EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
1990
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Caroline Thompson and Tim Burton
Edward Scissorhands is the kind of movie you get to make after you made Batman, and probably only after you made Batman, or the equivalent of Batman, the kind of weird and alienating and personal and incredibly creative film that is hard to call "a true original" in the strictest, most literal sense of that term, when it's to no small degree a bunch of horror geek reference points piled atop one another, and there are no points for guessing where its primary inspiration comes from; but you want to call it a true original, so clever and generous is it, in the way it considers (and reconsiders) its preexisting ideas along with its novel ones, getting as close as is imaginable that a live-action film could ever get, maybe that any story in a contemporary storytelling medium could ever get, to the idea expressed in that phrase, "a modern-day fairy tale."
In any event, the previous year Tim Burton had made Batman, and Batman had, in turn, made a zillion dollars, so as a reward (to some degree, as a retainer for Batman Returns) Warner Bros. was willing to give Burton some small but appreciable fraction of this zillion to make what had become his dream project (not, by any stretch, his last "dream project"), an idea he says he'd been kicking around for many years, since the image of a man with scissor hands came to him in his teens in the 70s, a man who was, perhaps obviously, also him. Warners' own faith in the project may or may not be indicated by how they sold the production to 20th Century Fox, but it was the guy who made Batman, and who had previously made his studio plenty of money from projects as offbeat as Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, and so he got his initial budget of $9 million, and when it went overbudget, he got the however many extra millions he asked for, too. Somebody's faith was well-rewarded, when Edward Scissorhands made $86 million in its winter holiday release in 1990, more popular and beloved than even its substantial profit lets on and to this day a synecdoche for a certain kind of person, a comparatively minor but not-forgotten fixture of American pop culture that, let us pray very hard, is never stained with a sequel, not that such a thing is likely for various extrinsic reasons. Moreover, it established "Tim Burton" as a genuine brand name in his own right (three years later, a movie he didn't even direct would be sold as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas*), while also confirming what "Tim Burton" meant artistically, or at least was supposed to mean, in basically all of his particulars.
And one of those things was a modern purveyor of darkly zesty fairy tales, and we are immediately placed at a narrative distance—and, in the literal-minded questions it's going to force us to ask, firmly placing us in a fabulistic bubble already—by the framing device of a grandmother relating a certain story to her granddaughter, the former being Winona Ryder in bad old-age makeup (somewhat remarkably, given the rest of the movie and what Oscar it got nominated for) and one furiously awful old-age vocal affectation. The little girl, as children do, has expressed curiosity about where the snow comes from. Her grandmother explains it has to do with the mammoth gothic fastness that sits at the end of a long spiraling road atop the hill outside their house and dominates the ordinary town below, where an inventor once lived (Vincent Price, with his customary classiness choosing the absolute best way to conclude his theatrical film career before passing in 1993**). The inventor had invented many things, but most importantly of all, he invented a man, whom he did not finish before he died, so instead of hands and fingers, the man had to make do with scissors (Johnny Depp).
This was many years ago—in the 1950s, unless Ryder is narrating from roughly now, and indeed probably no sooner than 2045, considering that the Ryder of "roughly now" still doesn't look like she has a face made out of a mask of slopped-on paste—and one day an Avon saleswoman named Peg Boggs (Dianne Wiest), having exhausted the finances and patience of her closer neighbors, decides to pay a call to whomever might live in those ruins up on the hill. There she finds the artificial man, named Edward, who retains the mind and countenance of adolescence and has been all alone for however long—he is, potentially, in need of some cosmetic assistance too, though this is secondary—and, taking pity on him, Peg effectively adopts Edward, a unilateral life-changing act that is accepted with easy aplomb by her husband Bill (Alan Arkin) and younger son Kevin (Robert Oliveri), though her daughter Kim (Ryder) is slightly more put out, possibly just because when Edward came home she was on a trip with her boyfriend Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), so she's naturally terrified to find a pointy cyborg sleeping in her bedroom upon her unexpected return, who also, during her shrieking discovery, was startled enough by her to completely destroy her waterbed. The rest of the community is friendlier, first curious about and then delighting in Edward's difference, but little by little, their seeming acceptance rots out from under Edward, as misunderstandings pile up and the worst elements of the community exploit his naievete, and while he perceives it's happening he can't really understand why, which leads to further misunderstandings. But Kim, who has been the closest thing to a neutral observer, knows it's never been his fault, and that he's sweet and pure, and that he's fallen in love with her, and she's figured out that she's fallen in love with him. Which is only one more reason why Edward has to be hounded.
