Gentle Disruptions
Edward Scissorhands and the Discourse of Normalcy
Edward Scissorhands demonstrates the hostility of suburban society to gentle men uncontained by consummated heterosexual love. Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, dir., 1990) is a moralizing tale about a young man with scissors for hands who encounters the alien landscape of the American suburb. Like most moral tales, Edward Scissorhands examines fundamental cultural categories that allow us to make sense of the world. Edward, the man with scissors for hands, is the powerful stranger who enters the community and turns it upside down by not recognizing the unspoken social codes that facilitate social interrelations. At the same time he is a sympathetic monster like Frankenstein’s creation, who unselfconsciously embodies the best aspects of those codes, demonstrating the failure of the people to live up to the standards they have set for themselves.
As Russell A. Potter argues in his electronic paper, “Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic Body,” “coming-apart is what [Edward Scissorhands is] all about.” Potter, working from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theses in Anti-Oedipus, sees Edward as an “Anti-Oedipal” figure, unraveling the threads of the Oedipal family and re-writing the narrative that most critically informs the formation of our subjectivity and sexuality, in the psychoanalytic view. Not coincidentally, these are the categories which lie at the very heart of the suburb’s historical organization around the nuclear family. The formation of the “nuclear family,” a family physically isolated from larger kin, depended upon a new model of sexuality (mutual satisfaction), a new model of economics (the social welfare state that reproduced the 19th century division of social labor between work and home, while it devalued work and individual autonomy), a new organization of residential space (single-family free-standing homes that guaranteed privacy and encouraged familial introspection). The suburban bedroom community, thus, represents a uniquely 20th century (and perhaps American) way of organizing social life. Perhaps, then, Edward Scissorhands is as much about the collective (dis)organization and (dys)function of these social categories in the suburbs as it is about the individual’s discomfort as he or she passes through liminal processes like the Oedipal crisis.
Edward Scissorhands explores these categories by setting up two very different spaces, each with its own iconography: the ranch-style houses with their manicured lawns on a suburban cul-de-sac oppose the gothic castle that towers over the street. At the beginning of the film, the suburb stands for the normal; it is the place where nice families share a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. The exaggerated details of suburbia—the houses and cars painted in matching saturated ice cream colors, the synchronized movements of working fathers as they make their daily pilgrimage to the city to work—serve primarily as an affectionate reminder of the everyday world that we of the middle-class know only too well.
The houses themselves are markers of a kind of 1950s “approach to living,” but the rich solid colors that adorn them seem to frustrate to any attempts to locate this suburb historically. As Potter points out,
90s appliances, such as CD players, exist side-by-side with 50s fixtures such as boomerang tables and lava lamps; the parents are from 60s sitcoms but the kids are from 21 Jump Street. The cars—at least those we see up-close—are of early 70s vintage. . . . The final effect is a kind of timeless time, a place without chronology or geography—in short, the suburbs as seen by those whose lives remained somehow untransgressed by history (paragraph 22).
If the suburb represents timeless unrestrained sameness, the gothic castle, showing all the conventional markers of the horror film, is clearly the domain of difference. As in Frankenstein, the overgrown forest leading up the hill, the dark and dilapidated mansion, the Inventor’s mixture of man and machine in his work suggest that this is a place where the human quest for knowledge challenges the domain of God, bringing doom to all.
Edward Scissorhands activates this filmic intertext, with its set of themes, only to modify it with another. The mansion on the hill, while graphically most like the Wicked Witch of the West’s fortress, is girded by a courtyard with fantastic garden-sculptures that calls to mind the public areas of the Emerald City.
This combination of The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein—the combination of “there’s no place like home” with a sympathetic monster who, finally, is “more human than human” (to borrow the motto of Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation)—results in the monstrous phrase, “there is no place that’s home.” By an odd set of circumstances and the apparent working through of an ethical crisis, at the end of the film the suburb becomes the place of horror, the place where difference is rejected as alien because of small-mindedness, bigotry and misunderstanding. At the end of the film, the suburb’s odd (but coordinated) palette and its extreme orderliness seem less affectionate details of once upon a time and more sinister signs of similarity, suggesting perhaps that the fears of critics in the 1950s that suburban housing developments would encourage a “creeping consumer conformity” were not too far off the mark.
At first Edward represents a kind of exotic difference, to himself and to the suburbanites. That Edward identifies himself with physical difference and yearns for a more perfect body is clear from a careful look at the newspaper clippings and magazine cut-outs that line the fireplace in Edward’s mansion loft. All of the major motifs and themes of the film are collected in this collage. One weight-loss ad with a large “before” photo of a hefty woman hangs next to a Charles Atlas body building come-on. “I’ll never diet again,” it proclaims, proving the possibility of permanent transformation. The fireplace collage also includes clippings headlined “Boy born without eyes reads with his hands” (a configuration that reverses Edward’s own bodily lack) and “Newly weds, 90, having a baby” (offering viewers the possibility of imagining the ever-youthful Edward and the elderly Kim fulfilling the classical Hollywood happy ending). These headlines are juxtaposed with a Madonna and child portrait (this trope of the lost mother may help explain Edward’s refusal to grow up). This collage represents Edward’s desire to be “a real boy” like Pinocchio, and demonstrates his own recognition of the distance between his current reality and his goal.
