Tim Burton Interpretation of “Alice in Wonderland”

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Table of Contents

The semantic dichotomy between Carroll’s novel and Burton/Woolverton’s movie
Hidden meanings in the plot of Lewis Carroll
Difference in the rationale of the storyline of development
Conclusion
Bibliography:

The semantic dichotomy between Carroll’s novel and Burton/Woolverton’s movie

Nowadays, it became a common trend among Hollywood producers to preoccupy themselves with cinematographic reinterpreting of classical works of European literature that had already been put to films in earlier years. Nevertheless, while pursuing such their agenda, many of these producers often realize a simple fact that, in order for their movies to be able to win favor with viewing audiences, they would have to go as far as representing these literary works in an entirely different light from what it has been originally invented by its authors. The reason for this is simple – the multicultural realities of today’s Western living are being quite inconsistent with the metaphysical values, upon which Western civilization remained firmly based, throughout the course of centuries. Whereas; as recent as fifty years ago, it would never occur to an average Westerner to even doubt the validity of rationale-based social and political theories, nowadays, more and more citizens in Western countries strive for nothing less than undermining the validity of very concepts of scientific empiricism and technological progress as being essentially ‘wicked’. One would only have to watch James Cameron’s most recent blockbuster “Avatar” to realize the full soundness of such our suggestion.

Apparently, the ongoing process of Western societies’ intellectual marginalization had created objective preconditions for people to be increasingly preoccupied with seeking ‘emotional content’ in just about anything, as the only legitimate form of entertainment. It is important to understand that; whereas throughout the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Western concept of entertainment was essentially synonymous with the notion of intellectual exaltation, nowadays it is being synonymous with the notion of emotional intensity. This is exactly the reason why, unlike what was the case with Lewis Carroll’s original novel, Tim Burton & Linda Woolverton’s movie “Alice in Wonderland” is not being concerned with stimulating viewers’ brain cells, but rather with allowing audiences to get cheap thrills out of being exposed to 3D graphics, which provide emotional appeal to movie’s rather banal (good vs. evil) storyline. In our paper, we will aim to substantiate this thesis even to a further extent, by exposing an utter semantic dichotomy between Carroll’s novel and Burton/Woolverton’s movie as being objectively predetermined by what many today’s neo-Conservative political scientists refer to as the ‘decline of the West.

Hidden meanings in the plot of Lewis Carroll

As we have suggested earlier, many people in Western countries have now grown to despise the notion of scientific progress as such that contradicts the notion of political correctness and as such that, during the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, has been closely associated with the process of Europe’s colonial expansion into the Third World. However, it was named the fact that Carroll’s original novel did promote rationalistic civilization vs. ritualistic savagery discourse, which made it very popular with contemporaries – by reading “Alice in Wonderland”, imperialistically minded Europeans were able to confirm the full validity of a notion of so-called ‘white man’s burden’ in their own eyes. As it has been rightly pointed out in Daniel Bivona’s article Alice the Child-Imperialist and the Games of Wonderland: “Alice’s ‘imperialism’, such as it is, is a semiotic imperialism: she is incapable of constructing, on a model radically different from her own, the ‘system’ of ‘systems’ that give meaning to creatures” (1986, 150). Apparently, the fact Carroll’s Alice was striving to expose Wonderland’s ‘creatures’ as being only formally affiliated with the principles of logical reasoning, had provided readers with the insight into why Europe’s colonial presence in the Third World was not only economically feasible but also highly moral – without this presence, it was only the matter of time before ritualistically minded ‘savages’ would turn Western rationalism into the mockery of itself.

Nowadays, many critics point out the fact that in his novel, Carroll actually strived to promote an idea that there was no single reason to think of ‘distorted logic’, on the part of Wonderland’s creatures, as being inferior to the ‘proper logic’ of Alice. For example, in his article Dodgson’s Dark Conceit: Evoking the Allegorical Lineage of Alice, Andrew Wheat suggest that in Carroll’s novel, the character of Alice is being presented as the challenger of ‘undeniable truths’, as opposed to such truths’ enforcer: “Innovative, inconclusive allegorical qualities of the Alice books to a large extent overtake the more traditional and affirmative ones, the path to this conclusion lies not in ignoring the traditional, nor in over-stressing the innovative, but in pinpointing exactly where and how Carroll first evokes the generic traditions and conventions of the allegorical quest” (2009, 104). Yet, the validity of these types of suggestions appears to be only partial – while probing the legitimacy of conventional categories of logic, Carroll acted like a typical intellectually advanced Westerner.

