"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Theatre and Film, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Kennedy, Dick"@en . "2009-01-16T22:35:24Z"@en . "1995"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "Tim Burton is steadfastly concerned with the visual imbrication of the\r\npatriarchal unconscious in the real. Insofar as he inscribes this problem into\r\ncontemporary cinema in a programmatic way, surrealism (particularly its\r\ncritique of representation) comes into razor-sharp focus as a point of reference for\r\nhis films. Often advanced through allegorical appropriations, especially of media\r\nimages, Burton's oeuvre recalls surrealism's historical critique because it likewise\r\ninvolves the unsettling of identity by sexuality, and the unsettling of reality by\r\nmeans of the simulacrum. Insofar as Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Edward\r\nScissorhands (1990), Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), have to do with\r\nevents in which repressed material returns in ways that play havoc with unitary\r\nidentity, aesthetic norms, and social order, they resonate with Burton's\r\npenetrating comprehension of the historicity of the uncanny.\r\nIn Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Burton's camp deployment of psychosexual\r\ndisorder to disturb conventional pictorial space, object relations and (masculine)\r\ngender identity models the outmoded cultural artifact as an enigmatic vestige of\r\na traumatic encounter or fantasy, equivocal in its restorative and incendiary\r\neffects. Setting the text's syntax of symbolic castration against the back projection\r\nof postmodern patriarchy's putative loss of a referent or an authentic domain of\r\nbeing, Edward Scissorhands brings into focus the ideological alignment of sexual\r\nand cultural disavowal. In Batman and Batman Returns, the makeover of\r\ntraumatic scenes into artistic origin myths is campily performed. While\r\nsurrealist fixations double as modernist tropes of setting up an origin in order to\r\ninstitute a self and/or a style, surrealist primal fantasies wreak havoc on such\r\norigins; the modernist search for roots produces rootless scenes.\r\nNo doubt inheriting a few optical cataracts from surrealist sexual politics\r\nand insights into the hookups between psychic energy, landscape, architectural\r\nform, and social mythology, Burton undertakes an archaeology of patriarchal\r\nsubjectivity as fossilized in (post)modern spaces. Unless our (de)realizing\r\npostmodern dreamscapes (i.e., landscapes, cityscapes, and cinemascapes) are\r\nconsidered a postmodern fulfillment of the surreal, Burton's camp-surreal is far\r\nfrom defunct."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/3728?expand=metadata"@en . "5957324 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "BACHELOR MACHINERY AND BALLETs MECANIQUE UNCANNY GENDER TECHNOLOGIES IN TIM BURTON'S CAMP-SURREAL by Dick Kennedy Honors B.A.,Brock University, 1992 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE AND FILM) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard The University of British Columbia April 1995 \u00C2\u00A9 Dick Kennedy, 1995 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of ftivW ^~\V_ra The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada DE-6 (2/88) Bachelor Machinery and Ballets Mecanique: Uncanny Gender Technologies in Tim Burton's Camp-Surreal Abstract Tim Burton is steadfastly concerned with the visual imbrication of the patriarchal unconscious in the real. Insofar as he inscribes this problem into contemporary cinema in a programmatic way, surrealism (particularly its critique of representation) comes into razor-sharp focus as a point of reference for his films. Often advanced through allegorical appropriations, especially of media images, Burton's oeuvre recalls surrealism's historical critique because it likewise involves the unsettling of identity by sexuality, and the unsettling of reality by means of the simulacrum. Insofar as Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), have to do with events in which repressed material returns in ways that play havoc with unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and social order, they resonate with Burton's penetrating comprehension of the historicity of the uncanny. In Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Burton's camp deployment of psychosexual disorder to disturb conventional pictorial space, object relations and (masculine) gender identity models the outmoded cultural artifact as an enigmatic vestige of a traumatic encounter or fantasy, equivocal in its restorative and incendiary effects. Setting the text's syntax of symbolic castration against the back projection of postmodern patriarchy's putative loss of a referent or an authentic domain of being, Edward Scissorhands brings into focus the ideological alignment of sexual and cultural disavowal. In Batman and Batman Returns, the makeover of traumatic scenes into artistic origin myths is campily performed. While surrealist fixations double as modernist tropes of setting up an origin in order to institute a self and/or a style, surrealist primal fantasies wreak havoc on such origins; the modernist search for roots produces rootless scenes. No doubt inheriting a few optical cataracts from surrealist sexual politics and insights into the hookups between psychic energy, landscape, architectural form, and social mythology, Burton undertakes an archaeology of patriarchal subjectivity as fossilized in (post)modern spaces. Unless our (de)realizing postmodern dreamscapes (i.e., landscapes, cityscapes, and cinemascapes) are considered a postmodern fulfillment of the surreal, Burton's camp-surreal is far from defunct. