The Philosophy of Tim Burton

Affect without Illusion

243 affeCt without illusion The Films of Edward D. Wood Jr. after Ed Wood David LaRocca A typical American film, naïve and silly, can—for all its silliness and even by means of it—be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film. —Ludwig Wittgenstein The director Edward D. Wood Jr. is derided for the films he made in the 1950s and otherwise notorious as the “worst director of all time”—a sort of patron saint of the B movie.1 Part of the pleasure audiences derive from proclaiming Wood the worst practitioner of filmmaking seems linked with an expression of resentment: hidden in the criticism of his work lies a belief andexpectation(perhapsunacknowledgedorunarticulated)thatfilmmakers are supposed to show us our world by taking us out of it. To outer space if need be. Science fiction, for example, is a film genre in which the demands for simulated but necessarily convincing escape tend to be the highest. Partly the escape to another world serves the symbolic significance of plot and character: many science fiction films (including many disaster films) become ciphers for terrestrial problems such as marriage trouble, political upheaval, fraught race relations, and compromised environmental policy. These otherworldly film fictions seem more satisfying as allegories precisely because we are sure the film is about, well, some other world. Much the same could be said of horror films, where the division between worlds allows viewers to explore fears, desires, and curiosity into the unknown without a sense that they are present in those horrifying realms. With both science fiction and horror, we are then at peace to experience and judge our own allegorized problems at a safe distance. Yet Wood fails to satisfy audience expectations 244 David LaRocca precisely because he fails to achieve this separation between worlds. He never really even gets off the ground. The viewer can see the wire holding the wobbling metallic disc meant to be a flying saucer (“Holy mackerel. . . . It’s nothing from this world”) as the disoriented airline pilot—whose acting is as wooden as the painted steering column he fumbles with—tries to avoid hitting it.2 Wood’s films are almost entirely without illusion, and so the audience remains in the world it sought to escape. But this failure, one that was likely as evident to audiences in the 1950s as at present, masks Wood’s success: creating a kind of documentary of creativity in the midst of constraint, and in that kind of realism showing —inadvertently—the emotional lives of his actors. His films excel not at moving us through illusion but rather through the awful reality of our encounter with the world we in fact inhabit. The science fiction world or the world of horror, it turns out, is our own strange world, a place where making films on one’s own—with little money and few accomplices—is often disparaged and compromised. Wood’s films reflect back to viewers the world they live in, and most viewers, it seems, ridicule him for it; those who are said to love his work may do so with the reassurance of knowing better work by other filmmakers. He was outspokenly committed to “realism ” and continually attested to his audience that what they were about to see was “real,” “true,” and “based on fact.” But he created a kind of realism that shows the strings, not the kind that hides them. As critic J. Hoberman has said, “The rich realism induced by Wood’s failure to convince is of incomparably greater aesthetic interest than the seamless naturalism of conventional narrative film.”3 It seems an unpardonable offense to genre conventions and audience expectations to claim you have made a science fiction or horror film and instead to have shown what amounts to a documentary about the failure to do so. Wood’s films are defiantly, though not intentionally, antispectacle.4 With Ed Wood (1994), however, Tim Burton reveals “the incomparably greater aesthetic interest” of Wood’s films by creating a film with “the seamless naturalism of conventional narrative film.”5 By Hollywood means, Burton shows how and why we should be interested in Wood’s work—above merely indulging in the pleasure of mocking it. Burton is a fan who clearly appreciates why it is fun to laugh at Wood’s poorly made films, but he is also committed to exploring what Wood’s films represent aside...