summon to unwelcome bed a melancholy maiden
I do enjoy going to movies with friends, honest I do, but there's a completely separate and idiosyncratic pleasure in going to movies by myself. Sunday mornings are my favourite time: if I'm lucky I'll be the only person in the theatre, and can dangle my feet over the chairs in front of me and comment on the action at the top of my voice without anyone throwing popcorn. I can also sit in the back row, which is my preferred movie space, and which cuts neatly through the necessary compromise of movie-watching with friends (jo&stv are my favourite people in the multiverse with whom to do almost anything, but they like to be in the front third of the theatre where I like to be in the back third, and we usually compromise on pleasing no-one somewhere in the middle).
This morning I was the only person in the theatre for the first 20 minutes of the film and could heckle the previews with demands for Iron Man, alas without effect. Then I was rather weirdly (I don't understand people who miss the start of films) joined by a couple with a small child, who sat down in front and allowed the wretched infant to kick the back of the chairs loudly and with a slightly tragic lack of rhythm at random intervals throughout. Insofar as the film was Burton's Alice in Wonderland, there were moments when I almost sympathised.
I am both an aficionado of Lewis Carroll, and a faint imitation of an expert: I've taught the Alice books for many years to second-year students, supervised various postgrad dissertations on them, and read really rather a lot about them and about Dodgson himself. I love the books for their dream-logic, for their frequent subversion of Victorian mores, and for their pedantic cleverness. I prefer Dodgson's own slightly sultry and disturbing illustrations to the prissy Tenniel ones; above all, I love Alice herself for her matter-of-factness, her slight bloody-mindedness and her general air of calm acceptance. In the event, this aspect of Alice is really the only thing the film got right, mostly by dint of genius casting. But Burton and Carroll are a strange mismatch, and odd enough bedfellows that neither of them ends up being himself; this is neither Alice in Wonderland nor a Burton film, and while it offers genuine pleasures to fans of either, I think it's best enjoyed as a separate creature all on its own.
This wasn't Alice. The central feature of the Alice stories is their dream-like nature, their narrative indeterminacy: Wonderland's quest is to go through the door into the garden, Looking Glass's to reach the eighth square and become Queen. Neither quest is madly instrumental or particularly clear-cut, and they're achieved almost by happenstance - the point is the strangely inevitable drift of the journey. Burton's bloody Jabberwock-slaying thing is thus alien to the true Alice, a far too coherent and steretypical narrative to be in any way Carroll's, even if I did rather fall for the Britomart version of Alice, all armour and sword and flowing hair. However much I enjoy the pale warrior-maiden, though, it's not what even a postmodern version of Alice should be; nor should the card/chess red/white elements of the queens be reducible to actual warfare outside the ritualised encounters of the chessboard. The lack of the true dream feel meant that all the familiar characters were knowing caricatures stapled onto a fairly standard quest, rather than being a rediscovery of Carroll.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy large tracts of the film: Burton was sufficiently a shadow of Burton that Underland was visually stunning, its twistiness offering a decaying and darkened version of Carroll's world. I loved the Cheshire Cat, fell heavily for the Bandersnatch (I think it was the way he bounded along), and I rather enjoyed Johnny Depp's Hatter, although only really by dint of pretending it wasn't Carroll's Hatter at all. (Apart from anything else, the revelation of the day was that the Jabberwocky poem was clearly meant to be declaimed in a Scottish accent. Why the Hatter sometimes had a Scottish accent is a question strangely akin to "Why is a raven like a writing desk?", and I can do no more than invoke Aldous Huxley's answer1). I also loved Anne Hathaway doing the drifty White Queen thing and, obviously, Alan Rickman's voice on the Caterpillar. Too many of the creatures, though, were either twee (the Dormouse) or grotesque (Tweedledum and Tweedledee), or completely gratuitous (the wretched talking dog. Why? I have no words).
Finally, I think the film flawed itself irrevocably in its framing. The jolly unrealistic wish-fulfilment of Alice's real-world outcome so utterly ignores the realities of the Victorian context as to cause me audibly to gnash my teeth. More importantly, the point of the Wonderland experience is really not to emerge a more mature and confident person able to tell the world to go to hell. The point of the Wonderland experience is the Wonderland experience, and as Carroll's Duchess rather pointedly demonstrates, it doesn't have a moral. The Alice books are anti-Victorian-children's-literature, they're not trying to teach anything at all. At best, they gently suggest that the world is inexplicable and unknowable, but still open to exploration and enjoyment. Tim Burton, alas, has either utterly failed to grasp this, or has been Disneyfied beyond redemption. However darkly attractive it is, his film isn't Alice: its detail simply suggests Alice, occasionally, if you squint.
