Alizah Salario

The Lovely Bones, based on the bestselling novel by Alice Sebold, is now a big screen extravaganza. The plot goes something like this: Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl, is young, precocious and the apple of her father’s eye, girl is murdered, girl’s family suffers, girl (girl’s soul? girl’s ghost?) wavers between the Peter Jackson psychedelic Candyland world known as the in-between and here, this world, full of tears, alcoholic grandmothers, murderers, useless detectives, ships in bottles, green vegetables for dinner and candles that burn out waiting for dead daughters who never come home.

But I don’t really care about any of that. Granted, the acting is stellar (Marky Mark, you never let me down) the plot is suspenseful – if not somewhat contrived – but for me, that’s all beside the point. I want to know why Susie goes to a magical fairytale land when she dies.

I shouldn’t be surprised. It happens in lots of movies. Vast, sprawling landscapes tumbling toward eternity became Susie’s playgroud. Everything was shimmery and hazy around the edges. There were kitschy images and archetypal dreamscapes (moonlight, horizons, cloudless blue skies, girl running barefoot through waves of grain) unapologetic in their majesty. It was a divine world of imagination – with just a bit too much tie-dye – but isn’t that what heaven is made of?

Movie heaven, that is. The whole afterlife aspect of the film was vibrant and swirling and endorphin enhanced, a place down the rabbit hole or up the magic beanstalk or God knows where movies and books take us because we need to get far away from our own here and nows, especially if we’re dead. Its countless movies about the afterlife that turn life after death into a stupendous carnival with such assurance that it seems like more than wish fulfillment. Its as if we want it so bad and so hard we’ve willed it to be true.

There are those who believe we are here on Earth as if in a cocoon, gestating for a total transformation in the next life.  There is someone waiting on the other side, patiently, or a light to envelop us, warmly.  Death is only the beginning- it is where we take off our ‘inky cloak’ slip, into the silky nightgown of the soul and get to be our true selves. Or is it?  If we know we don’t know, then why do we still read books and watch movies about a life beyond as if it were the truth? How could something as cut and dry as death breed such cotton candy portrayals of life beyond the grave? Yes, it assuages and calms us, but Bones also depicts in death what we lack for in life: pure, unadulterated freedom.

By the way, the in-between is more commonly know as purgatory.

Like any well constructed fantasy, it only takes a a tiny puff of realism to bring it down like a house of cards.

See the movie. You’ll enjoy it.

And for the record, I don’t think believing in the unbelievable is necessarily bad. After all, aren’t dreams what stories are made of?

Or, why I identify with Burton.

The scene through the window is gruesome. A small house that should be home to dolls at a dinner party or a friendly Labrador is instead the scene of a crime. A figurine of a boy stands inside the house next to a Christmas tree. A man’s legs jut out from an unseen back room, his toes pointing towards the sky like the Wicked Witch of the East.  Christmas lights flicker on and off, and it is uncertainly whether the boy is pleased or disgusted at his discovery – or his conquest. Peering through the widow, viewers become voyeurs into the surreal world of Tim Burton.

The house is only one installation in the massive Tim Burton exhibit at MOMA, but it tells his entire story.  To see the exhibit is to sit in Burton’s brain and watch his imagination at work. His signature characters – the sinewy figures with large melancholy eyes, the freakish, exaggerated creatures – all resemble reflections in funhouse mirrors: they are distorted and absurd yet intriguing nonetheless. They are victims of violence and horror, and they are full forlorn tenderness. It is this juxtaposition of the heartwarming and the gut wrenching defines the genius of Tim Burton.

Patrons enter the exhibit through a gaping mouth with teeth like ice picks fixed into the doorway.  They go through a tunnel painted with black and white stripes as they journey to a strange netherworld. Through such innovative curatorial choices, the exhibit becomes an interactive experience instead of passive window-shopping.

Burton’s work spans from his teen years, when he created an anti-littering poster that was displayed on public busses, to present day figures depicting the nascent stages of his recognizable movie characters. While the blockbuster movie memorabilia has its place, it is the intimate watercolors on framed notebook pages and early doodles he likely never intended for the public eye that animate the exhibit.

A series of sketches from his days as an animator for Disney reveal the seeds for his future movies: a rough sketch of  The Gardener  – “he uses gardening utensils instead of hands” – is clearly an early allusion to Mr. Scissorhands. His earlier work also reveals sharp wit and a slightly perverse sense of humor: “Two people enjoying each other” is a sketch of a man and a woman chomping on each other’s fleshy bones. It’s as if Burton is saying, “Don’t take anything at face value. Things are not always as they seem.”

Burton is prolific, yet the bulk of his sketches are variations on a theme: Two young girls sitting alone at a dinner table, with only a spoon and fork hanging from the wall to keep them company.  A skeletal figure pulling itself out through the mouth of a limp body that hangs like a wrinkled suit from its bones. Rooms of altered perspective in which the characters appear very small, and very, very alone. The freakish introvert, the misunderstood artist, the marginalized loner. These are the stock characters from which he has build the tragic heroes audiences know and love onscreen.

Yet from these characters – and Burton’s life– another motif emerges:

One can guess that Burton’s sense of being an outsider during a lonely childhood (the exhibit chronicles his early years growing up in Burbank, where he said he didn’t fit in) served as the wellspring of his creativity. Insight emerges from feeling misunderstood and alone, when the artist has only his imagination to contend with. Through his freakish figures, most notably Edward Scissorhands, Burton reminds viewers that everyone sees their flaws as glaring distortions; it is incongruous self-perceptions that prevent people from getting close to one another, not the true self. Through fantastical images and surrealism, Burton gets close to the harsh realities of the human experience: loneliness and the inability to connect is painful, isolating, and inescapable, whether or not we have scissored hands. His art is a self-reflective pastiche, and perhaps Burton will always be his most complex character.