If Edward recognizes his difference, the residents of suburbia work hard to deny it, developing mechanisms that allow them not to see its physical signs. Peg’s first meeting with Edward comes because she’s decided to extend her Avon route to the mansion. Her initial fear at his appearance is dispelled once she sees that he, like Peter Pan, is only a lost boy. “Where are your parents?,” she asks, recognizing the orphan in him instantly. Noticing that he has cut his face, she, like Wendy Darling, shifts to mother mode, activating nurturing behaviors which are complemented by her professional competencies (and by scripted Avon sales patter): “At the very least, let me give you a good astringent, and this will help to prevent infection.” Once she is done applying the astringent, she decides to take him home with her on the spot.
Bill, Peg’s husband, uses another strategy to manage Edward’s difference when Peg introduces him to Edward at the dinner table. He immediately shortens Edward’s name to “Ed” in an attempt to make him familiar, since, he, as head of the table, cannot easily or politely, escape his discomfort. Luckily for him, etiquette has provided him with a script for inconsequential dinner conversations with new people: “Must be some view from up there. See all the way to the sea. I’ll bet.” Bill and Edward, who is consummately polite though still unsure about the conventions of table talk (answering only, “Sometimes”), rely on tips from the Inventor’s book of etiquette to save themselves from “embarrassing blunders.” In a flashback just before the barbecue, Edward remembers the Inventor reading to him: “etiquette tells us just what is expected of us and guards us from all humiliation and discomfort.” The mocking tone his voice demonstrate his, and the film’s, preference for (ultimately illusory) “authentic” experience, experience, that is, not pre-coded by social rules.
Still, the conversation goes pretty well, the only crack in Bill’s calm facade is that Peg has to ask him twice for the salt and pepper. Young Kevin, on the other hand, excited by the latent possibilities of Edward’s difference (“One karate chop to a guy’s neck…”) must be contained by Peg, who demands that he not stare at Edward. So while etiquette insulates the Boggs family and Edward from their differences, it also the only thing that makes contact possible.
The gossip network, led by Joyce, wonders about Peg’s secret guest, and presses her to “offer [her] guest hospitality … by introducing him to all [her] friends.” For the neighbors, Edward’s difference is managed in the context of the barbecue. “Heck of a handshake you’ve got there, Ed,” one neighbor says, then darts off to talk golf with his buddies. His comment allows him both to acknowledge and ignore the outward signs of Edward’s difference. Another, an old man with a wooden leg from a war wound who recognizes himself in Edward, counsels Edward not to “let anyone call [him] handicapped.” Kevin offers to play “Paper, scissors, stone” with him. And finally, the neighborhood women, who wonder out loud what “a single snip of those scissors could do. Or undo,” clamor flirtatiously for Edward’s attention as they ply him with retro picnic delicacies straight out of The Joy of Cooking.
In order to manage their discomfort at his difference, the neighborhood tries to reinterpret Edward in their own frames of reference: Peg tries to make him over with Avon products and Bill’s old clothes, the Boggs family (save Kevin, who can’t contain his amazement) politely ignores his differences at the dinner table (though he soon gets the hang of eating), Esmerelda—the local born-again Christian reminiscent of Carrie White’s mother—recognizes him as the devil’s spawn, and Joyce sees him as a (perverse) alternative to the imagined caresses of the reluctant dishwasher repairman, and many people mention a doctor friend who might be able to “help” him.
As Edward becomes a recognizable (but still unique) part of the community, he reinterprets the environment in which they live, making it temporarily more like the gothic environment that gave him life: boring hedges become 3-D arboreal sculptures, bouffants become avant-garde hair creations, and dogs’ coats become new expressions of their owners’ trendy individuality.
At the same time, his work upsets the perfect orderliness of the suburban environment, introducing the element of nonconformity into a community that Potter reminds us seems to have left time behind. As the police psychologist suggests, “the years spent in isolation have not equipped him with the tools necessary to judge right from wrong. He’s had no context, he’s been completely without guidance. Furthermore, his work—the garden sculptures, hairstyles and so forth—indicate that he’s a highly individual [he pauses to search for a word] character. It seems clear that his awareness of what we call reality is radically underdeveloped.” The sympathetic Officer Allen asks, “But will he be OK out there?” “Yeah. He’ll be fine.”
The poverty of this analysis when applied to Edward is clear. It doesn’t recognize that Edward is the most moral character of the film. But, read another way, taking the suburb as the subject of this analysis, the meaning of the speech becomes apparent. A sense of “reality” is not a necessary survival skill in suburbia. In fact, the containment of private life in the nuclear family home has left the suburb with a radically underdeveloped sense of “reality,” the active fantasy life exhibited by Joyce and the women of the gossip network is a crucial technique in tedium management. Part of the film’s indictment of suburban life is based on its psychic distance from the humiliations and discomforts that are an inevitable part of urban life as people are forced to confront difference every day.
