Suarez-Sweeney Todd

Tim Burton overcomes moral revulsion about murder and cannibalism by getting the viewers to sympathize with Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, and also by making the protagonists more morally corrupt. Sweeney Todd is a man who has lived through a lot of pain and loss, all at the hands of another man; he was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit just because another man of higher power found his wife beautiful and wanted her for his own, taking Todd’s daughter away as well. Mrs. Lovett, at least for me, is much more difficult to sympathize with. In fact, I do not sympathize with her at all, I can see slightly how an audience would though. She is displayed in contrast with another character who is abusive towards a child, where she is, in contrast, very nice to motherly towards this child. Her kindness to an orphan child is something of a speculation because all other people surrounding her have no second thoughts about anyone else but themselves. After Todd kills this boy’s “care-taker”, Mrs. Lovett takes him in as a helper rather than letting him go back to the workhouse. Although the two never eat the meat pies that Mrs. Lovett makes, they serve them to the masses of London, giving them a upper hand on them. Both Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett are near the bottom of the economic food chain, neither one of them making much money or being of royal decent; they are the one’s with the “boot in their face”, not the one wearing the boot. By feeding the boot wearers the meat of other people unknowingly, they are taking the upper hand. British Colonizers would colonize these nations that were already inhabited by natives, and their only upper hand was their weaponry; this was their power. These colonizers weren’t as powerful as they liked to display, they had a weakness, which was their fear of the Other. The Other is a person who is completely different from you; different practices, beliefs, etc., and because of this, you do not understand them and tend to fear them. The solution is to understand the Other.