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 11 Table of Contents Acknowledgements i v Preface Theoretical Stakes Through the Art of Tim Burton's corplus] morcele INTRODUCTION Semiotic Ghosts and the Postmodern Unhomely Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Conclusion Anatomy of Pee-Wee Herman: Camp Sites, Shopping and the Semiotics of Tourism in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985) The Work of Suture in the Age of Hysterical Reproduction, or \"Snow on the Oedipal Stage\" in Edward Scissorhands (1990) Posthum[or]ous Patriarchy and MaZevolent Coffins: Staking Out Male Masquerades and Chimeras of Otherness in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) Animating the Cadavre Exquis of Hollywood's \"apocalyptic adolescent\" 6 24 55 86 115 Bibliography 125 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the students, staff and faculty in The Department of Film and Theatre at UBC who have helped me in the completion of this project. In particular, I should thank John Newton and Brian Mcllroy for their patient and inspiring assistance. Preface: Theoretical Stakes Through the Art of Tim Burton's corp[us] morcele The first Neapolitan theater was opened by Menotti Cattaneo... a nomadic social type... he began to present a show wherein, for a few pennies,., neighborhood flaneurs could watch him take apart and reconstruct a wax model of a human body, including its internal organs... this kind of performance\u00E2\u0080\u0094the exhibition of corps morcele\u00E2\u0080\u0094could be well complemented by film screenings... the spectacle of the anatomy lesson is the predecessor of the cinema. -Bruno Giulianna- ^ \"Bachelor Machine\"...From about 1850 to 1925 numerous artists, writers and scientists imaginatively or in reality constructed anthropomorphized machines to represent the relation of the body to the social, the relation of the sexes to each other, the structure of the psyche or the workings of history... The bachelor machine is a typically closed, self sufficient system. Its common themes include frictionless, sometimes perpetual motion, an ideal time and the magical possibility of its reversal (the time machine is an exemplary bachelor machine), electrification, voyeurism and masturbatory eroticism, the dream of the mechanical reproduction of art, and artificial birth or reanimation. But no matter how complicated the machine becomes, the control over the sum of its parts rests with a knowing producer who therefore submits to a fantasy of closure, perfectibility, and mastery. -Constance Penley- ^ In 1926, the artist and experimental filmmaker Fernand Leger lamented the fact that most films waste their efforts in trying to build a recognizable world, neglecting all the while \"the powerful effect of the object... the possibility of the fragment.\" Leger of course created the famous Ballet mechanique in which everyday practical objects, like knives and spoons, are set against one another to produce a rhythmic pattern of perceptual forms... these everyday objects become unimportant while at the same time they impart to us the experience of their artfulness. -Dudley Andrew- ^ My aim in this thesis is to look at the films of Tim Burton through a theoretical lens, making the textual politics of gender representation the focal point of my reading. As my title hints, the conceptual premise of this enterprise owes something to Teresa de Lauretis' proposition that as representation, \"gender is the product of social technologies, such as cinema, as well as institutional discourses, epistemologies... not only academic criticism, but more broadly social and cultural practices.\" 4 Since the theoretical backbone of the project is fashioned from feminist and semiotic materials, my argument is tailored by tracing textual patterns that accommodate ongoing critical debates over theoretical issues and problems. Drawn from neighboring discursive regimes, my methodological postulates\u00E2\u0080\u0094postmodern/cultural, f i lm, and feminist studies-represent potentially antagonistic discourses intended to (re)animate theoretical debate wi th a corpus of Tim Burton's popular texts. Through a kind of camp deconstruction of Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), I shall attempt to persuade the reader that this academic stagecraft is not simply a question of transporting film theory to film, but of appreciating the way popular films feed considerable theoretical stock of their own through the sprockets of institutional scholarship. 