The music, bongos and all ,was perfect. The credit sequence was perfect. The black and white photography was gorgeous. The recreations of Wood's film were dead-on. Depp's creation of Wood, down to that slight stiff upper-lip way of talking because of dentures seemed dead on.
So what was wrong?
Who knows? What's disturbing is I think Burton and I share a certain love for bad movies and for great little touches in good movies. I think Burton who's talked in interviews about his love of bad movies, like me, appreciates how time seems to stop in a bad movie. Plots derail and scenes flounder and what remains is an odd, timeless stasis-- a form of immortality in a way-- that can be comforting. Burton grew up watching bad monster movies; one that were as ritualized as a Japanese Tea Ceremony, and one could watch either with a bored impatience or a dreamy inertia; there's the scientist, there's the cop, there's the good girl, there's the monster. Sometimes the monster is a zombie, sometimes a giant ape. The dream is timeless, imparting the feeling of being in eternity's sanctum, and the ritual achieves an importance outside of excitement. Longing and fulfillment are suspended, and satiation of a sort is achieved. And for the right sort of dreamer, the proper type of lazy-headed illiterate, this sort of comfort is addictive and pure. As is obvious from reading this, I'm one of those types. So, I think, is Tim Burton. And so, in Tim Burton's eyes, is Ed Wood.
This allows Burton to celebrate Wood, to trumpet the desire to create as vital and have Wood's movies be not a failure, or a refutation of that desire, but an odd affirmation of it.
The movie shows the struggles for Ed Wood to make his movies, to dream his dreams. And a strange form of ethical freefall emerges. Wood wasn't suppressed and cast out of the Hollywood, as other filmmakers of the fifties were, because of political beliefs or a desire to say something that the general public would find upsetting. He was cat out because he was talentless and incompetent. There are dozens of lousy directors now, as eager to make hyperactive nonsensical pap as Wood ever was. And some would say that Burton might be among them. The end of the movie equates Wood with Orson Welles, in some way jokingly, and in other ways seriously. But there is no angst in looking at the best and the worst and wondering what causes the distances between the two. There is only a suggestion of equivalency, a suggestion that our country takes very seriously in its democratic way: the highest is no better than the lowest. Who, after all, is to judge?
Who judges? How to judge? These questions, though, no matter how difficult to answer, should still be posed, because Burton and I battle to redeem our taste for bad movies, because my generation is willing to talk Brady Bunch and Partridge Family, Melrose Place and 90210. The keys to why we appreciate these things may also unlock understanding about ourselves, about the society we live in. Burton has the potential to look at those questions and suggest answers, but answers would end the tea ceremony. Better in his eyes to dream, like Ed Wood, our hasty and half-assembled dreams of greatness and paranoia.
All written material on these pages is © 1997 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.