As the film progresses, Edward’s stubborn difference threatens to expose the seedy, over-consuming underside of the bedroom community. Kim’s rich boyfriend Jim wants a van of his own with a mattress in it to facilitate their trysts. He convinces a not-so-sure-about-all-this Kim to ask Edward to help him burgle his father’s electronics room. Edward’s subsequent arrest precipitates a change in the community’s attitude towards him. Now that he seems to be a threat to their property (“It could have been my house. It could have been any of our houses”), he’s no longer an exotic diversion from the tedium of suburban life. Joyce’s grotesque seduction of Edward to the music of Tom Jones becomes an attempted rape in the telling (although the slippage is marked; the line is, “He practically raped Joyce, you know”), Jim’s father thinks Edward is mentally incompetent, and so doesn’t press charges, and the suburb turns on Edward, using terms like “freak,” “cripple,” and “retard” to strip him of the fundamental humanity they once assigned him.
Edward’s trouble with the law and his refusal to accept money for his gardening give us a clue as to what is being affected by his difference, by his persistent humanity. As Edward’s skill with scissors becomes apparent, Bill recognizes that his labor is not contained within the capitalist system. Although Edward’s work is being rewarded with cookies, Bill chides him: “You can’t buy a car with cookies. Am I right Jim?” Unable to purchase consumer goods, Edward’s work is not “productive” in the eyes of the community and threatens to subvert the official system of exchange that underlies suburban prosperity. But that system of exchange itself refuses to recognize Edward. Despite his skill, and a testimonial from the mayor’s wife, Edward can’t get a loan to open a salon because he doesn’t have a social security number, a credit history, or a record of jobs held, and so “might just as well not exist.” Besides providing a plausible motive for the neighborhood’s belief that Edward’s break-in was self-motivated, this episode demonstrates the degree to which suburbanites are defined by their economic identity.
Edward’s inability to assume an economic identity is one key to the threat he represents to the community. After Bill and Peg have posted bail for Edward, Bill gives him a dinner-table ethics quiz: what do you do if you find a wallet stuffed with money on the street? Edward chooses the wrong answer; he gives it to his loved ones. Kevin, the youngest member of the family, demonstrates his facility with the ethical code that governs the suburb: “You dope, everybody knows you’re supposed to give it to the police.” Kim tries to construct an alternate evaluative framework to legitimize Edward’s answer: “Think about it, you guys, it’s the nicer thing to do. It’s what I’d do.”
But for Bill, what’s nice to do is not what is at stake, rather “we’re talking right and wrong.” From Bill’s point of view, as the figure of authority, Edward’s preference for his own ethical code represents a threat to a law theoretically based on the consent of the governed, and so he tries to get Edward to internalize the law that “everybody knows.” But since Edward is clearly the moral center of the film—he is the character least changed by his move in and out of suburbia, here, the film dramatizes the failure of the either-or logic of “right and wrong.” These episodes suggest that his “innocence” (which seems to be a modern recoding of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys’ steadfast refusal to grow up) upsets the economic and social contracts that governs life in the suburb, minimizing chaos and non-conformity.
On the one hand, then, Edward Scissorhands participates in the tradition of suburban critique, suggesting that suburbia is the place where a truly human society has stopped evolving. His expulsion from the suburb at the end of the film and Kim’s inability to cross over into and remain in his world draws a strong line between the tightly-coded experience of the suburb and the gothic fantasy world of the imaginative individual, suggesting that the possibility of redeeming the suburbs as a human\e place to live is nothing but a bed-time story for a world happy to live in dreams.
The comparison with Peter Pan, therefore, is telling. On one level, Peter Pan is about the need for growth. Wendy Darling and her brothers and sisters must finally give up the swashbuckle of their fantasies if they are to grow up and be properly Oedipalized into their adult roles. Indeed in most Peter Pan redactions Wendy uses her adventure in Never-Never Land to rehearse the future maternal role awaiting her in London. But Peter’s, and ultimately Edward’s, refusal to grow up is presented as a way to avoid the falsification of experience and the internalization of the law necessary for the individual’s submission to society. The cost of course is an unconsummated love. Edward’s and Kim’s love can never be “productive” (although perhaps the figure of the granddaughter represents the parthenogenetic consequences of Kim’s sublimated love for Edward). Edward’s sexuality must remain forever potential (“Think of what he could do other places!”), contained within the liminal space of a tale, and never realized. But the benefit of Edward’s innocent celibacy is to live free of the social categories that limit the individual and define difference.
On the other hand, the film’s critique of the suburban social contract offers a false solution to the problem it presents. The film rehearses the trauma of living without categories, but resolves that trauma through abnegation and isolation. The once-upon-a-time format of the framing story, itself, denies the collective face of this problem, turning the story into an instructive, but finally, too sweet tale of frustrated romantic love, one of the key ideological constellations that made the invention of the homogenous suburb possible. In the end, the fantasy of radical individualism cannot solve the problem of how to code social difference, it, like etiquette, can only soothe our humiliation and discomfort.