5 Indeed, part of the seductiveness.of Burton's movies is precisely that they showcase contemporary theoretical preoccupation, that they theorize on the same \"high\" ground as cultural criticism. His oeuvre kinetically catalogues issues and problems that intersect with current theoretical debates surrounding the postmodern politics of identity and the body: the intoxicating superfluity of postmodern vision, the piquancy and passivity of spectatorship, the delicacy and delir ium of moving pictures, the appetites that feed into social constructions of subjectivity, the pornographic seductiveness of sex and violence, and so forth. To boot, the movies represent head-on confrontations wi th media oversaturation, discursive and semiotic excess, and convert existential encounters into modified forms of mainstream entertainment, wi th remodeled narrative structures and functions. Assembled within the Hol lywood style and directed at a taste market that is at once targeted and managed by the institutional system of production and distribution, the films are obviously circumscribed by arduous constraints. This means that Burton's films need to be analyzed within particular discursive formations that have inscribed them with overdetermined meanings, not the least of which is that their primary function is less to signify than to entertain. Clearly, it is essential to regard them as market commodities capable of upsetting the balance between complicity and subversion so as to open up a space for radical critique. There is a definite appeal to spotlighting the reality of contemporary existential problems which engender states or feelings of personal /social \"powerlessness,\" \"alienation\" and \"exile,\" \"anxiety\" and \"homesickness, and to regarding Burton's camp-surreal repertoire as psychologically consistent characters in reference to them. Indeed, his films open onto postmodern landscapes wherein such big-time issues are organic. Critical w i n d and weather permitting, the reality of such topics, and of any consistently psychologized kinship wi th them, is noticeably leavened by the hypertextuality of the films. For all hands across the cutting board do not represent people so much as mercurial signifiers which come to life in Burton's texts. Burton's artistic brew of camp and surrealism\u00E2\u0080\u0094peppered wi th (tabloid) expressionism, Gothic horror, melodrama and fantasy\u00E2\u0080\u0094overflows the cauldron of run-of-the-mill cinematic conventions. A series of camp-surreal ballets mecanique, his technically inventive and violently visceral films string together extraordinary collages of 3-D modeling, puppets, marionettes, trick photography, animation and live action, and so make a cat's-paw of conventional Ho l lywood (masculine) fantasy wi th their physicality, manic aggressions and mechanical stock in trade. Outrageously theatrical, darkened by black humor, mordant melancholy, and smacking wi th bad taste, Burton's films fathom surface materiality through representational forms, unsettle or exceed dominant cinematic conventions, and make the interaction of fantasy, form, and ideology available for critical analysis. If a distinction is to be made between, on the one hand, popular genres which exhibit dead secrets and shocking events along a naturalistic skeleton and, on the other hand, a modernism whose strategies of enunciation are to a body of conventions as the autopsist's prosaic dismembering is to the human cadaver, then Burton's camp-surreal decoupage diagnostically represents the unrepresentable, and then ties a surgeon's knot between horror films and a (vulgar) postmodern sublime. Because the carnal is to the cultural as the personal is to the political in Burton's oeuvre, he is insistently drawn to tropes of horror, upon which psychoanalytic meanings interpenetrate with historically specific and fluctuating gendered power relations. His cartoonish, celluloid ink-blots screen/test psychoanalytic discourses, themselves a technology of gender, concerned with producing analytical categories to account for male psychosexual development. 6 But they also suggest ways in which contemporary cultural theory is capable of politicizing psychoanalytic film criticism, of showing how unconscious processes are (in)securely \"implanted\" in patriarchal discourses, specifically, how categories of difference are distributed across the narrative operations, how they are embedded within the filmic demarcations of diegetic order and disorder, and how sexual difference potentially interchanges with other categories of difference. Feminist psychoanalytic film analysis is oppositional only insofar as its excavation of patriarchal meanings constitutes a resistive reading strategy, one that works to highlight textual/social operations. Such practices (as Burton's films or this thesis) no doubt run the risk of becoming entombed with the very meanings intended for deconstruction. This is a