The close reading of both Carroll’s novels reveals that the author was well aware of the fact that the validity of logic-based notions could only be discussed in regards to the system of coordinates, within which these notions exist. Moreover, once a particular system of coordinates loses all links with another system of coordinates, the flow of time in both systems ceases to remain interconnected (after having woken up, Alice realized that her trip to Wonderland lasted only for a few seconds). What it means is that in “Alice in Wonderland”, Lewis Carroll had foreseen the foremost theoretical tenets, upon which Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is being based. In its turn, this explains why Carroll’s novel can only be formally referred to as such that belongs to children’s literature, in the contemporary sense of this word.

The validity of this thesis is being particularly self-evident in regards to Carroll’s second novel about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland “Through the Looking-glass”, which many literary critics refer to as being nothing short of a highly philosophical treatise on logic. In his article Looking Glass: A Treatise on Logic, William Sacksteder had made a perfectly good point while emphasizing this novel’s non-engagement with the issues of morality as ‘thing in itself’: “Alice experiences no incongruities of size, but rather intellectual and verbal incongruities. Her encounters do not issue moral instruction, but rather an explanation and debate… The prevailing disproportion and occasion for humor are between verbalization and reality” (1967, 340). In order for people to enjoy reading Carroll’s novels, they must be endowed with a certain degree of intellectual sophistication, regardless of what these readers’ age might be. The fact that, during the course of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-glass” has gained almost immediate popularity with adolescent readers simply indicates that, despite these readers’ young age, they were fully capable of operating with rather abstract categories.

And, even a brief inquiry into the subject matter, provides us with insight into this phenomenon – in the first part of the 20^th century, children’s (boys’) hobbies were primarily concerned with a variety of technical pursuits (model plane building, radios’ assembling, motorcycles’ maintaining, etc.). By indulging in these activities, children were developing their ability to operate with highly abstract categories of formal logic, which is why they were able to derive an intellectual pleasure out of reading Carroll’s novels. Nowadays, due to the fact that enforcers of political correctness have largely succeeded in taking over the domain of public education, and due to the fact that multiculturalization (barbarization) of Western societies continues to gain an exponential momentum, which results in a continuous lowering of educational standards (affirmative action), children as well as adults, are no longer being encouraged to expand their intellectual horizons, but to be solely preoccupied with ‘celebration of diversity’. In its turn, this created a situation when, despite many students’ inability to point at the U.S. on the world’s map, they nevertheless know just about everything they can about sexual positions and about different kinds of drugs. And, as it has always been the case, throughout the course of history, the lower is the rate of people’s IQ, the stronger is their affiliation with morality, ritualistic (new age) spirituality and emotional sensuality.

Apparently, Tim Burton and Linda Woolverton were well aware of this fact, which is why their cinematographic interpretation of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-glass” appears to have been made in exact accordance with the dogmas of political correctness – it is intellectually shallow, highly moralistic, pretentiously ‘rebellious’ and artificially ‘sophisticate’. By providing their movie with a linear storyline, by instilling it with clearly defined feministic overtones, and by depriving it of Carroll’s original spirit of logical riddlism, Burton and Woolverton simply strived to appease marginalized aesthetic tastes of American moviegoers. In the next part of our paper, we will explore this suggestion at length.

Difference in the rationale of the storyline of development

The most obvious difference between Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice in Wonderland” by Burton and Woolverton is the fact that, unlike what is the case with Carroll’s novel, the movie features a clearly defined developmental storyline. From the time when Alice fell down the rabbit hole until the time she came out of there, every part of her journey never ceased being consequential, in regards to the previous ones; whereas, in the original novel, there are no strong logical links between places and situations, Alice would find herself in. In its turn, this can be explained by the fact that Carroll viewed his novel as an exercise in logic – by placing Alice in seemingly unrelated situations, Carroll was prompting readers to utilize their own sense of rationale while figuring out how the novel’s scenes, themes, and motifs defined its storyline.

