On Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
Reviewed by John David Ebert
(thoughts by John Lobell under Comments)
Tim Burton’s films are generally uneven in quality, and lately, they have not been particularly good. When we think of Sweeney Todd or Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow or Planet of the Apes, we are presented with celluloid spectacles filled with remarkable and even memorable cinematic imagery, but which are generally mediocre products marred by humdrum screenwriting. Burton suffers from the same problem as a number of other visually-talented directors who are not very good at judging the quality of screenplays. Ridley Scott comes to mind; as does (the now long since forgotten) Alan Parker; perhaps David Fincher is a better recent example.
However, that said, it must be said that Alice in Wonderland is quite refreshingly entertaining and watchable by comparison with Burton’s other recent films. It is a good film, but not one that has much in common with Lewis Carroll’s novel(s) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. In fact, come to think of it, it has almost nothing to do with them. It is as different from Carroll’s narratives as Neil Gaiman’s recent cinematic Beowulf was from its master narrative. And, as in that case, the changes are not necessarily bad, it’s just that, all things considered, they add up to a rather different narrative that has a completely different logic than the original literary classic. And this is important to keep in mind, since the masses who go to see these movies very often think they’re getting the same narrative served up to them and walk away feeling that they have digested a “classic”–albeit in pictorial form–when in fact nothing of the kind has taken place. They’ve been given a completely different experience, with another message altogether.
And so, then, what is the message of Carroll’s narrative? Alice in Wonderland came out in the 1860s at just about the same time as Manet in France was finishing up his painting, Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe. This painting was a landmark in the history of Western art because it is the first painting to completely disregard the laws of depth perspective that had been worked out since the fifteenth century in Renaissance Italy. The central woman in the painting’s background is painted on a scale that is completely out of proportion with the mysterious figures on the grass–a naked woman and two clothed men–so out of proportion that she would have to be a nine foot tall giant in order to account for the difference. And this was not an accident but a deliberate violation of the laws of perspective on Manet’s part. After him comes Cezanne, whose series of still-lifes violate correct perspective at every turn. This entire epoch of modern painting was tantamount to the annunciation of what the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser termed the Aperspectival consciousness structure, in which the laws of perspectivity break down as each object comes into being in order to define its own space in its own time completely separately from all other objects. As McLuhan pointed out, the significance of this was the shift from the kind of visual space configured by the eye–in which all objects are contained inside the same overarching container of spatiality–to a retrieval of the qualities of Medieval space, in which the sense of touch predominates, for as McLuhan says, “to the blind, all things are sudden.” In other words, whereas the eye creates a world of continuity, the hand creates a world of discontinuities.
And Lewis Carroll’s novels, which are not really “novels” at all, represent the beginnings of the same kind of thing taking place in the realm of literature, for the fact of the matter is that, by contrast with Tim Burton’s film, Lewis Carroll’s narratives do not tell a “story” at all, for each chapter is a self-contained unity, existing in its own frame of isolation, completely independently of the rest of the narrative. It is more like a collection of short stories with some recurring characters than anything else. It is not a dragon-slayer myth, as is Tim Burton’s film. The episode with the Red Queen has little to do with what precedes or follows it, just as the trial of the Mad Hatter actually occurs before he has done anything wrong. Carroll is deliberately violating the laws of sequentiality, just as Einstein does in his 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.”
Tim Burton’s film, on the other hand, is a more traditional type of narrative that tells a continuous, linear story of a battle of “good” vs. “evil” which has nothing at all to do with Lewis Carroll’s novels. Alice, when she shows up in Wonderland, is expected, in accordance with ancient prophecy, to slay the dragon there known as the Jabberwocky, a creature which puts in only a brief appearance in Carroll’s narrative. The Red Queen now becomes an evil queen like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz and she is opposed to the White Queen, who is associated with the realm of “good” and “light.” Alice is expected to find the sword, slay the dragon, and release the Mad Hatter from captivity in the Red Queen’s dungeon. This is all traditional Medieval, Arthurian-type stuff, which becomes recycled in the modern “fantasy” narrative from Tolkien to Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks. But it isn’t Lewis Carroll, who was a sophisticated mathematician embedding clever mathematical and spatial structures–it is evident, for instance, that he was already aware of the non-Euclidean geometries that would soon become the basis for Einstein’s Relativity–in his narrative, which wasn’t much concerned with telling any sort of traditional kind of story at all. Burton’s journey, though, is a clear retrieval of the night-sea journey of the solar hero who descends into the world beneath the earth, slays the night monster of the deep, and redeems civilization, just like the daily journey of the Egyptian sun god Re, who travels through the underworld and slays the Apophis serpent every night.
And so this leads to a larger point about the differences between Carroll’s and Burton’s narratives and that is that in processing the Lewis Carroll classic through the Hollywood meat grinder, the mind is turned into hamburger while the senses come out on top. All of Carroll’s wonderfully sophisticated wordplay that gives his Alice novels their unique charm is gone. Audiences, I am sure Disney executives figured, wouldn’t understand that stuff. And so what is left is an entertaining dragon slayer myth a la Dungeons and Dragons that is visually sweet and seductive, but intellectually vacant. You know, just like Hollywood. Indeed, the film does not appeal to what Rudolf Steiner would have called the intellectual soul at all, but rather to the more primordial sensuous soul which is concerned with the delights of the senses. Indeed, the world of Wonderland has never looked so visually stunning: this is the type of narrative that CGI technology was invented for, and I admit that it is quite stunning and magnificent.
But then, Carroll’s narrative is already a masterpiece, and in transplanting a narrative from one medium to another, you cannot improve upon a narrative that is already a masterpiece in the former medium. But you can destroy it and recreate it as something else altogether: this is what David Cronenberg did, for instance, when he rebuilt Naked Lunch, long considered–and rightly so–an unfilmable novel. Stanley Kubrick did this to The Shining–in an exactly opposite manner of turning a piece of kitsch garbage into a celluloid masterpiece that rewards repeated viewings, whereas repeated readings of Stephen King’s novel–which I’ve read twice–only further increase one’s revulsion at his sentimentality and kitsch.
Perhaps Burton, in transforming Carroll’s complex and sophisticated child’s narrative–the most sophisticated children’s novel ever written (indeed it is so sophisticated that I think it is safe to say that only adults can read it nowadays)–into a simple and easy to digest dragon slayer myth for the masses knew what he was doing, since previous celluloid adaptations of Carroll’s novel have been resounding failures, although it must be said that Walt Disney’s 1950s adaptation is actually quite true to the spirit of the book and is one of his best films and should be watched and compared carefully with Burton’s revisioning. (Indeed, Alice in Wonderland was one of Disney’s favorite books and it is clear that it became a sort of master plan for most of his life’s projects: Disneyland essentially is Wonderland, for it performs a similar feat of spatial discontinuity with its assemblage of historical epochs right beside one another in space as hyperreal phantoms of history, more real, that is to say, than history itself and assembled with a total, Los Angelinean disregard of chronology).
I enjoyed Burton’s film, but I must say that the more I thought about what I had seen, the more I realized I had been cheated.
So, thumbs sideways on this one.