significant deterrent to feminists who avoid such entanglements by concentrating on alternative forms of representation that go beyond critique. These limitations aside, psychoanalysis possesses a great deal of explanatory power in the case of the horror genre. Indeed, a psychoanalytic framework of analysis seems indispensable where psychoanalytic themes and imagery overlap with historically specific cultural myths. Burton's camp \"reissuing\" of surrealist traditions unearths questions regarding the blood ties between art and fantasy, not only the unconscious phantasies which cloud ordinary perception, but the setting of one's sights on the cleavage between artistic representation and mimesis, on a mode of trauma through pictures and plastics allied to symbolic means of communication. In his oeuvre, gendered fantasies stand in an unmistakable consanguinity to the historical body of cultural ideas, beliefs, and mythologies in which they come alive. Notes ^Giuliana, Bruno. \"Spectatorial Embodiments: Anatomies of the Visible and the Female Bodyscape.\" Camera Obscura. no. 28 (January 1992), p. 241. ^Constance Penley, \"Feminism, Film Theory, and Bachelor Machines,\" The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989), pp. 57-58. 3Dudley Andrew, \"Bela Balazs and the Tradition of Formalism,\" The Major Film Theories: A n Introduction (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1976), pp. 80-81. ^Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) , pp. ix-x. ^Burton's other films include Vincent (1983), Frankenweenie (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), and Ed Wood (1994) which Burton directed, and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which Burton executive-produced. ^See Noel Carrol, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), and D. N . Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis. Sexual Difference & Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991). Introduction: Semiotic Ghosts and the Postmodern Unhomely Surrealism appears a critical double of fascism, which it anticipates, partially collaborates with, and mostly contests. If fascism exploits the uncanny in order to lock both present and future into a tragic repetition of the atavistic social and psychic structures, a repetition governed by the death drive, surrealism exploits the uncanny so as to disrupt the present and to open up the future\u00E2\u0080\u0094 if not to turn the compulsive return of the repressed into comedic resolution that might somehow free the subject from defusion and death, then at least to divert its forces in a critical intervention into the social and the political. -Hal Foster- 1 Men's fascination with [the] eternal feminine is nothing but fascination with their own double, and the feeling of uncanniness, Unheimlichkeit, that men experience is the same as what one feels in the face of any double, any ghost, in the face of the abrupt reappearance of what one thought had been overcome or lost forever. -Sarah Koffman- 2 Only ambiguously critical of dominant masculinity, Tim Burton is steadfastly concerned with the visual imbrication of the patriarchal unconscious in the real; and insofar as he inscribes this problem into contemporary cinema in a programmatic way, surrealism (particularly its critique of representation) comes into razor-sharp focus as a point of reference for his films. Often advanced through allegorical appropriations, especially of media images, Burton's oeuvre recalls surrealism's historical critique because it likewise involves the unsettling of identity by sexuality, and the unsettling of reality by means of the simulacrum. Insofar as his films have to do with events in which repressed material returns in ways that play havoc with unitary identity, aesthetic norms, and social order, they resonate with Burton's penetrating comprehension of the historicity of the uncanny. The estrangement of the familiar that is indispensable to the uncanny resides in the etymology of the German terms heimlich, meaning \"homely,\" and unheimlich, meaning \"unhomely\" or \"uncanny.\" The return of familiar phenomena rendered unfamiliar by repression is what the uncanny entails. This \"return of the repressed\" creates anxiety around the subject and ambiguity around the object, and this anxious ambiguity instigates the uncanny's principal effects: a derangement of the real and the imagined, of the animate and the inanimate, and an annexation of the referent by the sign or of physical reality by psychic reality. In Burton's oeuvre, the surreal (theatrically embodied by a surrealist repertoire of grotesquely disfigured puppets, dolls, mannequins, automatons, and live-action figures) is encountered as an overshadowing of the referential by the symbolic, or as an enslavement of a subject to a sign or a symptom; and its upshot is the (male) anxiety associated with the uncanny. 