One of my favorite techniques that Tim Burton
uses is the way he incorporates flashbacks into his movies. Part of the reason
is because I have always been interested in how the upbringing of a person and
the experiences they encounter early in life shape them into a person mentally
and socially. He uses them in Edward
Scissorhands, Batman, Batman Returns, Sweeney Todd, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and
the Chocolate factory, Corpse Bride and several others. Flashbacks can be
used several times during a movie to uncover more and more details about a
character’s life without giving it all out at once. Flashbacks are a way to
assimilate a character’s past experience or an accumulation of them into a
movie without it having it to directly flow with the movement of the plot line.
They are moments in which the audience is removed from what is going on in the
plot and gets an insight into the mind of a particular character. Through
flashbacks, the audience is able to understand more about a character and see
how the past of this character’s life affects the way they are in the present.
Flashbacks are ways in which the audience gets to see what goes on in a
character’s mind without them having to say it directly in the dialogue of the
movie.
Specifically,
Burton uses flashbacks to give the audience an understanding of why
Batman/Bruce Wayne is the way he is. Bruce Wayne witnessed the murder of his
father and mother when he was a young boy and ever since then he has been
troubled emotionally because of how traumatized he was at such a young age. In the picture above, the importance of that spot where the rose is placed on is revealed through Bruce Wayne's flashbacks of seeing his parents murdered there. Through flashbacks, the audience learns of this dark episode in his life and
begins to connect the dots in understanding why he is so emotionally detached and
why he may come off as frigid at times. He uses his dual identity of Batman to
seek out the villains in Gotham City who threaten the well being of the city
because he does not want other people to suffer like he did.
Like Batman,
Edward is the outcast of the suburban town in Edward Scissorhands. When the movie first starts, the audience only
sees what is on the surface of Edward’s being. They see that he is lonely,
quiet, expressionless, and always dressed in dark clothing. His hands of
scissors add a fearful and scary element to his presence, but this soon changes
as flashbacks throughout the course of the movie show that Edward was created
by machines and eventually left alone by his creator when his creator died
suddenly. The audience comes to know that Edward just wanted to be loved by
someone, but instead was forced to live a lonely life. The moral of the story
is to not judge a person by their looks because even though Edward may have a
dark and scary appearance, the flashbacks indicate that he is like any other
person who wants to be loved and cared for by others.
Burton is very
smart in the way that he uses flashbacks in his movies to make the audience understand
the mentality and past of the outcast in his movies. Flashbacks teach the
audience that there is more to a person that what it seems and that every
person has a past that has shaped them into the person they are.
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