In the preface to his book The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze had come up with a perfectly legitimate suggestion, while stating: “The privileged place assigned to Lewis Carroll is due to his having provided the first great account, the first great mise en scene of the paradoxes of sense – sometimes collecting, sometimes renewing, sometimes inventing and sometimes preparing them” (2004, IX). Just as it is being the case with many contemporary commercials, the connection between the novel’s scenes only exists in the minds of readers.

In Burton and Woolverton’s movie, however, scenes progress from one to another in rather a linear manner, which undermines the storyline’s plausibility – only a few adult viewers would find the story 19 years old girl’s adventures in Wonderland (as the ultimate consequence of her unwillingness to marry Hamish), as being very credible. It appears that producers’ preoccupation with trying to provide viewers with insight onto motivations, behind Alice’s every move, had played a bad trick on them – instead of endowing the movie with credibility, it resulted in creating an entirely opposite effect. The fact that Burton and Woolverton’s interpretation is cinematographic, cannot serve as justification for the fact that the movie appears to be deprived of Carroll’s novel’s original spirit. For example, the 1981 Russian animation “Alice in Wonderland” does not feature a linear plot, just as it is the case in Carroll’s novel, and yet – it is highly watchable.

Nevertheless, it is not the fact that the movie’s structure does not quite correlate with that of a novel, which makes it anything but Carrollian, but the fact that Burton and Woolverton’s interpretation of Carroll’s novel is highly moralistic. Unlike what is the case in the novel, the movie’s characters are being clearly divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Apparently, the movie’s producers were not concerned with stimulating viewers’ brain cells, as much as they were concerned with instilling them with ‘positive values’. One would only need to compare qualitative subtleties of Alice’s dialogues in the novels and film, in order to realize the full legitimacy of this statement. Here is what Alice’s dialogue with a Pigeon sounded like in Carroll’s original novel:

‘I have tasted eggs, certainly,’ said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.’ ‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Pigeon; ‘but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say.’ ‘You’re looking for eggs, I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?’ (1876, 30).

The context of this dialogue implies emotional impartiality – Alice and Pigeon are simply exercising their ability to indulge in logical reasoning – nothing else. And, here is how Alice’s dialogue with Mad Hatter sounded like in Burton and Woolverton’s movie:

Hatter: ‘I’m frightened, Alice. I don’t like it in here, it’s terribly crowded. Have I gone mad?’. Alice: ‘Afraid so, you’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret – all the best people are!’ (00.56.33).

In this dialogue, Alice sounded like a typical middle-aged White housewife, whose post-climaxes urges and whose bellyful idling makes her believe that she is a great expert on tolerance. It is not only that Alice did not try to actively confront Hatter’s madness, as is being the case in Carroll’s original novel, but she actually encouraged him to expose others to his madness as something absolutely natural. By doing so, Alice acted as today’s enforcers of political correctness, who often go as far as denying the validity of scientifically proven facts, simply because these facts do not sound ‘tolerant’ enough to their ears. For example, in 2009, the officials from American Psychological Association have openly proclaimed that homosexuality can no longer be discussed in terms of pathology, even though that such their suggestion is being utterly unscientific – as recent as 5 years ago, the officials from the same Association used to suggest something entirely opposite. Nowadays, it is not only that mentally deviated people are being assumed normal, but particularly ‘special’ – the fact that in Burton and Woolverton’s movie, Alice never ceases being fascinated with different emanations of behavioral inadequateness, on the part of ‘creatures’, simply reflects film creators’ strong affiliation with left-wing political agenda.