3 The peculiar import of surrealism in his films rests in its doubly-exposed enterprise of excavating historical as well as psychic repression; not simply in its symbolic recuperation of outmoded yet \"haunted\" spaces/objects/images, but more importantly, in its conscious and (potentially) critical deployment of the disruptions of the uncanny within the popular framework of postmodern cultural production. In Barbara Creed's recent book, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, she annotates Freud's three main categories of things considered uncanny, that is, things which pertain to what is frightening to what awakens dread and horror; and they are worth transplanting here for her shorthand and inadvertent knotting of the blood-ties between the \"abject\" and the \"simulacrum\" in terms of their uncanniness. They include: (i) -things which relate to the notion of the double; a cyborg; twin, doppelganger; a mutilated object; a ghost or spirit; an involuntary repetition of an act. (ii) -castration anxieties expressed as a fear of female genitals or of dismembered limbs, a severed head or hand, loss of the eyes, fear of going blind (iii) -a feeling associated with a familiar/unfamiliar place, losing one's way, womb fantasies, a haunted house. 4 Burton's camp-surreal horror films painstakingly playact and poke fun at the above check-list of fears. Indeed, allowing for a good deal of anatomical slippage through these three fractured fingers as they pick the brains of the patriarchal unconscious, we can graft them\u00E2\u0080\u0094like transplanted organs from foreign bodies\u00E2\u0080\u0094 onto the three chapters which make up the mid-section of my critical skeleton. The horror which licks these categories into shape smacks of a lapse of tight-lipped boundaries. The double unfastens the psychic/social tourniquets which rough-cast each human screen figure into a hard-edged silhouette; castration fear plays on a caving-in of gender boundaries, and the uncanny feeling of being plugged into a familiar/ unfamiliar place worries the boundary which stakes out the known and the unknown. Indeed, the subject resides in the simulacrum as in the fantasy. The fantasy and the simulacrum alike are made up of a double register which denies the priority of the original over the copy. If the simulacrum is similarly manufactured out of a suspended action, an internalized difference that contravenes in the Platonic representational order, then this difference not only makes the fantasmatic cartography of surrealism simulacral, but sets up the surrealist image as an historical expression of a traumatic fantasy and involuntary memory. If history is a living force outfitted for lacerating the the not-so-leathery skin of the dominant fiction, and so for cutting off its eternal economy, then the trauma which it produces can be grasped as the unforeseen cleavage in an order which strives to erect a kind of stone wall of self-possession by a force aimed at derangement and decomposition. If the contemporary genre of horror and the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism are both anxious cultural expressions about categorical instabilities, the former animating the insecurities of the latter, then the postmodern simulacrum holds joint transgressive features with the uncanny (as well as the abject, the semiotic, the sublime), for it likewise throws (patriarchal) identity and (patriarchal) order for a loss. Absent and unrepresentable, history can never be hemmed in; it is only accessible through texts. If the eruption of horror cycles coincides wi th instances of social/historical trauma, the genre is a screen onto which historical anxieties are projected. What can be discursively managed is the trauma which it engenders wi th in the ordained systems of representation and signification, a trauma which is felt by the subjects who look to these systems for their sense of identity. 5 The melodramatic dimension of Burton's camp-surreal makes visible the (male) anxiety/hysteria produced by a frightening cultural order in which traditional social caulking seems to have lost its adhesive properties. Kitsching up a lot of dust along the road of apparent optimism, Burton's camp-surreal brand of melodrama is a (vulgar) sublime vehicle which breaks the ground of camp surfaces and undertakes an archeology of dominant cultural fictions in postmodernity. By grafting repression onto dominant patriarchal fictions at the representational camp site of the family and the phallus, and the \"return of the repressed\" onto ironic, spectacular anatomies of the invisible-made-visible, he illustrates complex historical blood-ties among 1) a genealogy of horror and melodrama as formal geographies, 2) a cultural anatomy of the present sex/gender system and its ideological contradictions, and 3) a spectatorial architecture that is superintended by a corporeal visuality. Accordingly, structures that have converted particular social or historical complexions into representation within formal and generic frameworks require an interpretive model that accords to the figures of fantastic discourse, thus concentrating on instabilities, excesses and intensities. By cementing a union between ambivalent textual mechanisms, the flaccidity of borders and the heterogeneity of identity on the one hand, and a materialist concern wi th particular social/historical constructions of monstrous figures on the other, we can comprehend the uncanny in terms of fantasy's double operation, whereby that which is frightening transports us back to that which was once familiar but has been estranged through repression, with the result that anxiety is conjured up and put in check. 