[COLUMN] A Grand, Unified Theory of Tim Burton | by Darren Mooney

For a certain generation of audience members and film fans, Tim Burton is a hugely influential figure. For many people my own age, Burton was effectively “baby’s first auteur.” He was a filmmaker who was hugely instructive in understanding the role of a director on a movie. Burton was an artist with a very distinct visual style and aesthetic, which were paired with a strong set of recurring thematic preoccupations and a group of immensely talented creative partners.

Burton had a frankly incredible run in the ’80s and ’90s. He announced his arrival with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, adapting Paul Reuben’s stage persona for the big screen in a way that, in retrospect, retains Burton’s unique authorial voice. He followed that with the horror comedy Beetlejuice, and then made the jump into comic book adaptations with Batman, which felt distinctly Burtonian while also going on to be the highest-grossing film of 1989 at the domestic box office.

However, something happened to Tim Burton, almost exactly upon the turning of the millennium. Starting with his remake of Planet of the Apes in 2001, Burton’s films became a lot less consistent in their quality. Critical opinion of Burton’s work dropped sharply. According to Rotten Tomatoes, four of Burton’s five “rotten” films were released after the year 2000. Reviews of Burton’s recent efforts are often headlined with questions like “What’s happened to Tim Burton?”

To be fair to Burton, this isn’t necessarily a clear binary. It isn’t as if Burton’s films became uniformly terrible in the new millennium. Many audience members and critics can single out individual works from Burton’s 21st century that they deem worthy of appreciation and celebration. It is not uncommon for individual critics to single out the most recent work from Burton as “a rousing return to form.” However, Burton’s films are not the singular creative lightning bolts that they once were.

There is a popular school of thought – advanced by figures like Quentin Tarantino – that some artists just get old and lose touch with their gifts. Burton has been making feature films for almost 40 years at this point, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will be his 20th film as director. It’s hard to maintain a consistent level of quality as one gets older. A person changes over time, and so it makes sense that a director might not be able to hold on to their youthful vigor after so many years.

However, there are plenty of counter-examples. Clint Eastwood enjoyed a creative renaissance in his 70s, beginning an incredible run of films with Mystic River that included his second Best Picture and Best Director Oscar winds. After decades as a critical darling, Martin Scorsese only really started to resonate with audiences through his collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio, enjoying commercial and popular success with The Departed, Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street in his 60s.

As such, it seems fair to dismiss the argument that Burton simply got “too old.” It is entirely possible for directors to offer some of their most dynamic and compelling work in their later years, like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return or Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. However, Burton’s decline is so sharp and so notable that it demands some explanation. There must be some factor at play here. Something must have happened to account for such a sharp pivot in the director’s body of work.

To understand where Burton might have gone astray, it’s important to understand why his early films resonated in the way that they did. Burton was a quintessential outsider. His entire brand and persona was built upon his slightly skewed outlook, which stood in especially sharp contrast to the homogeneity of the 1980s and 1990s America. Against the bright, triumphant and nationalistic backdrop of the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton eras, Burton’s wry cynicism stood out.

Burton grew up in Californian suburbia, and was one of the first generation to attend CalArts. Burton was hired as an animator at Disney, but struggled to fit in at the company. “At Disney, I almost went insane,” he confessed a few years later. It was the monotony that really got to him. “You're strapped to a table all day and you have to draw,” he told The New York Times during the production of Batman. “I just flipped out.”

One can feel that frustration and anarchic energy in Burton’s first two feature films, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. In both movies, the eponymous characters are forces of chaos that cannot be controlled or understood. In both cases, the leads serve to disrupt elaborate constructed worlds. The climax of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure finds Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) chased through the Warner Bros.’ lot. In Beetlejuice, Betelgeuse (Keaton) takes up residence in a model town maintained by Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) in the attic of his Connecticut house.

The most personal film in this early stretch of Burton’s career is probably Edward Scissorhands. It remains the only one of Burton’s feature films on which he retains a “story by” credit. Based on a “drawing he’d made in high school of a character who had scissors for hands”, the film finds the eponymous character (Johnny Depp) adopted and then set upon by the residents of a pastel suburbia. It’s easy to understand why this story resonated with a teenager who felt “strange and isolated” in his Burbank hometown and who would “still get the creeps” revisiting it decades later.

Burton’s early movies were strange and weird and confrontational. They had a very adolescent outlook, and they unsurprisingly resonated with younger audiences. Every teenager understands, on some level, what it feels like to be an outsider and to feel like a freak. Indeed, Burton’s big innovation in Batman and Batman Returns was to create a version of Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) for whom dressing up as a bat was a way of manifesting the freakishness he felt inside himself.