Thus, it comes as no surprise why it was namely Mad Hatter, who assumed a highly moral posture of a rebel against oppressive authority and who rallied others to support his cause – the parallels between Mad Hatter and often mentally inadequate promoters of left-wing agenda, who call for an abandonment of euro-centric terms of ‘authority’ and ‘discipline’ as ‘intolerant’ and ‘chauvinistic’, are quite obvious not to be noticed. And yet, the original sounding of Carroll’s original novels can be referred to as anything but progressive, in the politically correct sense of this word. As it has been rightly pointed out in Calvin Petersen’s article Time and Stress: Alice in Wonderland: “Carroll obviously felt this secret of irony, whether or not he ever fully admitted it to himself. The ‘Era of Progress’ had brought neither the millennium nor utopia, but an ‘all-devouring, all-destroying,’ ‘dark resistless stream.’ It may be that the stream and the conception of time which it carries that bring on the stress of modern existence – life ever rushing from its own perplexity, progress as a thin veneer against a darker truth” (1985, 432). The fact that Burton and Woolverton’s movie is being instilled with a variety of positivist ideas is what sets it apart from Carroll’s novels more than anything else does.

In its turn, this also explains why the movie’s imagery appears fantasy-like – Burton and Woolverton’s Wonderland reminds John Tolkien’s Middle Earth: Red Queen’s soldiers look like orks, the members of White Queen’s entourage look like elves, the castle of White Queen looks like Tolkien’s Rivendale, etc. Also, just as is the case with Tolkien’s novels, the movie’s storyline revolves around the never-ending struggle of good against evil. Yet, it is important to understand that the charm of Carroll’s novels consisted in the author’s ability to provide readers with an opportunity to mentally construct their own Wonderland.

As Douglas Nickel had rightly suggested in his book Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll: “Carroll’s pictures operated in a world where migration from one classification to the other was not as unmanageable as it would later become, where real and unreal as yet coexist equally as a set of potential pictures available to the artistic imagination” (2002, 53). By being taken to Carroll’s Wonderland, readers felt as if they were inside of one’s dream. However, the scenery of Burton and Woolverton’s movie is being just too realistic to be referred to as dream-like, and the appearance of Wonderland ‘creatures’ is being spared of any symbolic undertones whatsoever, unlike what is the case in Carroll’s original novels.

Apparently, it never occurred to Burton and Woolverton that ‘creatures’ physical appearance was meant to provide readers/viewers with insight into the workings of their minds. For example, in the article from which we have already quoted, Daniel Bivona points out the fact that Blue Caterpillar’s hookah is actually an item, closely associated with the East: “The hookah, itself a stock ‘orientalizing’ feature, highlights the Caterpillar’s foreignness; and the tautological turn that their conversation takes demonstrates, not that the Caterpillar is incorrigibly illogical, but rather that he refuses to be comprehended by Alice’s categories of meaning” (1986, 151). By depicting Caterpillar with hookah, Carroll wanted to emphasize that the rationale of this ‘creature’ worked along different lines, as compared to what is the case with the rationale of Whites. In his article Cultures of Reason, Bruce Bower states: “In a variety of reasoning tasks, East Asians take a “holistic” approach. They make little use of categories and formal logic and instead focus on relations among objects and the context in which they interact” (2000, 57). Nevertheless, it is highly doubtful whether the film’s creators were even aware of what was the actual reason for Carroll to depict Caterpillar with a hookah in its mouth, in the first place, otherwise, whey would make Caterpillar’s eyes appear slanted; just it was the case with the character of Yoda from George Lukas’ “Star Wars”.

Instead, Burton and Woolverton made Caterpillar look like Winston Churchill. Apparently, it has now become taboo for producers to even think of portraying representatives of ethnic minorities in a somewhat unfavourable light. The same does not apply to ‘wicked’ Whites, of course, which explains why Burton and Woolverton had made a point in ridiculing the character of Hamish – in the eyes of producers, this character was supposed to emanate psychological qualities that are now being ridiculed by Medias and by especially ‘progressive’ social scientists as euro-centric, and therefore ‘evil’ – emotional coldness, perceptional rationalism and the ability to plan things ahead of time.