1 Because there's a "B" in both.
This morning I was the only person in the theatre for the first 20 minutes of the film and could heckle the previews with demands for Iron Man, alas without effect. Then I was rather weirdly (I don't understand people who miss the start of films) joined by a couple with a small child, who sat down in front and allowed the wretched infant to kick the back of the chairs loudly and with a slightly tragic lack of rhythm at random intervals throughout. Insofar as the film was Burton's Alice in Wonderland, there were moments when I almost sympathised.
I am both an aficionado of Lewis Carroll, and a faint imitation of an expert: I've taught the Alice books for many years to second-year students, supervised various postgrad dissertations on them, and read really rather a lot about them and about Dodgson himself. I love the books for their dream-logic, for their frequent subversion of Victorian mores, and for their pedantic cleverness. I prefer Dodgson's own slightly sultry and disturbing illustrations to the prissy Tenniel ones; above all, I love Alice herself for her matter-of-factness, her slight bloody-mindedness and her general air of calm acceptance. In the event, this aspect of Alice is really the only thing the film got right, mostly by dint of genius casting. But Burton and Carroll are a strange mismatch, and odd enough bedfellows that neither of them ends up being himself; this is neither Alice in Wonderland nor a Burton film, and while it offers genuine pleasures to fans of either, I think it's best enjoyed as a separate creature all on its own.
This wasn't Alice. The central feature of the Alice stories is their dream-like nature, their narrative indeterminacy: Wonderland's quest is to go through the door into the garden, Looking Glass's to reach the eighth square and become Queen. Neither quest is madly instrumental or particularly clear-cut, and they're achieved almost by happenstance - the point is the strangely inevitable drift of the journey. Burton's bloody Jabberwock-slaying thing is thus alien to the true Alice, a far too coherent and steretypical narrative to be in any way Carroll's, even if I did rather fall for the Britomart version of Alice, all armour and sword and flowing hair. However much I enjoy the pale warrior-maiden, though, it's not what even a postmodern version of Alice should be; nor should the card/chess red/white elements of the queens be reducible to actual warfare outside the ritualised encounters of the chessboard. The lack of the true dream feel meant that all the familiar characters were knowing caricatures stapled onto a fairly standard quest, rather than being a rediscovery of Carroll.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy large tracts of the film: Burton was sufficiently a shadow of Burton that Underland was visually stunning, its twistiness offering a decaying and darkened version of Carroll's world. I loved the Cheshire Cat, fell heavily for the Bandersnatch (I think it was the way he bounded along), and I rather enjoyed Johnny Depp's Hatter, although only really by dint of pretending it wasn't Carroll's Hatter at all. (Apart from anything else, the revelation of the day was that the Jabberwocky poem was clearly meant to be declaimed in a Scottish accent. Why the Hatter sometimes had a Scottish accent is a question strangely akin to "Why is a raven like a writing desk?", and I can do no more than invoke Aldous Huxley's answer1). I also loved Anne Hathaway doing the drifty White Queen thing and, obviously, Alan Rickman's voice on the Caterpillar. Too many of the creatures, though, were either twee (the Dormouse) or grotesque (Tweedledum and Tweedledee), or completely gratuitous (the wretched talking dog. Why? I have no words).
Finally, I think the film flawed itself irrevocably in its framing. The jolly unrealistic wish-fulfilment of Alice's real-world outcome so utterly ignores the realities of the Victorian context as to cause me audibly to gnash my teeth. More importantly, the point of the Wonderland experience is really not to emerge a more mature and confident person able to tell the world to go to hell. The point of the Wonderland experience is the Wonderland experience, and as Carroll's Duchess rather pointedly demonstrates, it doesn't have a moral. The Alice books are anti-Victorian-children's-literature, they're not trying to teach anything at all. At best, they gently suggest that the world is inexplicable and unknowable, but still open to exploration and enjoyment. Tim Burton, alas, has either utterly failed to grasp this, or has been Disneyfied beyond redemption. However darkly attractive it is, his film isn't Alice: its detail simply suggests Alice, occasionally, if you squint.
1 Because there's a "B" in both.