However, it’s hard to be an outsider and a household name at the same time. At a certain point, success can transform even the most anarchic artist into the very establishment against which they define themselves. To Burton’s credit, he retained his rebel streak and transgressive sensibility despite considerable mainstream accomplishments. Batman Returns was the highest-grossing movie of 1992, but was also a delightful weird and horny film that sparked a genuine moral panic.

Somehow, Burton was making films for major studios that cost (and earned) hundreds of millions of dollars while remaining provocative. He offered a subversive spin on even the most generic projects. Ed Wood might sound like a fairly standard biopic mythologizing a Hollywood legend, but Burton opted to focus on “the worst director of all time.” Mars Attacks! is a star-studded special effects extravaganza about an alien invasion, but its bleakly nihilistic and juvenile sense of humor made it feel like an insanely elaborate troll of Roland Emmerich’s patriotic epic Independence Day, released the same year.

Through all of this subversion and cynicism, Burton retained a bizarre sincerity about the things that mattered. Batman Returns really invests in the dysfunctional love affair between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer). Ed Wood has sincere affection for its subject, suggesting that the relationship between Wood (Depp) and his collaborators was far more important than the quality (or commercial viability) of the work they produced. Even Mars Attacks! felt like Burton taking the millions of dollars that the studios never would have given Wood, to make a movie that feels like a film Wood would have loved to have made.

In hindsight, it feels like a miracle that Burton walked this tightrope for as long as he did, balancing a cynicism about the business around him against an honest affection for the outcasts and weirdos who make it so compelling. At a certain point, Burton stopped being an outsider and became a brand unto himself. Henry Selick’s debut film was marketed as Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s hard to be both iconoclastic and an icon.

In the late 1990s, the sort of outsiders that populated Burton’s work began to feel decidedly mainstream. Under the pen of writers like Joss Whedon on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer or Kevin Williamson on Dawson’s Creek and in Scream, nerds not only moved into the spotlight, but they started to become cool. Hot Topic – a store obsessed with Burton’s aesthetic – became a mall fixture, existing at the peak of its popularity roughly between 2004 and 2008.

Around this time, ironically for the director of Edward Scissorhands, Burton became a safe pair of hands for major studios, a filmmaker who could be trusted to make a big-budget blockbuster without the controversies that haunted Batman Returns. Sleepy Hollow is a delightfully fun movie, but it’s also the first time it feels like Burton is making a movie for the sake of making a movie, without anything to say with it. He followed it up with Planet of the Apes, the first time that Burton manages to feel somewhat anonymous in his own movie.

Burton had obviously worked with existing intellectual property early in his career, from the stage show that inspired Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure to the comics that inspired Batman to the trading cards that inspired Mars Attacks! However, as Hollywood became increasingly preoccupied with remakes of existing films, Burton proved himself a good company man who could show up and layer just enough of his distinctive visual aesthetic on an adaptation without taking it too far away from the template.

Burton directed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Warner Bros., a re-adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic but also effectively a remake of the beloved Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The results were painfully generic, right down to giving Willy Wonka (Depp) an overly signified backstory involving a rift with his dentist father (Christopher Lee). He also directed Alice in Wonderland for Disney, technically a live action sequel that nevertheless kick started the modern wave of live action Disney adaptations while also turning Alice (Mia Wasikowska) into a generic “Chosen One.”

These movies were massively commercially successful, making Burton an even bigger draw than he had been during the 1990s. However, it’s interesting to revisit them, as one can sense an artistic anxiety simmering through the work. It often feels like critics and audiences weren’t the only ones wondering what had happened to that daring 1990s filmmaker. Burton himself seemed in conversation with his own past and his filmmaking technique.

Indeed, in the midst of these blockbusters, Big Fish stands out as perhaps Burton’s most personal film since Ed Wood. It tells the story of Will Bloom (Billy Crudup), who returns home to visit his dying father, Edward (Albert Finney, Ewan McGregor). Edward has always been a fantasist, telling elaborate and fanciful stories about his adventures. In his final days, Will tries to come to terms with his father, to understand who Edward really was.

Big Fish was the first film that Burton made after the death of his own father while he was working on Planet of the Apes, confessing that he was never “particularly close” to his parents. The film is often discussed in those terms, with Burton even joking that it was “a semi-cheap form of therapy.” However, the film can also be understood from the opposite perspective. The film was in production while Burton’s long-term partner, Helena Bonham Carter, was pregnant with their first son.

Indeed, there’s arguably far more of Burton in Edward than in Will. Edward’s stories are full of references to Burton’s earlier movies. For a science fair, Edward makes Pee-Wee’s breakfast machine from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. He becomes a local superhero, like the lead of Batman. He even sells “the handi-matic”, a bizarre implement that evokes Edward Scissorhands. There’s a sense of Burton as a father, wondering what his children might make of him.

