I want to start out by saying that I enjoy Tim Burton’s projects. His art touches me in a way no other entertainer does. He’s all sharp angles and dark whimsy. You know who he is; you know what I mean. He’s someone that speaks to all those who, like me, have a weird little heart.
However, like the Wizard chilling behind a curtain in his castle in Oz, not everything is quite as it seems. Or so it would seem. The mirrors crack, the smoke fades, and we’re left with just a man.
Let’s reminisce a little first, though.
The Appeal
I can still remember the first time I watched Nightmare before Christmas. I was young, staying with my siblings at my cousin’s house. Our parents went out for the night (probably gambling, let’s be real), and they had left us to our own devices. There were eight of us in the house, four kids on each side, each pair almost the exact same age as the other. It’s like our mom’s were on a mission and their biological whatnots were in sync. Kinda crazy if you think about it.
Anyway, I was with my cousin in the den, and our parents had either rented or bought the movie for us to watch so we would stay out of everyone else’s hair. I remember it was scary in some spots, but not so bad I got nightmares. After we watched it all the way through, we rewound it to the part where Jack first goes to Christmas Town, after he sings his iconic What’s This song, and he runs into the pole. We laughed a lot. I also remember wanting to eat the snow. I remember falling in love with Jack Skellington, and all the spooky things involved with him. I don’t know if that movie completely molded who I am today as a person, but it definitely set some things in motion.
I watched that movie for years to come, sometimes multiple viewings in a row because I didn’t feel like I appreciated it enough the first run through. I still bust it out to this day, devouring it piece by piece, falling in love with a walking, talking, singing skeleton over and over again. I grew with it up to the age when I realized it’s not just about Halloween and Christmas, but about a guy stuck in a rut and depressed and searching for something to make life exciting again. It’s about trying to run from your problems and having to come back and face them head on. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but where you water it.
Nightmare before Christmas had some very grown-up themes for a kid’s movie. I think that’s a big reason why I still consider it a part of my life as a 31-year-old. It’s a masterpiece, in my humble opinion.
Fast forward several years later. I was in college when Burton’s take on Alice in Wonderland came out. This was not the film of the century. It’s not as influential as Nightmare was by any means, but it’s a favorite of mine. Any version of Alice has a special place in my heart. I love the story of it. The whimsy. The implied drug use (even though that’s just a theory everyone clung onto and is in no way the real deal).
I remember seeing this film as well. It must have been a break of some sort because I was at home. A simple Google search could answer this for me in a second, but the exact time frame isn’t important. I was at work, and my sister text me to see if I wanted to go with her. I, of course, did, but the movie started about a half hour before the end of my shift. We decided I could still make it, that I’d only miss the previews. I clocked out at ten til, because that was legal for Walmart standards at the time, and made a mad dash over there. She’d bought my ticket despite me telling her not to, we ran into a half empty (or half full??) theater, and I was blown away enough to buy the DVD when it came out. We repeated the process almost word for word when the sequel came out. The theater was our happy place.
Again, this wasn’t a masterpiece. The plot won’t stick with me the same way as Nightmare. I will grow older, and it will stay very much the same. And the important thing to get out of this is that’s okay. Not everything you consume has the obligation to be a mindfuck. Entertainment does not always need to have layers upon layers of deeper meaning. Alice in Wonderland was a feel-good movie with enough bizarre imagery to make it undeniably Burton. That was enough for me.
Fast forward again. It’s November of 2019, and I’m in Vegas with my soon to be fiancé. I had just been to Vegas a few months prior for my coworker’s birthday trip, but I chose to go back. On one hand, I was doing the good girlfriend thing: My fiancé got the go ahead to hit up SEMA, a personal goal of his. I’ll be real with you. Cars interest me not in the slightest but seeing him happy makes me happy. Yanno, that lovey-dovey bullshit. I had my own reasons for joining him to Vegas for the second time in a year.
The Tim Burton exhibit.
Lost Vegas.
Words don’t do it justice, so I’ll just share some of my favorite pictures with you.
This was truly a once in a lifetime experience. It’s one I will never forget, and I’m so grateful to have gone.
The Bad
What celebrity hasn’t had a controversy or two during the life of their career? If you name one, I’ll tell you to just wait. At the end of the day, no one is perfect. We are all human. We all have skeletons in our closet and demons under our skin. It’s a fact of life. It’s what makes us real.
In the past, I had heard of Burton being in hot water with social justice warriors everywhere because of the type of characters he chose to portray. Yup, I’m going there. The white-washing whatnots. This article gives a pretty good summary of it.
TL;DR: He was confronted about his lack of diversity in his films, and he responded with “Thing’s either call for things, or they don’t.”
Here’s the thing. When this was making headlines, I was standing off in the corner. Quiet. Mostly because I don’t like to go along with movements, but also because I don’t like to start shit.
(And now here I am. It’s whatever. It’s cool. Please don’t hate me.)
Diversity is a fine thing. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s what makes life worth living. I like seeing differences come together. It’s beautiful.
