Tim Burton’s Films Are Ultimately Always About Tim Burton, and That’s Okay

The Big Picture

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• Tim Burton’s career has been focused on portraying and celebrating artists who don’t fit societal norms and struggle to pursue their passions.
• Films like Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, and Beetlejuice showcase the journey of artists with unconventional tastes or practices in pursuit of their dreams.
• Burton’s films often serve as a form of therapy for him, allowing him to express his unique and warped vision of the world. We should appreciate and support artists who stay true to their artistic instincts and perspectives.

Let us all gather around and pray that Tim Burton shall achieve true success with Beetlejuice 2, as the director is long overdue for a solid hit. He’s been on shaky ground in the past decade or so when it comes to his filmography (the massive success of Wednesday notwithstanding, considering it’s a Netflix show that he didn’t entirely direct). But at one point, he was the cinematic poet laureate for all the outsiders, the weirdos, and the quiet kids in the back too busy doodling to pay attention to boring class. In other words, he’s spent a lifetime devoted to validating how he sees himself amidst this chaotic world, and vouching for the artistic instincts that nourish his soul.

How Did Tim Burton Start His Career?

Burton was born and raised in the suburban section of Burbank, California, and as he shared in Burton on Burton, he’s often lamented a feeling of being ill at ease with society around him. While he’s comfortable in his own skin and eccentricities, he said that growing up in the midst of the squeaky clean 1950s era of America made him feel immensely isolated. He’s convinced that he grew up with an aura of “leave me alone,” having friends but not much of a social life, content to bask in his love for monster movies, exploitation cinema, and the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. He much preferred these types of excessive and aggressive art forms due to how much “rougher, harsher, full of bizarre symbolism” they were, rationalizing it as a reaction to the “very puritanical, bureaucratic, fifties nuclear family environment,” preferring his own idea of how things were and loving that such art could be open to interpretation in an age of ultimate conformity. So savor the irony of Burton having a good chunk of his film career be indebted to the single biggest entertainment conglomerate of all time: Disney.

Burton started his career as an animator for Disney starting in 1979, working on films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron; as far as he’s concerned, it was a particularly miserable time in his life. In Burton on Burton, he laments how “they want you to be an artist, but at the same time they want you to be a zombie factory worker and have no personality. It takes a special person to make those two sides of your brain coexist.” He clearly looks back on this period with Disney as one of great complex trauma, seeing it as a damaging affront to his identity as an artist. He poured this anguish into his debut stop-motion short film Vincent, the story of a young man who just wants to be like Vincent Prince and get lost in his daydreams, which Disney gave him $60,000 to produce after being impressed by his unique gothic drawings. He even got Vincent himself to narrate the film, since it was ultimately a loving tribute to his legacy as an actor, and it was the beginning of a mentor relationship that would be hugely vital to Tim’s future artistic endeavors. This short film established the primary theme that Burton would spend the majority of his career fixating on: the passionate artist who cannot conform to the society they’re stuck in.

Tim Burton’s Best Films Are About Artists

For my money, the best films that Burton has ever made are Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, and Beetlejuice, and all of those films are essentially about artists of unnatural tastes or practices trying to pursue their passions in spite of a world that either doesn’t understand or actively disregards them. Sometimes that art is literal, in the cases of Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands, and sometimes the art is more subtextual, in the cases of Sweeney Todd and Beetlejuice. Let’s look at the actual artists first. Ed Wood is Burton’s tribute to the worst director of all time, and Burton frames Ed (Johnny Depp) has a lovably naïve dope whose deep passion far exceeds his actual talent. The film is refreshingly lacking in outright mockery or belittling of Ed, and you can feel Burton’s respect for how committed Wood was to his hilariously shortsighted vision, and Depp portrays the childlike glee that Ed has in seeing his creations come to life in one of the best films about filmmaking ever made.

In the case of Edward Scissorhands, Edward is a man stumbling his way into his newly awakened life as a member of a suburban society ripped straight from The Stepford Wives. He doesn’t warm up to it quickly, poking holes in water beds, vomiting up ambrosia salad and alcohol, and not being able to see windows like a lil’ puppy. But luckily, he finds his passion in landscaping, using his scissorhands to cut people’s hair and illogically enormous hedge bushes. Indulging in this passion allows him to turn it into a promising career, he could even get a business out of it! This is arguably the most obvious of the allegories that Burton has drawn to the artistic process that he’s made in his films, as Edward’s turning his hyperfixation and his disability to his advantage is rapturously encouraging for a disabled person with autism like myself. Seeing this film changed my life as a little kid, and Edward carving an ice sculpture for Kim (Winona Ryder) is about the purest depiction of the joy of the artistic process as I can remember.

Beetlejuice and Sweeney Todd Are Both Artists

You’d have to be a particularly macabre minded individual to call Beetlejuice and Sweeney Todd artists, and I’m thankfully that kind of person. Beetlejuice is a bio-exorcist who prides himself on getting the living out of a dead person’s home, especially when those living are pretentious caricatures with horrible taste in art. Similar to Ed Wood, you can palpably feel how Beetlejuice functions as a stand-in for Burton himself, taking chaotic glee in how many ways he can think of messing with the people around him. Be it throwing his voice, turning into a giant snake, or arranging a poorly thought out marriage, Beetlejuice’s every action is an affront to good taste and mainstream etiquette. More than any other Burton film, this one was less about story and more about the contrast between the abject misery of Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam (Alec Baldwin) and the pure anarchic energy of what’s happening every time Michael Keaton is on-screen, and we’re all shivering with antici…pation to see what Burton and Keaton cook up for the upcoming sequel.

Sweeney Todd has more claim to being a true artist than Beetlejuice, as he comes off like the Robert Smith idolizing funhouse mirror version of Edward Scissorhands, turning his skill at hair cutting into a cover for murdering his way towards revenge for his life being ruined. Sweeney views murdering anybody who comes into his office as one long therapy process, and Burton has gone on record stating that the sheer insane amount of blood that comes out of people’s throats when he cuts them is a metaphor for the catharsis Todd gets from his journey. It’s fitting then that when he finally ensnares his ultimate goal, the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), he vigorously stabs his throat and lets himself be bathed in blood, fully drenching himself in that which has given his life new purpose. It’s fitting that Sweeney Todd was one of the most critically praised films of Burton’s career, as it signaled a renewed vigor in his thirst for the material he was working with.

Why Tim Burton Is Important in the World of Film

I only mentioned the highlights, but there are so many more instances of his therapy in action. He profiled the underappreciated painter Margaret Keane in Big Eyes; he gave Willy Wonka a backstory involving his chocolatier ambitions and disapproving father in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (rendering the upcoming prequel completely past its expiration date); Edward Bloom was a man fully consumed by his need for fairy tale half-truths in Big Fish; Pee-Wee Herman’s entire life was one big performance art piece in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Over and over, Tim Burton needs to exorcise his love for his warped vision of the world, and I, for one, welcome it wholeheartedly, even during his abysmal low points. If we’re going to valorize letting artists do what they want, especially during this time when artists are still striking for the right to their own humanity, then we must be able to accept artists even when they’re perhaps too laser-focused on one thing. Film nerds have spent more than enough time saluting Quentin Tarantino for his constant obscure pop culture fetishism, and I would rather be grateful for Tim Burton’s insistence on welcoming us to his nightmares.