Karly
I’ve accidentally turned October at Nonsense & Lit into the Helena Bonham Carter Extended Editorial Universe. First came A Room with a View, which I can defend on the grounds that it was my birthday week and therefore I was entitled to write several thousand words about Lucy Honeychurch if I wanted to, then Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein, and now, apparently, Tim Burton. If you’ve spotted the connection between those last two before I did, congratulations, because I seem to have programmed an HBC exes spooky-season double feature entirely by accident, immediately after writing about HBC herself. It’s my birthday month and I’ll construct a messy editorial calendar if I want to.
Tim Burton is an obvious person to arrive at during spooky season anyway because death has been wandering around his work for decades, although I’ve never thought his fascination with it was particularly frightening. His dead people are often having an excellent time. They sing, dance, argue, flirt, complain, get married, attend meetings, navigate bureaucracy and continue having the same kinds of personality clashes that presumably irritated everyone around them while they were alive. The afterlife in a Tim Burton film rarely feels like an empty void waiting ominously on the other side of existence because there are simply too many people there with things to do.
This is especially obvious in Corpse Bride, where one of the film’s best visual jokes is also one of its most important ideas. The world of the living is grey, blue, rigid and repressed, populated by people who seem to have been informed that enjoying themselves would constitute a serious breach of Victorian etiquette, while the world of the dead is colourful, musical, crowded and astonishingly sociable. Victor Van Dort accidentally enters the afterlife and discovers that everyone there appears to have a significantly better nightlife than anybody he left upstairs, which raises a fairly reasonable question about which of these worlds we’re actually supposed to find frightening.
The reversal is completely deliberate, and this is where Mexico enters the picture because it turns out I didn’t invent this connection after staring at Burton’s skeletons for too long. While promoting Corpse Bride in 2005, Burton explained that they had deliberately made the Land of the Living muted and humourless while making the Land of the Dead more upbeat and emotional, and he connected that decision to growing up near Mexico and seeing Día de Muertos treat death as part of life rather than something exclusively dark. In another interview that same year, he talked about the skeletons, humour, music and dancing he associated with Día de Muertos and described it as a celebration of life, saying that this approach to death had always felt more positive to him than the dark, unspoken attitude surrounding it in the culture in which he grew up.
As a Mexican, I know exactly what he means by death having colour because death here has never belonged exclusively to black clothes and whispered conversations. Día de Muertos gives it marigolds, food, music, photographs, sugar, papel picado, jokes and skeletons doing things skeletons have absolutely no anatomical business doing, and none of that means death isn’t painful. The colour doesn’t cancel grief. If anything, what has always struck me about the tradition is that grief and affection are allowed to occupy the same space, because remembering somebody who has died doesn’t require pretending that their life has been replaced entirely by the solemnity of their death.
Burton’s connection to that way of thinking wasn’t a one-off promotional observation either. He continued talking about Mexican culture and Día de Muertos after Corpse Bride, and during a visit to Mexico in 2007 he said that growing up in Los Angeles had exposed him to a strong Mexican cultural influence and specifically described Día de Muertos as a major inspiration for his films. That doesn’t make Corpse Bride a Día de Muertos film, nor would I want to flatten a Mexican tradition into a convenient explanation for every colourful skeleton Burton has ever put on screen, but it does mean we can take seriously something he has repeatedly said about his own work: he responded to a culture in which death could coexist with humour, colour and celebration, and that response became part of the way he imagined the dead.
That idea is all over Corpse Bride, where Emily is funny, romantic, impulsive, jealous, wounded and enormously alive for somebody who is, inconveniently, a corpse. She isn’t simply an object of horror who exists to remind Victor of his mortality, nor does death flatten her into some serene supernatural figure who has transcended all recognisable human emotion. She still wants things. She gets things wrong, hopes, misinterprets, becomes angry and eventually makes a choice that requires her to understand the difference between what she wants and what she can ethically take from somebody else, which is considerably more emotional development than several living people manage over the course of the film.
The dead around her behave similarly because dying apparently hasn’t relieved anybody of the burden of having a personality. They have social structures, entertainment, gossip and enough collective energy to make the Land of the Living seem genuinely funereal by comparison, and that reversal is what makes the film’s world so satisfying. Burton doesn’t need to tell us repeatedly that the living are emotionally constricted because he can simply drain their world of warmth and then send Victor downstairs, where a collection of skeletons immediately launches into a musical number.
What makes that contrast even better is that Burton himself described the two worlds in almost exactly those terms when the film came out. The Land of the Living represented repression, while the Land of the Dead gave him somewhere for colour, emotion, creativity and energy, and suddenly the joke of the film becomes considerably more revealing. Death isn’t what has drained these people of life because the actual dead are doing perfectly well. Repression has, and apparently the cure is dying and finding a jazz band.