But I get what he’s saying. Having a black character or an Asian or Hispanic or whatever it may be, simply to say that you have one, is insulting. Throwing someone in just to meet a quota is wrong. You make a token character. There is a reason that the black kid in South Park’s name is Token. It takes away part of the creativity.
This is not a popular opinion, and I guarantee that my stance will be twisted into something that it’s absolutely not. Do I think that there should be more representation for people of different races and beliefs and sexual orientations or lack thereof? Yes. Absolutely. Do I think that every movie from here on out needs to have a cookie cutter cast list to appease every person to make sure they are accurately portrayed? Absolutely not. I feel like doing so is a form of censorship, and as I have stated in posts past, I hate censorship. Even when I disagree with the subject material. Hell, even when the subject material is so far out there and wrong and what I consider to be immoral. I don’t think art should be censored.
I think that if Burton wants to have characters with skin tones ranging from alabaster to porcelain, that is his deal. Will I look down on him for it? Not necessarily. Will I continue to support his and other’s movies that have a cast of all one race? Not necessarily, because I don’t watch movies to fill an agenda. I watch to escape, and if it’s a good movie, I don’t care who’s acting in it. If Burton continues to create films starring his best friend and ex-wife, good on him. At the end of the day, he’s creating, and I’m not going to shit on anyone for creating.
His creative choices (though poorly worded, I’ll admit) are not a comment on his character. Primarily white characters are not enough to make me stop consuming.
However…
The Ugly
Over the holidays, I was stuck in quarantine. This led to a lot of show binging and random documentaries. One of them that struck my fancy on Netflix was a series called “Holiday Movies that Made Us.” There was only two episodes available, and low and behold, one of them was all about Nightmare Before Christmas.
Now, first I want to say that I did not enjoy the episode. The editing and cuts that were in it reminded me of a special on Bravo. The awkward repeats and upbeat, snarky narrator didn’t tickle my fancy. It felt like it was trying too hard to be funny and edgy and it fell flat. At least for me. My mom would probably like it. You might like it. I did not. That’s not the important part, though.
Here’s the thing: I could have at any time stopped watching. I could have added some arbitrary statistic that someone either at Netflix or otherwise deems as too scary to finish, when in fact, it is lame. That’s a conversation for a different day. I could have stopped. But I did not. And the reason for that was something I wasn’t expecting.
I, who had grown up watching Tim Burton and stood in his corner when others attacked him, was horribly, utterly, terribly disappointed.
Let me explain.
Spoiler alert if you want to watch the episode.
Tim Burton was hardly involved in the making of one of my favorite childhood movies.
Okay, so I’ve asked around since I learned this, and apparently this was common knowledge for a good amount of people. I was not in on it. I had no idea. I was 31 years old when this little tidbit of information was thrown my way, hitting me in the face like one of those rubber dodgeballs, and splaying me out on the floor.
So then, why is it considered Tim Burton’s Nightmare before Christmas? The simple answer is big business trying to distance itself from the little guy. Disney gave Burton the go ahead to make the film, but after a tense preview, they decided they didn’t want to be associated with it. It was dark, it was scary in some parts, and it didn’t fit their brand.
For the life of me, I don’t understand why. 😉
Ultimately, they let the filming continue, but when it came time for it to be released to the world, they gave it to their sister company and slapped Burton’s name on the title, gracefully bowing out to watch from the shadows.
Of course, they changed their minds years later when Nightmare made a comeback, and rereleased it, letting everyone know that the cult classic was, indeed, a Disney masterpiece.
Corporations are dumb sometimes.
Truth be told, the shock shouldn’t have hit me so hard. It wasn’t a secret. The truth was in the credits the whole time. I just never cared enough to look, and there’s probably others out there who are the same way.
The other big truth bomb that went off while watching the reality-tv-style documentary was something I never would have dreamed was real. If it didn’t come from the mouths of the people who worked with him (or, rather, under him), I wouldn’t believe it.
Tim Burton is kind of a dick.
Dick might be a strong word. He is eccentric, which is not inherently a bad thing, but he takes that quirk to diva territory. I’m talking all-out temper tantrums. The man would scream when others would come to him with different ideas for the story. He kicked a hole in the wall once during one of his rare visits because he got upset over creative differences.
Okay, so dick is just the right word.
For someone relying on a crew to essentially ghostwrite and create his vision from the ground up, including modeling, set builds, script, music, lyrics, and voice acting, he sure liked to throw what little weight he had around. It’s not a good look.
Tim Burton: The Legend
So what does all this mean for people who, like me, loved everything about the man up to this point? It’s like a crossroads. One side is all the good memories associated with his works, or at least the ones with his name plastered on them. The other side is ideas built upon with lies, whether intentional or otherwise.
Here’s where I stand.
Have my feelings about him changed? Definitely. It’s embarrassing to admit this aloud, but I held him on a pedestal. It’s the same pedestal I put all celebrities or influencers I admire. Hell, it’s the same damn pedestal I put close friend and family on. When they are up there, they can do no wrong. Everything they do has a good reason, and any bad they do is forgivable, and with a flick of the wrist, their wrongdoing is gone, forgotten.
