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

24 Introduction
In his book Sculpting in Time, Andrey Tarkovsky discusses the use of
ready-made, intellectual and decipherable imagery in ®lmmaking. He
considers such practices bad taste. Signs that are `®xed' by the director for
the audience, images ready for consumption, are the ones that sti¯e the
viewer's imagination rather than widen his or her range of vision. Not
surprisingly, perhaps, as a long-shot director, he links such `sign-making' to
clever montage:
`Montage cinema' presents the audience with puzzles and riddles,
makes them decipher symbols, take pleasure in allegories, appealing all
the time to their intellectual experience. Each of these riddles, however,
has its own exact, word for word solution; so I feel that Eisenstein
prevents the audience from letting their feelings be in¯uenced by their
own reaction to what they see. When in October he juxtaposes a
balalaika with Kerensky, his method has become his aim, in the way
that ValeÂry meant. The construction of the image becomes an end in
itself, and the author proceeds to make a total onslaught on the
audience, imposing upon them his own attitude to what is happening.
(Tarkovsky, 1989: 118)
Such methods, Tarkovsky argues, `are utterly inimical', and contradict `the
very basis of the unique process whereby a ®lm affects an audience.
Directors obsessed with associative montage `make thought into a despot: it
leaves no ``air'', nothing of that unspoken elusiveness which is perhaps the
most captivating quality of all art' (2000: 183).
Tim Burton is no Eisenstein. An anti-intellectual ®lmmaker, he does not
make an effort to create `signs'. He remains in the realm of the symbolic,
operating with the images that are personally dear to him, which also
happen to be so `loose' that their interpretive range is endless. Edward's
blade-hands, apart from Burton's own inability to communicate (which is
the most obvious interpretation), also represent the double-edge (and the
edginess) of creativity, the creator's de®ciency, his inner darkness, and the
inevitable tension between the creative intention and the ®nal result.
A psychoanalytic approach ± Freudian, Lacanian, Kleinian, etc. ± tends
to view human nature in a ®xedly negative light. While Freud's theories are
veiled with biological determinism, Lacan's ideas of the unconscious structured
like a language display an equally fatalistic approach to the psychic life
of man. Once trapped in the trans-individual symbolic order, or a variety of
such orders, an individual cannot change his destiny. The Lacanian man is
surrounded by endless rigid cultural signi®ers, and mourns the impossibility
of controlling the process of signi®cation because the signi®ed will always
escape, and the precious moment of communication will be lost. In other
words, human civilisation is yet another existentialist failure because the
http://www.jungarena.com/tim-burton-the-monster-and-the-crowd-9780415489713