In this simple and intentionally-timeless story that could've been summed up more quickly—"young adult romantic Frankenstein"—there's a lot going on that's unusual, and not even in the generic way that stories about outsiders shunned by society are definitionally "unusual" while simultaneously being enormous cliches. It'd be silly to try to say that Burton doesn't do "cliche," as viewed from our standpoint of the future, but the importance of the filmmaker is that he built the cliches for himself, or at least came by them early and honestly—we wouldn't even have to go back to his alienated childhood to support the claim, for he was a filmmaker who'd been rejected in his adult life, losing his dream job over his artistic personality despite the consensus opinion being, even at the time, that he was good at that job, and his artistic personality was an appealing one—though Edward does in fact go back to Burton's childhood, that doodle he made being a stark representation of how his weirdness scared people, which when you think about it seems like unconsciously doubling-down on being scary and weird.
I have no reason to doubt the deep roots described in Burton's oral history of Edward Scissorhands, though the sketch no longer appears to exist (the earliest extant drawings of Edward that I could find are from the pre-production of this movie), so it's hard to tell exactly how close the inspiration was to the execution, though I think we can draw some conclusions from makeup effects artist Stan Winston's relation of the design process where, upon beholding the more detailed sketches that Winston's firm came up with in order to translate Burton's idea into tangible objects, Burton exclaimed—I'm not paraphrasing Winston much—"oh, you literally did give him scissors for hands! Looks cool!" (And while I bet Burton would own, proudly, how much of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's Cesare there is—I mean, the number of times and the precise manner in which Depp holds his scissorhands out in front of him most silently and expressionistically makes this undeniable—I find it absolutely impossible to believe that in 1990 nobody realized they were designing the smoldering teen idol version of Fred Kreuger combined with a Cenobite. Just add messy gothboy hair.) But anyway, this is a great teenage Frankenstein, with Winston doing some fine work (the last vestigial objection I ever had, the scissor handles, vanished on closer inspection of the sketches and stills, where it becomes clear that those handles are attached to cables, notionally attached to Edward's muscles, though in truth often attached to an offscreen operator that we somehow never even think about).
The particular spin does a lot of work to take it out of Frankenstein already—if we were talking of the avoidance of cliche, Price's father to Edward is a lovely inversion of the Frankensteinian archetype, even if I truly do not know what possessed this madman to outfit Edward with scissor-hands instead of "manipulator hooks" or "nothing," and the visual explanation Burton offers (Edward's precursor is a dicing robot on Price's cartoon cookie assembly line) is simultaneously infuriatingly and charmingly opaque—but the principal thing is it's so utterly Goddamn whimsical, dangerous (I truly adore the scars of a dozen thoughtless hand movements to which Edward's face testifies), but whimsical. That's on top of driving some genuinely novel imagery and prompting some of the best-imaginable kind of "yes and" story construction, where you can tell that Burton and his co-scenarist and screenwriter, Caroline Thompson (making her name for herself and, by my lights, kicking off a pretty great career), are giddily spitballing methods of Edward making himself useful and neat in a way Frankensteins kind of usually aren't—topiary construction at first, though the development of Edward into the town hairdresser is awfully canny, a way to insinuate Edward into proximity with femininity, the kind of thing that enrages meatheads like Jim but which isn't devoid of its own inherent dangers, either. And by the same means, quite paradoxically, Burton and Thompson managed to make their movie feel like a right proper folktale in its outline, working backwards from their conclusion to tell the just-so story of, yes, where that snow comes from: every Christmas, a lonely immortal on a mountain makes ice sculptures of his lost love, and the shavings float down, as snow, and God help you it that doesn't pierce you right in your gingerbread heart. (Edward Scissorhands thus marks Burton's earliest feature film gesture towards his peculiar notion of Christmas, so despite vastly more overt gestures later, it's the one that best captures why he has that notion: there's not even a hint that it's ever been anything but summer in this movie, but Christmas nonetheless comes to this subtropical town, just like it did for the one Burton grew up in; and Christmas is meant to have snow.)
Burton's collaborators have been marshalled to do everything possible to aid the screenplay, and I'll circle back to Bo Welch's great production design momentarily. So that leaves us for now with DP Stefan Czapsky (inaugurating a successful run with Burton, but having just come off, in full earnestness, the gorgeously-shot Child's Play 2, which I'm sure had to have gotten him the job here, despite being released only a month prior), somehow combining both a dreamlike softness and a wide-eyed wooziness with the self-contradicting "sunny goth" mood of the majority of the movie's scenes (not to say he's slouching on the dreamlike nighttimes); and with composer Danny Elfman, selling the hell out of the film's emotions of misunderstood and victimized gentleness with the lilting bigness of his yearning cues and the twinkling-and-choral (almost carol-like) delicacy of his melancholy ones, eventually both currents merging into overwhelming bittersweetness.