If I may continue on that idea, I am a paradox. I believe so hard in good that I refuse to see the bad. At the same time, when there is bad, I force myself to recognize that anyone can do it, that no one is evil, that we are only as bad as our choices, and that everyone has some good.
That came out confusing. Simplified: Good=can be generalized. Bad=can never be generalized.
If you’re still confused, shoot me a message and I’ll give you my Hitler talk to illustrate it better.
The point is Tim Burton is no longer on a pedestal. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the dickishness. I am a pacifist at heart. I care possibly too much about how I make people feel in all situations. I don’t like it when people raise their voice at me, and I definitely will not raise my voice at them. Anything can be solved with kindness. I’ll stand by that fact until the day I die. No matter what was going on, nothing excuses screaming at your crew or damaging the wall. It’s a gross quality to have. Explosive anger does nothing for anyone.
After I watched that film, I thought that my opinion would be forever changed about him. I wasn’t going to denounce my childhood, but I wasn’t going to immerse myself into anything he does in the future. This was all purely out of spite. I thought I lost my love for him.
Then Christmas came. My fiancé and I were still locked in quarantine. I was finally experiencing the joys of Covid, and my fiancé was starting to get better. His family brought over our gifts and some food so we would feel a little bit of normalcy during an otherwise shitty holiday season.
Lo and behold, his family got me a signed print. The print: Nightmare before Christmas. The signature? You guessed it.
When I opened it, I just stared at it for a long time. It came with a certificate saying the signature was legit. It was in an absolutely beautiful—and fitting—frame. We opened up other gifts, and I kept coming back to this one. When gifts were done and we were getting the living room back in order, I kept coming back to it. Even now, as I write this, I keep glancing over at it, just staring, willing this office to be done so I can hang it on the wall above my desk so I can look straight ahead instead of off to the right.
I treasure this. I treasure this as much as the signed Stephen King and Joe Hill books I own. Maybe, dare I say, even a little more than those.
Void, I can’t stay mad.
Here’s what it all boils down to. I love Tim Burton’s work. Whether or not he was directly involved with all of it, he breathed life into it. He made his mark on it. I love his aesthetic. He takes death and makes it beautiful.
That being said, I don’t know if I would ever want to meet him in person.
Let me backtrack that statement in case future Manda has an opportunity that today Manda doesn’t see. If I had the opportunity to meet Tim Burton, I would take it. But if I died without ever having breathed the same air as him, I would be okay with it. At the end of the day, I am content with consuming what he delivers; my compliments to the chef without the chef having to come out from the kitchen and make the whole exchange awkward.
I recall in the film The Fault in Our Stars (total chick flick by the way, not the type of movie I would ever choose to watch, but I’m generally overruled when it comes to picking those kinds of things out), the girl has an author that she absolutely adores. Closer to the end of the movie, the love interest of said girl finds out where this author lives, and they go to meet him. They get there, and he is nothing at all like she imagined. He’s just plain mean. A dick, if you will. I remember watching that and thinking, oh god, I never want that to happen to me.
Luckily for me thus far in life, all the people I admire whom I have had the pleasure of meeting have been coolly pleasant to outright friendly. But I dread the day where the one I meet is a dumpster fire of a person, forcing me to have a whole new outlook on the world.
Now what?
I want to end this off first by saying that the negative information about Burton all came from a Netflix special that was poorly edited (in my shitty opinion) and featured old coworkers with a chip on their shoulder. It never once interviewed the man himself to get his side of the story. Was he asked to be a part of it and he declined? Did they have their own narrative they wanted to push and decide not to involve him themselves? I don’t know, but either way, the end result was one-sided. I understand the point of the episode was not about Burton at all; they wanted to show a fun behind the scenes of Nightmare. But at the same time, they sure did leave some road rash when they passed by. (Is that even a phrase? Whatever. It is now.)
Secondly, there are testimonies from others who have worked with him who claim he’s a great guy. I don’t doubt that, mostly because I don’t want to doubt that. At the end of the day, you can’t make everyone happy, no matter how hard you try.
Thirdly, despite all this, I still like him. His movies are still some of my favorites. His gothic whimsy makes so much serotonin in my brain. If he made a billion more movies with a pale cast list and the same three people in lead roles, I wouldn’t be mad one bit.
This is all I know, and the only thing I want you to take away from this. It’s not that you should hate him, nor should you adore him. You need to make up your own mind on that.
No, what you need to take away from all this rambling is this: Kicking holes in walls is a dick move. Just don’t do it.
Whew. Hey Void, did you make it through all that? Okay, sweet. Now’s the time I turn things over to you. I want to know your thoughts on Tim Burton. Good, bad, don’t matter. Is obscure involvement in things and dealing damage to literally anything the end of the world? Or does none of that really matter? Do famous people get a pass for being a dickbag? Am I reading too much into the whole thing?? Let me know!
Manda Kay Writes 