6 Where modern experience is progressively mediated and abstracted within the stages of late capitalism, \"authentic\" experience is putatively rendered intangible and figurative as it is cast outside the sphere of lived existence. The perception of that outside as a genuine and authoritative background of which the object is only a trace is ratified by the seriality of mechanical reproduction. In the putative absence of a referential authority outside the simulacrum, the traditional (male) subject's desire for a social contract or real identity is negated, and the horror of semantic cancellation comically engenders the hysteric and untold manufacture of systems of absent prepotency. Burton ironically allegorizes Pee-wee's, Edward's, and Batman's quest for meaning and value in a postmodern consumer landscape, campily reassessing the nature of mimesis and simulation (and, by extension, the significance of genre and formula in popular cultural practice). Burton theatricalizes how in postmodernity, the hysterical patriarchal subject manufactures itself in identical signs designed to represent, allude and appeal to reality. With the real allegedly off the subject's hands, the inability to access it only engenders an increase in the attempts to stake it out for keeps. Burton thus offers an ironic account of today's overraanaged hysteria of production and overproduction of the real. Campily impersonating posthum[or]ous patriarchal culture, each of Burton's male protagonists parodically root for the reincarnation of the real that evades them through superfluous overproduction. Hence, Burton's ironic account of the hysteric overproduction of signs of the real, whereby the aggressive renegotiation of \"monstrous\" threats to personal/sexual masculine identity and authority are compulsively staged by inventing the physiognomy of structure as fixed entity, objectifying internal difference and projecting it as an external supplement, is at once a visible indemnity for what the structure lacks and its menacing excess. 7 At the same time, however, Burton ambivalently exploits the very effects of advanced capitalism\u00E2\u0080\u0094artisanal and industrial objects alike rendered outmoded\u00E2\u0080\u0094against its own system of commodity exchange. Hence the terrorizing of the bourgeois order by ghosts of its repressed past (the outmoded, the depayses) as well as its exploited (primitive, exotic, and even industrial) outside. This is the basic structural tension in Burton's work: even as he ironically renders in epic complexity the manslaughter of the referent and the real, he executes this maneuver without lopping off all ties to reality reference, and subjective intervention. At the end of the day, things, signs, and actions\u00E2\u0080\u0094compulsively reincarnated when cut loose from their respective ideas, essences, and origins-do not automatically forfeit the inheritance of their content. Less like a shadowless man consigned to madness or death, as certain postmodern coroners would have us believe, outmoded images/objects, may call to account the late-capitalist product with past images/objects either deadened or outside its purview, as when an object or space remindful, or having an aura of a different formative mode, social configuration, or feeling is disinterred, in apostasy. Burton physicalizes the return of repressed social desires not simply in terms of straight forward monstrous equations, but as a textual symptom, as an intense or \"abnormal\" property of style or mise-en-scene in film bodies. If Burton's images are literally unheimlich\u00E2\u0080\u0094temporally distanced and spatially dislocated by collage at the very level of representation, then the historically outmoded is related to the psychically repressed. His fascination with the uncanny, with the postmodern poltergeist of familiar images rendered alien by repression, concerns the (subjective) regeneration of discarded cultural forms in the staccato development of productive modes and social formations. If feminist film criticism essays to reorder social relations of power and difference, then (post)modern recycling and its aesthetic undercarriage, nostalgia, must undergo inspection to see how these representational strategies actually succeed in reordering such relations. 