and methodologically incomplete. `The
monster' is not simply an imprint of Burton's own feelings towards the
outside world which he perceives as `hostile in its normality'. Far from that,
the image of the monster acquires independence and becomes an archetype
± a ¯uid, symbolic representation of a whole range of psychological phenomena
± from the child±saviour who can perform miracles, and the
creative punk born in a Gothic castle, to the antidogmatic rebel with a
political stance. A nonconformist director, who has to defend his ideas
from the studio heads, is only one aspect of the multi-faceted symbol.
Meanwhile, the audience is full of outcasts who feel unique and misunderstood,
and each viewer adds his or her personal dimension to the image,
thus adding to the picture's interpretative volume. Being litmus papers for
the state of culture, the best ®lms resonate in many a soul; and that is why
Burton's Gothic tales of a loner's con¯ict with society have a very wide fanaudience.
Which probably means that `the crowd' is not so ordinary, cruel
and insensitive, after all.
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