IN THE STYLE OF SCRATCH

TIM BURTON AND THE DEMON PEN

          

There are few artists whose work I enjoy more than Tim Burton; his films but, more, his work with pen and ink, now on show in London as part of a major retrospective. I saw an earlier incarnation of this survey in Australia some years ago, and wrote it up for a local magazine. Aside from his domestic arrangements, not much seems to have changed.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”           Introduction to the 1930s radio serial.

When I taught at a US college in the 1970s, my students asked would I mind ending afternoon lectures early.  Local TV was re-running Dark Shadows, and they didn’t want to miss a minute.

           I had to have Dark Shadows explained to me, and then didn’t believe it -  even less so after watching a few of its 1225 episodes. A cheesy vampire soap opera with cardboard sets and acting to match? What did these smart, privileged young women see in it? The same thing, apparently, as Tim Burton, Then a gawky, wild-haired high-schooler in Burbank, California, and now a gawky, wild-haired multi-millionaire in Hollywood, he’s readying Dark Shadows as his next movie project.

Tim Burton won’t simply upgrade the original, any more than his Batman  genuflected to original artist Bob Kane or he reverenced  Lewis Carroll and illustrator John Tenniel in his 3-D sequel to Alice in Wonderland.  Expect, rather, something shiftier and stranger; The Vampire Variations,  or A Sketchbook of Blood – dried blood,  for choice, since that slaty off-crimson tint permeates Burton’s work. Less an update,  Dark Shadows 2011  will resemble a palimpsest, the parchment medieval scribes scraped clean to create new surfaces on which to write, but which often bore, faded, the ghost of an earlier text. To conserve some shadow of the lost words did honour to the work they supplanted. Even as they effaced it, they tipped their hat in respect.

Most movie fantasists computer-craft their monsters and project them as backgrounds on a green screen. Burton, at heart an artisan,  builds his,  plank by plank, brick by brick. The windmill in Sleepy Hollow towered five storeys. Its sails alone weighed two tonnes. The bedevilled tree that devours the headless horseman was a sculptured swirl of ancient,  gnarled trunk, imported from the tormented landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the Teutonic Expressionist he reveres. 

The Burton exhibition celebrates his films but exults in  his draughtsmanship. Celluloid in his lanky frame is liberally slathered in paint.  He carries with him not a camera but a sketchbook, and a pocket set of watercolours.  For every image from Edward Scissorhands, Planet of the Apes, Batman , Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice, the show exhibits drawings, posters, sketches and models  dating back to a childhood that, in his telling, dripped with Gothic.  "I remember when I was younger, I had these two windows in my room, nice windows that looked out onto the lawn, and for some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit window that I had to climb up on a desk to see out of. To this day I never asked them why.”  He memorialised this time in the animated character Stain Boy. Sullen, pathetic and menacing , he’s Peanuts’  troubled moraliser Charlie Brown who’s embraced the Dark Side. Wearing  a perfunctory super-hero cape and uniform, he roams Burbank at the orders of a snarling bureaucrat controller, stamping out deviant creativity, beauty, love.

Burton has little good to say of his education at the Californian Institute for the Arts, the university conceived by Walt Disney -  of whom, on graduation, he was a brief, intransigent employee.  Having flunked Life Drawing at CalArts, he failed Cute at Disney. His  thirty-minute Frankenweenie, in which young Victor Frankenstein shows his early promise by reanimating  his dog Sparky, so horrified the studio that they fired him, claiming he’d wasted company resources, and besides, it was too scary for kids. (He’s now making Frankenweenie  as a feature, which rug rats of all races will no doubt adore.)

Appreciation of Burton demands a recalibration of our aesthetic. He sketches in the key of twitch. His ink oozes, drips and spatters, not so much a medium as  an excretion, like spit, semen and sweat. Art litters  his wake like graphic dandruff, the detritus of a fretful mind. He’s in good company.  Picasso scribbled on bar napkins or the backs of a menu, scratched on soft clay, drew in wet sand. Cezanne and Renoir dashed off a dozen small watercolours each morning “to get their hand in”, then used them to light the fire or wipe their arses.  Inspiration is the gold you transmute from air, art the stuff that sinks to the bottom of the pot.

Burton the graphist has custody of a magic line. It climbs from the American earth, deep-rooted as crab grass, entangling as kudzo. By way of Saul Steinberg, Charles Addams, Gahan Wilson, Edward Gorey, and such righteous honoraries as Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe and Garry Shead, we can trace it back to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, his illustrations for Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel,  and the cartoons of Thomas Nast in the 1860s that snared Boss Tweed. Burton belongs to an aristocracy of the dip pen, the steel nib, the ink-well.  Though his drawings recall New York satirists Jules Feiffer and David Levine, they lack the leer of Levine and Feiffer’s talky strangling of the literati in their own jargon. Nor will you  find  Mervyn Peake’s lapidary cross-hatching and  shading, or Edward Ardizzone’s wistful antique. Look rather for blots and smears; crosses for eyes, faces flat and white, embodied above all  in his Gioconde, Johnny Depp, who loiters palely through Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood,  and does a jittery Mad Hatter in Alice.

He does have an affinity, in print if not on film, with David Lynch, whose strip The Angriest Dog in the World  ran for years in Los Angeles’s LA Reader. The drawings never changed; a black backyard dog with bared teeth, straining on his chain; two panels in daylight, one in night. The text was likewise unvarying. “The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.” Occasionally, with zen reticence, Lynch dropped in an extra word,  just to see if we were watching.

