Falconer-Reflecting on "The World of Tim Burton"

When the email came out over the summer telling me to sign up for a freshman seminar I first rolled my eyes nauseated by the thought of ever doing school work again. For four long years I worked hard in school anticipating the day I was to graduate from high school. Unfortunately the email came out a short two days following my high school graduation reminding me that I was about to spend four more years working hard in school crossing off the days on my calendar to college graduation. I reluctantly clicked on the link to browse my options when my eyes stopped on “The World of Tim Burton”. High school classes were always boring standard subjects like math, history, etc. and I was intrigued to spend a semester not only watching the movies by my favorite strange, infamous, and talented director, but learning more about what makes them so different from the works of other film directors. Now today on my last week of school I can truly say this seminar course exceeded my expectations.

We started of the course with one of my childhood favorites, “Beetle Juice”. I always knew this movie had a twisted attitude towards death but our class discussion revealed the complex denial of death Burton portrays in the film and how it relates to American culture. We also first discussed the idea of the “trickster” in this film. The trickster is always in some sort of prison trying to escape, as close to an animal as you can get and often a shape-shifter.(these are only a few elements of the trickster) We then watched “Batman” and the sequel “Batman Returns”. Each of these Burton films had their own trickster character. In “Beetle juice” it was Beetleguise, in Batman it was The Joker, and in Batman Returns I argued that the Penguin and Catwomen both posses many elements of the trickster. In our “Batman Returns” discussions we were introduced to Mise-en-Scene analysis, which we continued to use in every film we watched from then on. Mise-en-Scene helped us break down the significance of Burtons directing in certain scenes. This helped me see how Burton could influence the audience’s eye to a specific object in a scene and how that could prove the object’s significance in the story. We then watched “Edward Sissorhands” where I found it hard to identify a character with the traditional elements of the trickster but found many scenes that a simple Mise-en-scene analysis revealed the hidden complex meanings behind Burtons directing including his film angles, character proximities, lighting choices and so on.

Next we read poems by Tim Burton from “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy”. During this unit I learned more about Tim Burton himself, leading to my more clear understanding of his film and poetry style. I began to notice that many of his films and poems reflected his own views on life, death, feeling like an outcast, love, family and much more that Burton started to develop from childhood. This helped me to understand Burton’s unique, gothic and twisted film style on a new level I had never been able to fully reach before this course. My mind was blown to learn all the elaborate characteristics that made a Tim Burton film or poem something so unmistakably and unapologetically his own.