Feltes- Final Reflective Blog

        Over this course, I learned many things about movie watching that will help me in the future to better analyze film. First of all, the concept of mise-en-scene was entirely new to me, and I learned just how important it is and how much Burton incorporates it into his movies. To be honest, I had already assumed that the brightest or most clear image in a still frame of a scene was the focus of the scene, or the dominant, but I was incredibly interested to learn about how the second things that attracts your eye is the subsidiary contrast. This really opened my eyes to how much work is put into the filming of movies.  I also learned that if you learn to look for the dominant and subsidiary contrast’s while you are watching a movie, you can more easily find the focus of the scene and the emotion that the director is trying to convey with each scene, which is important because occasionally, the mood is not what you would assume and you can even catch forewarning’s of things to come. I also learned that Burton is not only a movie director, but he also writes pretty creepy poems. I learned much about Burton’s past, which was also interesting, and this helped explain Burton’s skewed view of relationships between kids and their parents, and his view of parents and parenting in general. One thing that I did not learn throughout this course was the reason for Burton’s incredible obsession with Johnny Depp and why he loves him so much.
       During this course, I also learned that I personally have a tendency to put off my work an incredible amount and I actually worked a lot over this semester to improve this bad habit. I learned that if properly motivated, I have the ability to complete a 1500 word draft of an essay in one night, and not do a half bad job of it either. I learned that Burton directed more than one Batman movie, which was really awesome to learn because I loved how well Michael Keaton acted in the original, and it was incredibly cool to see another movie with him as the star. I learned that while all of Burton’s movies differ in their themes and message, they all have similar themes that relate to Burton himself and more specifically his own childhood. Another cool thing I learned about filming in general was how density of the shots can be used evoke different moods and emotions, and to express different aspects of each scene. Before I learned about density, I assumed the directors changed the angles of the camera and shot from different perspectives to merely keep the audience interested as opposed to actually mean different things about each scene. I also learned about how Burton feels about different groups, for example middle-class suburbia, which he feels has a nasty and gossipy or crowd mentality side to them, and I was struck by how accurate his interpretations were. All in all, I really enjoyed this course and I learned a lot from it, and would recommend it as a first-year seminar to future freshman.

Feltes- Duality of Species

In the movie Planet Of The Apes, redirected by Tim Burton, there are many dualities created between the two alternate time frames involved in the movie. The duality that struck me the hardest was the duality between the two species involved, apes and men. In the first scene of the movie, we see an ape named Pericles flying a plane in a flight simulator run by highly advanced humans aboard an advanced space ship. The apes in the beginning are used to man flights considered to dangerous for humans, and are kept in cages and fed treats. Eventually Pericles is sent by the commander of the ship to check out an electrical storm considered too dangerous for a man to go, symbolizing the first unethical treatment of the opposite species in the movie. Mark Wahlberg ignores his flight commanders orders not to follow and chases after Pericles, his favorite ape in an attempt to save him, and gets transported through time to a wild world where he meets primitive humans that are running through a forest. They are captured by highly advanced apes who use primitive tools to capture and enslave the humans. The first scene we see after the humans are captured is them inside primitive cages that resemble a jail, and we see the apes mocking the humans inferiority and minimum brain power, which is a direct parallel to the treatment of apes aboard the spaceship in the beginning of the movie. Wahlberg at first believes all of the apes to be savages and actually takes the ape that saves him from slavery as a hostage in one scene. Eventually, the ape who saved him joins him in an escapade to escape the city of apes they are trapped in. The violent general of the apes chases after them throughout the whole movie, and can be considered a parallel to the spaceship commander form the beginning of the movie in that he views the opposite gender as disposable and primarily to be used as sacrifices. Towards the end of the movie, Wahlberg traps the general in a glass prison inside of the spaceship, and ends up kissing an ape, which shows how his character changed from one who thought of all apes as savages to one who truly respected the apes and considered them his equals.