Thus, it will not be an exaggeration to say that Burton and Woolverton’s movie subtly promotes an idea that, with the exclusion of mentally abnormal individuals (‘the best people’), such as the character of Mad Hatter and White Queen, all Whites can be divided on ice-cold imperialists (the characters of Red Knave, Hamish and Red Queen), and on saliva-drooling imbeciles (the characters Tweedledum and Tweedledee). This suggestion is consistent with our paper’s main thesis, which is being concerned with the exposal of Burton and Woolverton’s “Alice in Wonderland” as another cinematographic vehicle of pushing forward the neo-Liberal agenda. The fact that, besides aiming to instill viewers with a sense of historical guilt, the movie also promotes a feminist cause, can serve as yet additional proof as to the full validity of this paper’s initial thesis.

In his critical review of Burton and Woolverton’s movie, Ethan Alter states: “At its core, Burton’s take on the material recasts Carroll’s odd little children’s story as a tale of female empowerment. His Alice stands on the precipice of adulthood, torn between becoming the woman 19th-century society expects her to be—namely a dutiful wife and mother—and the woman she wants to be, a free-spirited dreamer” (2010, 138). There are many scenes, throughout the course of a movie, when Alice beats impossible odds, by simply exposing these odds to her female charms (the scene of Alice escaping on Bandersnatch, for example). Without even having to mention that these scenes are being inconsistent with the spirit of Carroll’s original novels, they also do not add to the movie’s overall plausibility, as Alice’s feminist posture does not make much of a sense, within the context of the Victorian era’s socio-political realities.

Thus, we can say that Burton and Woolverton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is more related to the “Lord of the Rings” movie, than to Carroll’s novels, out of which Burton and Woolverton supposedly drew inspiration. Just as it was the case with Frodo single-handedly saving Middle Earth, Alice was given the mission of ‘saving Wonderland’, which she initially rejects. Just as Middle Earth, Burton’s Wonderland appears romantically realistic. Just as Sauron, from “Lord of the Rings”, Red Queen is being presented as the ultimate villain, who wants to destroy Wonderland. In other words – Burton and Woolverton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is essentially a politically motivated fairy-tale under the disguise of a politically disengaged intellectual mind-opener.

Conclusion

This paper’s ultimate conclusion can be articulated as follows:

Whereas; the themes and motifs in Burton and Woolverton’s “Alice in Wonderland” appear to be formally related to those from Lewis Carroll’s original novels, the very essence of these themes and motifs points out their incompatibility with Carroll novels’ original sounding. Whereas; Carroll had written his novels with the purpose of helping children and adolescents to expand their intellectual horizons, Burton and Woolverton had produced their movie to instill viewers with the sense of politically correct morality, as the ultimate mean of preventing them from being able to expand their intellectual horizons. However, both producers cannot be solely blamed for the fact that their “Alice in Wonderland” appears to be a mockery of Lewis Carroll’s original novels. It is namely due to the process of Western societies’ continuous intellectual marginalization, that producers had no choice but to proceed with endowing their movie with a high degree of emotional intensity, at the expense of depriving it of its intellectual integrity.

Bibliography:

Alice in Wonderland. Dir. Tim Burton. Perfs. Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter. Walt Disney, 2010.

Alter, Ethan ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Film Journal International 113.4 (2010): 138. Print.

Bivona, Daniel ‘Alice the Child-Imperialist and the Games of Wonderland’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.2 (1986): 143-171. Print.

Bower, Bruce ‘Cultures of Reason’, Science News 157.4 (2000): 56-58. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. London: Continuum, 2004. Print.

Lewis, Carroll. Alice in Wonderland. Ed. Donald L. Gray. New York: Norton, (1876) 1971. Print.

Nickel, Douglas. Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Petersen, Calvin ‘Time and Stress: Alice in Wonderland’, Journal of the History of Ideas 46.3 (1985): 427-433. Print.

Sacksteder, William ‘Looking Glass: A Treatise on Logic’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 27.3 (1967): 338-355. Print.

Wheat, Andrew ‘Dodgson’s Dark Conceit: Evoking the Allegorical Lineage of Alice’, REN 61.2 (2009): 103-123. Print.

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