Beetlejuice plays with the same basic contradiction in a completely different register. Barbara and Adam Maitland die almost immediately and discover that death comes with paperwork, waiting periods, rules they don’t understand and a bureaucracy apparently designed by somebody who correctly realised that nothing would make the supernatural more believable than administrative inconvenience. The dead aren’t removed from ordinary existence so much as transferred into another department, and there’s something wonderfully mundane about the fact that becoming a ghost doesn’t exempt you from needing instructions.
Then there’s Betelgeuse, who is dead and yet possesses enough unpleasant vitality for several living people at once. He’s vulgar, loud, opportunistic, impossible to contain and generally the last person you’d want representing the afterlife at a careers fair, but he’s certainly not spectral in the traditional sense of being pale, silent and mournful. Burton’s dead don’t necessarily whisper from the shadows because sometimes they burst through the wall and start trying to sell you something, which is arguably much worse but certainly more entertaining.
That’s what I find so appealing about Burton’s treatment of death more generally. The boundary between living and dead matters enormously in these stories, but it doesn’t neatly correspond to the boundary between vitality and stillness. Sometimes the living characters are the ones trapped in repetitive routines, social expectations, unhappy families or painfully controlled environments, while monsters, ghosts and corpses are allowed an emotional freedom the supposedly normal people don’t have. Being alive in a Burton film isn’t always a biological condition so much as an ability to remain strange, expressive, curious and emotionally available in a world that would prefer you to behave yourself.
You can see versions of that idea beyond Corpse Bride and Beetlejuice because Burton has always seemed drawn to characters who are technically monstrous but emotionally legible. Edward Scissorhands looks like the person a conventional horror film would teach us to fear, yet the cruelty of his story comes largely from watching supposedly ordinary people decide what to do with someone they don’t understand. Frankenweenie begins with a child refusing to accept the death of his dog and quite literally bringing him back, while The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Burton conceived and produced rather than directed, gives us an entire town of creatures associated with horror who are mostly preoccupied with putting on a successful annual event.
The monsters are frequently the sentimental ones, which complicates the idea that Burton’s work is simply fascinated with darkness. His creatures fall in love, miss people, want friends, become lonely and try, with varying levels of success, to belong somewhere, while conventional society is perfectly capable of producing cruelty without the assistance of a single pair of fangs. Even his visual darkness often contains an odd warmth because Burton doesn’t seem especially interested in darkness as shorthand for evil. Sometimes darkness is simply where the interesting people live.
Maybe that’s why Burton’s graveyards have never felt particularly bleak to me either. A cemetery in his world can be frightening, certainly, but it can also be peaceful, romantic, funny or simply another place where somebody happens to be, and the dead don’t automatically transform a space into somewhere devoid of life. Death becomes part of the landscape rather than something the landscape has to hide, which feels very different from stories where the supernatural exists primarily to invade and contaminate the safe world of the living.
There’s something about that which feels particularly familiar from a Mexican perspective because Día de Muertos has never asked us to pretend the boundary doesn’t exist. The people being remembered are dead. That’s precisely why the ritual exists, and no quantity of marigolds, pan de muerto or brightly decorated calaveras changes it. What colour and humour can do is resist the idea that our only possible relationship with death is terror, or that remembering somebody requires us to strip away everything lively about the person they were.
I think that distinction is important when talking about Burton’s response to Mexican culture too, because the interesting connection isn’t simply visual. Skeleton equals Mexico would be both reductive and rather boring. What Burton actually described responding to was an attitude, one in which death could be acknowledged without being pushed behind a dark, unspoken curtain, and that makes the emotional architecture of Corpse Bride much more interesting than simply pointing at the Land of the Dead and saying that it’s colourful.
His films don’t make death harmless because Emily’s death is still a tragedy, the Maitlands still lose their lives and Victor Frankenstein, while we’re apparently continuing last week’s theme, would probably like a word about the consequences of treating mortality as an optional inconvenience. What they repeatedly suggest is that death and life aren’t aesthetic opposites, and that the presence of skeletons, ghosts and corpses doesn’t automatically require the absence of humour, colour, desire or joy.
Perhaps that’s why the Land of the Dead in Corpse Bride remains such a perfect Burton image for me. Above ground, everyone is alive and looks half dead; below ground, everyone is dead and has apparently decided to make an evening of it. It’s funny, but it also tells us almost everything we need to know about a filmmaker who found something meaningful in seeing death treated not only as an ending to fear, but as part of life itself, complete with skeletons, music, colour and the occasional extremely lively corpse.
So perhaps Tim Burton’s version of death feels so alive because he’s never been particularly interested in treating death as the opposite of living. His ghosts still have problems, his corpses still fall in love, his skeletons still dance and his monsters are frequently more emotionally available than the respectable human beings standing beside them. After several decades of films in which the dead refuse to behave with anything approaching appropriate solemnity, the strangest thing about Burton’s afterlife might be how quickly it starts to look less like the end of life and more like another extremely peculiar part of it.