Feltes- Sleepy Hollow

        Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow is based off of Washington Irving's short story The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Burton takes a huge creative license in this movie and changes basically the entire story to suit his own interpretation of how things should of gone, and only incorporates a few themes from the original story. For example, in the original storyline, the main character Ichabod Crane is a schoolteacher and town maintenance worker, but in Burton's movie, Ichabod is a detective and crime scene investigator. Burton uses this as Ichabod's motive for going to Sleepy Hollow, where there were several unexplained murders that Ichabod was going to attempt to solve. This also makes Ichabod seem more intelligent and less goofy as he is portrayed in the story, and it also helps with Burtons expression of the love shared between Ichabod and Katrina, a woman from the town. This is contrasted by the story, in which Katrina mocks Ichabod and never even remotely falls in love with him.
        In my personal opinion, Burton is really using Irving's story as sort of a cover for his own tale of horror and fear. I consider Burton using Irving's story as mere packaging because of the sheer amount of changes that Burton incorporates into the story. He changes some themes entirely; for example, giving the story a romantic twist considering the relationship between Ichabod and Katrina, and making Katrina's step mother responsible for bringing out the headless horseman. Burton even changes the ending of the story, which in my opinion changes the whole message of the story, as most stories are interpreted based on their ending. In the movie, Ichabod is seen as happily involved with Katrina and the horseman has finally been put to rest with Katrina's evil stepmother, and all seems well with the world. In the original story, Ichabod disappears with no one to mourn for him, and it is generally assumed that the headless horseman got him. Burton also changes Ichabod's character pretty substantially and even gives him a back-story, which explains the profession that he goes into. The courts, for an unfair reason, killed Ichabod’s mother, and ever since than, it made Ichabod want to look deeper into situations involving crime so that he could solve them with logic and reason. This back-story just furthers my point that Burton was merely enhancing a horror story as opposed to doing more with The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, as it creates whole new facets to Ichabod’s personality that were not discussed in the original tale.

Feltes- Mars Attacks

The movie Mars Attacks, directed by Tim Burton, satirizes the government, military, capitalism and patriotism by depicting a scenario in which aliens from Mars land on our planet and wreak havoc. The scene in which the aliens land and are greeted by Earths ambassador is particularly humorous, in which the aliens flip out and start shooting everyone in attendance because a hippie form the crowd released a dove into the air. In this scene, the U.S. military presence is portrayed as close to useless; the aliens cut down soldier after soldier with their advanced laser beam technology. Burton has the soldiers run around like crazy, unsure of what to do and ignoring their basic training, and kills several minor characters played by very famous actors, including Michael J Fox and Jack Black. In doing this, Burton mocks current Sci-Fi movies and how they tend to kill off minor characters played by mediocre actors while the more recognized actors miraculously escape.

In general, Americans are raised to believe that sacred institutions, such as the government and the military, can be trusted and relied upon to make beneficial decisions for the safety of their country. In this film, the government invites the aliens to land on Earth repeatedly, and each time the aliens murder people mercilessly. In this way, the film is saying that sacred institutions invite their own destruction and don’t learn form their mistakes, which could be expressive of Burton’s views of the government. In a scene in the movie, an alien disguised as a beautiful woman manages to get into the white house to have sex with the presidents PR representative. The disguised alien is very odd, in that it says nothing, and sways constantly as it walks and seems to merely float across the ground as opposed to walking on it. The film mocks the government in that the alien is able to murder the PR rep very easily and even get into the presidents chambers in an attempt to assassinate him before it is killed. This really speaks to the government’s lack of security, and the buffoon like qualities of some of its representatives, such as a lecherous PR rep and a security team that we’re so distracted by the fake woman’s beauty that they completely ignore her unearthly attributes when the protection of their leader should be their foremost concern. In the movie Alien, the aliens are portrayed as vicious beasts that have the ability to tear humans apart with ease and the humans can do almost nothing to stop them. This is mocked by the aliens in this movie, that are defeated by yodeling in the final scenes, really mocking the myth that all aliens are superior to humans in almost every way.

