Introducing a new semi-regular feature:
To: Kate Silver
Subject: Big Fish, Tim Burton, the id of the psyches, familial struggles, Eddie
Vedder, the “other woman”.
Finally got back from seeing Big Fish a couple of nights ago, much to my satisfaction. That’s really what it’s about, after all, isn’t it? Satisfaction? The perfect resolution? Above and beyond the typical Hollywood ending, past the point of narrative, into a sort of ultimate “happily ever after”? Though perhaps I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Yes, best to start, not at the beginning or ending, but at a halfway house, right between “then” and “there”, because it seems that’s what Tim Burton demands of all his subjects: a continual feedback loop, always starting the race squarely out of sight of both the opening gate and the finish line.
Big Fish is perhaps as much a Tim Burton film as any other one he’s made- especially at this point in his career, when things like Planets of the Apes start to look like detours he wandered into for fear of telling the same story over and over. I can immediately see what drew him into adapting this novel- no other Hollywood director of the past decade or so has been so obviously crying out for a full-on Oedipal struggle as Burton. To recap: Director starts off his auteur-status career with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, a youthful, raging id of the psyches of film if ever their was one. He had just passed the mirror stage, and was reveling in all the pretty colors the world had to offer him. Beetlejuice added to this flair by showing that even night terrors are nothing more than flipsides of a wonderful, surreal palatte of life’s offerings, that inevitably display as much appeal as the harmless. But kids grow up mighty fast these days, and Burton seemed to realize that with Edward Scissorhands, where we see the director as perpetual outsider, and literally the entire world around him ends up playing the role of the vengeful father to Winona Ryder’s unattainable object of desire. I’m always tempted to see the film as a near-explicit allegory of Burton’s then-recent submersion into the Hollywood machine- a frustrated loner who wouldn’t hurt a fly, trying only to make works of beauty, but doomed to be forever thwarted by a cold, uncomprehending world. Reinforcing this was the fact that Burton made “Scissorhands” right in between the two films that vaulted him to the top of the A-list: Batman and Batman Returns- clearly classic Hollywood experiences if ever there were any.
But I don’t want to digress too much; after all, that seemed to be what the nineties were about for Burton: a way of distracting his growing-up-too-fast, psychology-obsessed mind with other pleasures, setting objet-a placebos in front of his raging desire for the ungraspable. Naturally, they were still items that hit close to home: Ed Wood is about as Burton as you can get, and the similarities are undeniable, even to detractors. And Burton seemed to have looked at Wood and said, “Hey, I can do that too!”, because immediately following next was Mars Attacks!, an homage as heartfelt as can be managed with a $50 million budget. However, it’s clear that, no matter what he tackled, the man was on a collision course with his muse. Sleepy Hollow is a film with more burning psycho-sexual undertones than anything since Blue Velvet. I mean, come on: Johnny Depp’s Ichabod, the man of logic and science and industry, literally plunges his probe into a gap in a bleeding tree; need we say more? The film’s infatuation with Depp’s naivete, Christina Ricci’s pubescent, innocent sexuality, and the fear of castration represented by the Headless Horseman were things that Burton seemed like he had been trying to say for years; trying to deal with them only seemed to make him more obsessed, more determined to tackle his issues head-on.
Imagine his surprise, then, when the script for “Big Fish” was literally tossed into his lap. The ostensible protagonist hates his father, loves his mother, can’t always communicate well with his wife, and is resolutely determined not to follow in Dad’s footsteps. I don’t know anything about Burton’s background, and I don’t particularly care to, or think it’s important. His celluloid struggles of the misbegotten son and his families have painted a legend his real life could never live up to. Coincidence, then, that this is the exact belief of the son in “Big Fish”? That Dad is a fraud, a phony, making up lies to conceal the fact that he hates his dull-as-reality life? It almost reminded me of Eddie Vedder at times: a man who dislikes painting in broad strokes, who wishes all the grandiosity around him would just disappear; that, gosh, if only we could all be simple and true, then things would be okay. And yes, I did relish the irony when the closing credits faded to the melodies of a new Pearljam song, written just for the film.
“Big Fish” turns out, of course, to be all about the realization of the extremities that make up reality, and the fact that our lives are exactly as we tell them, whatever the hell we choose to make of that. It actually takes a mysterious Ur-women, the presumed “other woman”, to strip away the cobwebs that have blinded our earnest son from the fact that his Dad’s life has always been just as real as you could imagine. And we, and the son, end up resolved to provide the father with exactly the dying farewell that he wants- ultimate wish fulfillment, the attainment of the unattainable. It’s reality meant as fairy tale meant as reality; for that reason, it seems that “Big Fish”, to me, is all about getting what you can never have. Of course, to Burton, this is more than just the message: it’s what he’s desperately hoping is the truth. That it will turn out, in the end, that what we always wanted is what we always have.