Back then, before Eraserhead, Lynch also liked to dissect a trout or flounder, mount and label each component on a plank, and present it as “Fish Assembly Kit” – a gift, one feels,  young Tim might have enjoyed finding under the Christmas tree, were the holiday not, to judge from his feature The Nightmare Before Christmas, a dread interregnum between Thanksgiving and New Year. He preferred more fecund feasts, and their grisly playthings. Mexico’s Day of the Dead, for instance, the pink sugar skulls of which are first cousins to the gutted pumpkins of Halloween. 

 The music to Burton’s films reflect the scratchiness of his images. His composers of choice, Danny Elfman and Thomas Newman, draw , like Philip Glass in his opera The Photographer, on hand-made frontier musicology; the fiddle, zither, harmonium, thumping bass drum, and the forms of  country dance – reels, jigs, scottisches, rigadoons. In the show, music rises off the objects and images like the faint taint of decomposition. One group of black plants,  like the nightmares of a Venus Fly Trap, displays stiletto steel fangs. An aide, showing off this monstrosity,  says of them “Musical, too,” and gives the fangs a playful briiiinnnnggg.  

Don’t expect engagement from Burton.  If he has a position on anything more contentious than Disney’s decision to abandon hand-painted animation for the computerised variety, he stays mum. 2010 is no part of his world.  He mostly refuses to approach the twenty-first century at all, only tentatively acknowledges the twentieth,  is barely on speaking terms with the nineteenth.  and begins to warm to the past only when it approaches those eras when woods were dark and deep, trolls lurked under every bridge, and carnivals trailed town to town with their gaudy sideshows and rides, their bearded ladies, two-headed calves, and all-round oom-pah-pah.

Alexander Theroux said of Edward Gorey that he “found almost everything about human nature absurd.  Politics, Sports, Trends and fads. International news. He was a born isolato and his singular fascinations – books, movies, music, television, antiques, art – were all solitary and had virtually nothing to do with people in the sense of directly encountering them.”  Ditto , one feels, for Burton, who, with Gorey and Star Wars’  George Lucas, shares a detestation of groups, movements, and families - fathers in particular.  (Lucas, long-divorced, adopted his children and raised them as a single parent: Burton and companion Helena Bonham Carter have two kids, but live in separate houses.) From Batman to Sweeney Todd,  Burton’s dads are hostile, malevolent, but, above all, absent. He and Lucas lead  a generation of film-makers that wants to stay in its room with its toys,  and the rest of the world just GO AWAY!  

Lucas lurks incommunicado on  his Skywalker Ranch, where the buildings all imitate 19^th century originals, complete with an invented history (built by a retired whaling captain, gullible visitors are told).   No less reclusive, Burton lives in Ojai, whose astonishing valley inspired Shangri-La, the Tibetan sanctuary  in Lost Horizon where everyone remains happy, healthy, and lives forever, so long as they don’t step outside.  His favourite film is The Omega Man, in which lone plague survivor Charlton Heston has Los Angeles all to himself – at least until sunset, when the vampires emerge.  Join the dots yourself. “If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness,” he says, “of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.”  

In most Burton films (and in The Omega Man, come to that) Nemesis is a woman, and a dead (or undead) one. Necrophiles may rejoice at this exhibition, but for the conventionally sensual there’s little to stimulate. Deceased, demented, damned, or sometimes all three, his feminine ideal is embodied in frost-faced Marilyn Richardson as the witch of Sleepy Hollow, Bonham-Carter’s rabid Red Queen in Alice, and,  in The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride,  by  bloodless, languishing creatures, sewn together from cadavers but with the naughty bits omitted.  Quizzed about his adolescent sexuality, Burton, who’d have been thirteen at the time, described “being in line to see When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth , and all the younger kids were, like, 'Dinosaurs are so cool!' and all the older kids were, like, 'Oh, man, I hear there's this really hot babe in this movie!' ” No prizes for spotting Burton’s preference.  Dinosaurs vs. Sex?  Dinosaurs 100 - Sex 0. 

Key to any appreciation of Burton is the moment when Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman , dodging the  high-tech. gadgets deployed by the Caped Crusader,  crows “Where does he get those wonderful toys? ”  Lucas also confessed that, if he hadn’t made films, he’d have liked to be a toymaker. And his billions come not from the Star Wars films but the merchandise they promote.  If “Toy” is a prime word in the Burton lexicon, so is “Sewn”. We sense his glee in the needle, the thread, the fabric, the craft. (Edward Gorey, to keep busy, hand-sewed bean-bag frogs.) Scarecrows stitched from sacking and straw; limbs tacked to torsos,  corpses criss-crossed with autopsy scars.....What infantile perversion of the Primal Scene lurks here?  In developing an aesthetic of wounds, Burton belongs to (perhaps even helped inspire?) the audience that encompasses the undertaker soap opera Six Feet Under,  police procedural Dexter  -  blood-spatter maven by day, family man by night, serial killer on weekends and holidays - and the various incarnations of CSI, revered by ghouls of all nations, and currently outrating every drama in TV history. 

Though Richard Matheson wrote  I Am Legend, the novel that spawned The Omega Man, Matheson’s contemporary Ray Bradbury  is a better fit to Burton’s literary consciousness.  The small-town diabolism and peripatetic carnival of Something Wicked This Way Comes seem custom-made for him, as does the grue of a story like The October Game. A nasty father – perfect! -  herds kids at a Halloween party – even better! -  into the light-less cellar, and proposes they play The Witch Is Dead.  Handing around the circle what they assume are chicken gizzards and assorted offal, they squeal “This is the witch’s heart....these are the witch’s eyes...” Nobody notices the absence of little Louise....

“Then.... some fool turned on the lights.”

Want to guess who?