Feltes- Ed Wood

The first element that I noticed in Burton’s Biopic that emulated Ed Wood was how it “came from the heart.” In all honesty, I actually thought this movie was incredibly boring and confusing for the most part, and didn’t really like the majority of it. This can be seen as a direct reflection of Ed Woods’s movies considering how generally he is considered the worst director of all time. However, when it was over, I was somewhat impressed by how it really appeared genuine; Burton had Johnny Depp portray Wood in a very heartfelt manner; throughout the movie, he was constantly trying to get his emotions out through his work and was always incredibly optimistic about his movies, no matter how many bad reviews he got. This also branches into how he never got downtrodden or upset, even when he was going through the struggle to find funding for his movies.

Another homage Burton pays to Ed Wood is a little more direct; he actually used direct scenes from Wood’s movies to show what Wood actually did, such as the scene from Glenn or Glenda. By using that scene, he really showed the issues that Wood was going through in his life, and his struggle with becoming a transvestite. Tim Burton can probably relate to Wood indirectly because Burton feels like an outcast from society, and portrays Wood as an outcast, who could only make terrible movies and ended up losing his first wife. By showing that scene, Burton shows how he really respected Wood’s plight and understood partially what he was going through.

The last element that I noticed Burton incorporate into the movie as homage to Wood was his relationship to his film crew. Throughout the movie, we see none of Ed’s family, other than his first wife who ends up leaving him. Ed really connects with the actors in his film and the crew who worked for him, especially Bela Lugosi. Wood used Lugosi because Lugosi was Ed’s hero and inspiration, as we see in the movie. Wood used Lugosi in several of his films, to the point were he had an incredibly close relationship to him. We can see a parallel between their relationship and the relationship between Burton and Johnny Depp, as Burton has used Depp to star in several of his movies, and even the star in this movie. In this way, Burton probably feels a connection with Ed, to be so obsessed, for lack of a better word, with one actor that he uses him in every movie he can fit him in.

Feltes- The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy

   The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy is a poem by Tim Burton that tells the story of a married couple who have an oyster for a child that they name Sam. When they have the child, they claim it can't be theirs, but the doctor convinces them to take it home anyway. One evening on a car ride through the rain, the wife ends up accusing her husband of blaming their son for his problems in bed. Eventually, the man eats his son to regain his sexual prowess, buries the remains of oyster boy in a grave on the beach that gets blown away by the tide and says they should pray for a girl next time. This poem speaks to me about Tim Burton’s abandonment issues more so than any other poem in this whole book. For one thing, Tim Burton’s parents were said to try to keep him in seclusion, like they weren't proud of him. Oyster boys parents were immediately disgusted with their son and only thought about themselves, which reflects on how Tim Burton views the parents in the world, namely as selfish and uncaring. Also in the poem, when Sam first sees other kids, they end up calling him a bivalve and running away. This is a type of biographical criticism and refers to Tim Burton’s childhood, where he was considered an outsider and had very few friends. In this poem, I believe the parents to be the Jungian Archetype barbarians, for the husband actually literally eats his son so that he can get his sexual mojo back, and Sam to be the Monster, even though he did nothing wrong, because he was born disfigured. 

   Tim Burton delves deep into the sexually based motives on the part of the parents, and this is an interesting take on how Burton must view the sexual relationships of adults. He discusses how the husband tried to use ointments and salves to no avail, and eventually resorted to eating his own flesh and blood so that he could re gain his sexual prowess. This speaks to Tim Burton's view of his own parents, because we must assume that they are at least part of whom he is talking about. He makes the adults seem like monsters, which is most likely because that’s how he sees his own parents. To be fair, his own parents did board up his windows and keep him in seclusion until he moved out of their house, so they could be considered bad parents, but I don't think they would ever go so far as to hurt anyone. Tim Burton ends The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy with the parents burying Sam in the sand, where the tide ends up breaking his grave and washing it out. This also demonizes the parents, who obviously could have cared less about Sam and were only ever worried about themselves. This relates to how Tim Burton must have viewed his parents as unreasonably selfish, and could be just generally critiquing all of the parents in the world as being too selfish.