Tim Burton's Gothic Imagination

TIM BURTON AND THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION:
AN EDUCATION RESOURCE EXPLORING THE FILMS OF TIM BURTON
AND THEIR LITERARY, FILM AND CULTURAL INHERITANCE
The arts of the grotesque are so various as to resist definition. Here we have the
plenitude of the imagination itself. – Joyce Carol Oates 1
This resource is designed as an introduction to the duality of Tim Burton’s imaginative vision
and his creative fascination with the darkness that is part of human existence and the
human psyche. It will also suggest ways that Burton’s films can be used more broadly to
explore the centuries-old tradition of Gothic literature as well as more recent but wellestablished
film styles, genres and conventions.
Burton has always been fascinated by the dark and light aspects of life, consistently arguing
that one cannot exist without the other: ‘life is an incredible jumble of being funny and sad
and dramatic and melodramatic and goofy and everything’. 2 During his childhood in suburban
Burbank, Burton found the tendency for the people around him to live life on the surface
unsettling and alienating. Their resistance to the darker side of life and their denial of the
reality of death inhibited their creativity as well as their capacity to accept and nurture
different ways of looking at and exploring life. Such a denial of life’s duality involves a failure
of imagination that has the paradoxical effect of rendering life ‘lifeless’.
That thematic thing of the living world being much more ‘dead’ than the dead world,
playing with juxtapositions and those feelings – I remember having that from very
early on. It goes back to childhood: I just remember that feeling that what people call
‘normal’ is not normal and what people call ‘abnormal’ isn’t abnormal. – Tim Burton 3
Burton could be described as having a ‘Gothic sensibility’ and this way of looking at the world
underpins the stories that he tells in his films and the way that he tells them. While Burton’s
artistry and imagination are remarkably individual, his films consciously place themselves
within a particular tradition of story-telling, and demonstrate his indebtedness to the
inspiration and freedom that his early engagement with popular culture gave him. Burton
reworks and echoes themes, images and techniques from the texts that fed his imagination
during the arid years of his suburban childhood and adolescence. His tastes were eclectic:
Japanese monster movies, B-grade horror and science fiction films and Dr Seuss’s picture
books. His work attests to his ongoing fascination with texts and stories that counter the
façade of practical and mundane realism with which so much of life is invested.
FREE FOR EDUCATION Education Resources Tim Burton’s Gothic Imagination 3