To: Alex McCown
Subject: Oedipus Wrecks
Alex, I agree with you on a number of levels, and I thank you for refreshing my memory on a number of Tim Burton films, many of which I’ve seen (with the exception of Sleepy Hollow). Through a number of his characters and sprawling comic book landscapes, Burton’s modus operandi isn’t far from Woody Allen. And why should I bring up Woody Allen? Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is about a writer who cannot function in real life, only in art, where he skews the truth, obscuring the unsavory aspects with pseudonyms. There is also a scene near the end of the film where the characters of Bloom’s fantasy/reality gather to mourn and praise him. It is very much like the ending of "Harry," where Harry Block’s (Allen) characters gather to praise him and offer him an award. Whether the characters actually exist, in the end, is beside the point. Allen and Burton both have tendencies to begin stories, not at point A, but rather around point C. Somewhere in the middle. I admire both in their manner of storytelling that’s totally post-modern. Big Fish taught me an awful lot about storytelling (Todd Solondz take note).
I’m not entirely convinced that the protagonist hates his father. I think he’s unhappy with himself, even though he’s living the dream of any bed-wetting professional: Bloom Jr. lives in a gorgeous contemporary apartment in Paris with an equally gorgeous, young wife. Both are writers. He hasn’t so much entered adulthood, but the pages of Architectural Digest. Bloom Junior’s life lends the few doses of modernism in this story -- Dad isn’t telling tall-tales via email -- but overall, I think son is frustrated with a "dull-as-reality life," as you call it. Dad’s yarns represent an oral tradition that was alive and well during his day, a tradition that will die with him unless son participates.
What does this say about Burton? So many of his principle characters have misgivings about adulthood. At some point in our lives, I think we strive to grip childhood like PeeWee to his bicycle. But sooner or later we have to let go, admitting to ourselves, "I meant to do that." But do we? Aging is not always a pleasant experience. Even Allen, working through more psychosexual frustration than Alex Portnoy, is frustrated with the aging process. He surrounds both himself and his characters with a bevy of young, attractive women. In the end, perhaps both directors are excising the desire to sleep with Christina Ricci.
To: Kate Silver
Re: Ooohhh! Good call!!
I say, Kate, good show on the “Deconstructing Harry” reference. See? THIS is why we all should’ve made that or Celebrity the last Allen film we saw. I’m too busy trying to shake the wreckage of Anything Else from my head, I can’t remember all the great material from before that I used to be able to mine with such abandon.
Yeah, clearly no way Bloom Jr. actually hates his Dad. He just, y’know, can’t stand to be in the same room with him. An impulse we all clearly can relate to with at least one family member, right? I hadn’t even noticed that he lived in Pairs with his beautiful French wife. Wow, maybe Burton’s taking the piss on all of us latter-day bohemians, with our fuel-efficient cars, our fancy-pants art music (again: see the Pearljam issue), and our willful denial of the fact that our arms-distance appreciation of culture happened a long time ago, and isn’t any more interesting a way to live now.
So what are we saying here? Clearly, it was a damn fine movie. But how do we describe it when recommending to friends? Or more important, family? “Um, yeah, so Dad, you know how we all hate you and wish to supplant your patriarchal role so that we can have sex with Mom in an attainment of the Ego-drive? Well, there’s the movie you’d really like....”
-Alex P.S. Maybe we should apply these exact same criterion to critique You Got Served.
To: Alex McCown
Subject: Deconstructing Boogaloo
You’re right about Allen. I’d suggest a review of his next project, but I
think we can safely agree that neither of us will see it in the theatre.
Sorry about the Allen tangent, there is usually one with me, kind of like the
Seinfeld tangent (dissertation to come?) and the upgraded model: the Curb
Your Enthusiasm tangent. Though – to stay on-track – both television programs
share in the post-modern storytelling (PMS for short) aesthetic that I’ve
become accustomed to. I find it helpful and a little artful to apply this
aesthetic to my own storytelling, precisely because I’m accustomed to such
tangents. I cannot tell a story straight (that is, beginning to conclusion)
orally. A friend of mine once told me that I reminded him of a bop-jazz
artist in technique because I "Scat". With Big Fish, the viewer receives a
mosaic of story, and it’s up to us to fit them together into some semblance
of narrative.
And again, I think you’ve made a great point about the general
public’s lazinless when it comes to culture. We live in this weird reality-TV sphere in which popular culture has become the culture. Burton reminds us, in a roundabout way, that a rich oral tradition once existed. That doesn’t mean the stories were dull. They were just as informative, imaginative, and scandalous. Even though Access Hollywood wasn’t reporting on them. That all of this appears in a glossy mainstream movie really impresses me. Hopefully my explanation makes sense. So, what did you have for dinner last night?
Best,
Kate