The same can be said of the front-of-camera talent, especially Wiest, who's doing wonders with her chipper mom who ultimately internally crumples under her powerlessness—almost fairy tale-necessary in order to cede the heroine's function to her daughter—but I'm likewise quite fond of Arkin's parody of a mid-century patriarch's benign obliviousness and the way he effortlessly reorders his mental universe to accommodate the weirdo son he didn't have yesterday. Ryder is also very solid, though arguably jumping ahead of the script a little (arguably the script jumps ahead of the script a little), so she becomes moreso as the screenplay starts providing reasons for her hostility towards Edward to melt into affection. (If we wonder why Edward must fall in love with Kim, besides his first-ever encounter with his sexuality being woken up in his bed to Ryder in a tanktop—arguably sufficient—we do have to allow a fairy tale some gauziness, even a modern one underpinning its elementalism with some character interiority.) We must also concede, and I pretty much already have by implication, that Depp, in 1990, is the perfect embodiment of Edward's heartthrob goth; his soft-spoken performance, simultaneously exceptionally curious and lost in a perpetual daydream where his lack of experience with other people means they can only take on the vaguest reality to him, and ultimately implosive under the weight of his and others' failures, is unfortunately the kind of performance that even years later would allow one to warp the American justice system around one's own narcissism.
Well, it's a movie, not unlike Burton himself (even if it's a bummer that we're obliged to think of a filmmaker with forty years under his belt this way), that straddles the 1980s and 1990s almost like it intended to—for one thing, it makes sense that eight years later somebody asked "but what if E.T. were fuckable?"—and given that the early years of the literal 1990s were only the last years of the cultural phenomenon of the 1980s, it's naturally more of the previous decade, a time when suburbia could still be a locus of magic rather than only scorn. But it sits at this odd inflection point, that I suppose Burton must've been well-situated to exploit—"in" but not exactly "of" the Gen X wave of filmmaking now starting up in earnest—so that one of the earliest (culturally) 90s movies I can name, Pump Up the Volume,*** even predates this one by a couple of months, but feels of a different era, placing itself in a very similar setting (Edward Scissorhands doesn't really take place in the 1950s; it doesn't really take place anytime, or really take place), and like most movies about the suburbs wants you to know that it's positively despondent about them, the plight of the youth, the trajectory of American society, etc. And indeed Edward Scissorhands looks for all the world like the art comedy version of that, leaning on that great production design by Welch I mentioned, and all the ticky-tacky little boxes he's made out of the Floridian suburb it was partially shot in, these sickly solid pastel homes and kitsch interiors (though the inspired kicker is the reduced size of the windows, so they all look like tiny prisons) effectively just the extension of the sketchlike expressionism he's already brought to bear on Edward's crumbling gothic mansion, only now applied to mass-manufactured junk.
And... it is that, but it's not that, either: Edward's adoptive family never turns against him, the wider community is initially absurdly welcoming, and while there are insidious elements, the people are mostly just stupid, easy to push one way or the other, and in the film's exaggerated fairy tale whipsaw of public sentiment, it actually feels nuanced and generous and (this being good for the movie as a drama) it means it's so much more of a betrayal when the people who previously welcomed Edward become a lynch mob mostly because two people with freakish sexual jealousies over Edward and Kim respectively worked to set them against him. It's simply not born of the usual sneering meanness—I have neglected to make the affirmative case for Edward Scissorhands being the most Goddamn hilarious light comedy, funnier than Beetlejuice and as funny as Pee-wee's Big Adventure (and I've previously made the point that Edward resembles that movie's iteration of Pee-wee, conceptually, to not the smallest degree), but it is such a comedy, even if it's probably a matter of taste; by volume, the movie might genuinely be 10% shots of Depp making more-or-less the same pinched expression of focus and discernment whilst he hand-minces at the camera and some PA throws clumps of [leaves/fur/fake hair/soap pretending to be ice] in his face, whereupon editing reveals some new outre visual absurdity, but, personally, I never stopped laughing at this—but, nevertheless, there's nothing saccharine about Edward Scissorhands, either.
To a certainty, it knows meanness, and doesn't ignore the dark undercurrents that increasingly erupt upwards into the movie, from what amounts to Edward's rape-or-close-to-it at the (almost equally-taloned) hands of the "friendliest" of his neighbors (Kathy Baker, and watch her last shot to see the nuance I mentioned exemplify itself at the microscale of non-verbal acting), who's already spent the first act bubbling with perverse horniness over, almost explicitly, Edward's potential to cut her, to Edward's climactic decision to murder his most dogged persecutor, who's figured out not to bring fists to a knifefight at this point, but isn't in a position to do much to defend himself when Edward stabs him and flings him through a window designed with no right angles. Above all, it doesn't contrive to extend the happiness that's only truly experienced a few times in the movie—dancing under what looks like snow, the briefest kiss—because it knows itself as a tragedy, and like Pam and like Kim, it has no solution to the tragedy of the lonely boy nobody likes. Except, maybe, making something painfully beautiful to freeze those emotions in time, so we can see them.
Score: 10/10
*They didn't figure out this one's good tagline till VHS, "His story will touch you, even though he can't."
**Technically, The Thief and the Cobbler concluded it, but a movie released twenty-three years after he recorded his voice role doesn't really count.
***My choice for "the first 90s movie" is actually 1989's When Harry Met Sally, but that's not remotely germane here.
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