Burton’s films in this stretch become preoccupied with industrialization, populated with artists lost in their own machinery. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie’s father (Noah Taylor) is replaced in his job at a toothpaste factory by a machine, while Charlie’s grandfather Joe (David Kelly) was fired by Wonka when the chocolate factory was automated. In the Victorian London of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, human beings are literally processed into foodstuffs.

These films are often about intensely talented individuals who have lost the passion to create. Willy Wonka has been driven completely mad because he cannot trust the people around him, and so seeks to hand the factory over to a new owner. Sweeney Todd (also Depp) was once the finest barber in London, but is now consumed with a lust for vengeance. Even Alice, upon her return to the fantastical world of her childhood, is told that she has “lost [her] muchness” in the intervening years.

With this in mind, it makes sense that a certain nostalgia begins to creep in around the edges of Burton’s work. His stop motion film Corpse Bride feels like an obvious effort to recapture the magic of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, a film he didn’t actually direct. His direction of the streaming show Wednesday in some ways feels like the ultimate work-for-hire gig, but also an acknowledgement of decades of rumors that he was going to make an Addams Family adaptation.

Frankenweenie is both literally and metaphorically about resurrecting the past. Narratively, it is the story of a young boy (Charlie Tahan) who revives his dead dog. However, it is also a remake of one of Burton’s earliest short films, reuniting the director with several actors from his earlier films: Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice), Martin Short (Mars Attacks!), Martin Landau (Ed Wood), Winona Ryder (Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands) and even Conchata Ferrell (Edward Scissorhands).

Big Eyes finds Burton reteaming with Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the writers of Ed Wood, to tell the true story of kitsch artist Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), famed for her mass-produced paintings with… well, big eyes. There’s a recurring debate in the film about whether Keane’s art has any real merit to it, and whether it is in any way diminished by being mass-produced, imitated and reduced to an assembly line product. It’s not hard to feel Burton’s anxieties simmering through.

Burton continued his retreat to familiar ground. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children exists at an intersection of familiar genres for Burton. It is a young adult story, about a community of outsiders like those who populated the director’s earlier work. It is also a superhero story, his first smash success. However, it is a much more modern take on those two genres than Burton’s 1990s efforts; more Mortal Instruments than Edward Scissorhands, more X-Men than Batman.

As with many of Burton’s big studio films from the 21st century, the director gets lost in the conventions of modern blockbuster filmmaking. Burton becomes nothing more than an aesthetic to be layered atop a familiar template, a desktop theme that can be swapped out. As with Planet of the Apes and Alice in Wonderland, there is nothing in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children to mark it as a Tim Burton film beyond a vague gothic texture. It’s largely anonymous.

In some ways, Dumbo feels like Burton working through this lost decade. It is another nostalgia play; like Alice in Wonderland, it is a live action reimagining of a classic Disney story. However, in expanding the source material, Burton crafts a story that feels like an allegory for his own career, as an ambitious circus owner Maximilian "Max" Medici (Danny DeVito) sells out to the ruthless entrepreneur V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton).

It really isn’t too much of a stretch to read Vandevere as a stand-in for Disney. The movie begins in Florida, and focuses on Vandevere’s plans to build a gigantic “Dreamland” amusement park. However, as with the focus on artistic integrity in Big Eyes and perhaps the nostalgia of Frankenweenie, it’s hard not wonder if the story of Medici resonates with Burton, who has made these gigantic corporations billions of dollars while perhaps losing his way as an artist.

Dumbo perfectly illustrates the tensions within this stretch of Burton’s career. It is a movie keenly aware of the limitations of Burton’s recent films, clearly articulating anxieties about the choices that he has made in the past few decades. However, it’s also an example of those same shortcomings. It’s the work of a filmmaker who understands that a large part of his creative stagnancy is rooted in his decision to sell out, but who expresses that in a film that feels like a director selling out.

Considering this larger trajectory of Burton’s career, it’s perhaps surprising that it took the director so long to make a legacyquel to one of his earlier works. Then again, it seems unlikely Warner Bros. would ever let him near Batman again. As with Frankenweenie, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Dumbo, there is a palpable desire with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for the director to return to what worked. He’s reteaming with old collaborators on an established and beloved property.

However, as with so many of Burton’s later films, there is a sense that the director understands the issue without taking the necessary steps to solve the problem. Burton’s recent films are often about artists who have sold out, struggling to express themselves while trapped inside inhuman mechanical systems. Sadly, Burton’s response is not to embrace the spirit of his earliest work by pushing back against those systems, but to retreat back into the aesthetics of his earlier work.

Burton made his name rebelling against suffocating structures of studio filmmaking, introducing a unique and often provocative perspective into mainstream crowd-pleasing cinema. These days, Burton is far too comfortable within those systems.