8 Indeed, the utopic dimension of nostalgia accords to the dynamics of fantasy insofar as it is prelapsarian, conflating lived and mediated experience in a genesis where authenticity and transcendence are thought to be ubiquitous. If authenticity overspreads both word and world of this gendered Utopia, it is because the crisis of the sign, developing out of the cleavage between signifier and signified, between the material properties of the former and the abstract and historical character of the latter, is disavowed or withheld. Allegations of consensus, authority or identity such as the cross-cultural fantasy of dominant masculine gender identity, the standardized aesthetic ideals of beauty or the politics of antiquarianism/utopianism\u00E2\u0080\u0094comprise a terrifying, totalitarian framework. As much a product of spectatorship as the text, Burton fosters an uncanny relationship to representation, a suspension bridge over postmodernism's apparent divide between the aesthetic and the historical-political. He implies that to fashion a politics around the perfection and approximation of idealized identities is not only misguided but also a form of totalitarianism. Thus, his \"cheesy\" special effects often express a pragmatic modesty, a camp consciousness of the materiality and limits of representation, and of their fated shortcomings where ideas of aesthetic and/or political totality are concerned. In Burton's filmic imaginary, as in cultural history, the closed body of a finished text is a kind of fascist state. He flings the semiotic sheet off the cadaver of the Hollywood mainstream, gets under the tactile \"skin\" of textual surfaces, and enables the spectator to re/member the act of seeing with one's own eyes as it were. If the apparent fixity of gendered subject-positions conventionally operates as a \"phantasm\" that forecloses polyvalent identificatory possibilities, declines its own potentialities as fantasy through its obstinate attachment to the real, then Burton's subversive dismantling of generic architecture accords with transgression or disarrangement of character. Since the phantasmatic is additionally that which haunts and joins issue with the boundaries which hedge round the construction of stable identities, his political aesthetics advocate an inferential leeway between representation, its meanings and its effects. 9 Envisaged as a popular aesthetic, Burton's camp-surreal perspective, shares with the vulgar sublime a carnivalesque release from social regulation, structural inversions of hierarchical power relations, and guerrilla transgressions of aesthetic boundaries and decorum. Change occurs at the indiscriminate border between complicity and resistance. Hence, the critical import of horror and liminality, and the historicity of the uncanny in Burton's films are central. In today's monstrous mediascape, melodrama's \"home\" is where the electronic hearth is, and Burton's camp-surreal cinema-of-the-absurd invites us to stare into this uncanny fun-house mirror, to come face-to-face with the apparition of something at once unpresentable and familiar. In his analysis of contemporary fairy tales for children, Jack Zipes aligns the art of subversion with the \"liberating potential of the fantastic\" and provides a model of critical approach in his approximation of \"the uncanny\" as an aesthetically motivated construct. Zipes argues that \"the very act of reading a fairy tale is an uncanny experience in that it separates the reader from the restrictions of reality from the onset and makes the repressed unfamiliar familiar once again.\"1 0 The concept of \"home\" becomes synonymous with the concept of liberation\u00E2\u0080\u0094 a means and a destination that ceases to be bound by its own goal because \"the real return home or the recurrence of the uncanny is a move forward to what has been repressed and never fulfilled.\" 1 1 His theory makes a case for potentially oppositional desire in audience engagement where, as in the \"'counter-cultural' fairy-tale,\" where the intention \"is to make readers perceive the actual limits and possibilities of their deep personal wishes in a social context.\" 1 2 The uncanniness of the inanimate made animate gets sidetracked in Hollywood fantasy and children's fairy-tales alike through capriciousness and unambiguous fantasy scenarios, yet Burton deploys anarchic wit and vertiginous technical style to underscore the hard-fisted properties of the comic, the ironic, the grotesque and carnivalesque via his hybrid of surrealism and camp. Provoking the vertigo associated with the terror of the sublime, Burton's brand of Gothic horror likewise pertains to the uncanny themes of death and the supernatural, adding to the formula\u00E2\u0080\u0094through the comicality and excess of a camp-surreal alloy\u00E2\u0080\u0094a radical relationship to representation. But can uncanny effects be apprehended within the space of representation? Or are the feelings and anxious ambiguities which are instigated by it undermined, made over, canceled out by camp irony? One could argue that Burton's films, which consistently stir up a mishmash of horror and humor, would be better placed in the context of morality tale, caricature or melodramatic kitsch. And with dead certainty, one could quiz the likelihood of any uncanny effect in the long shadows of formal/technical conventions and grotesque/comic effects. In postmodernity, where surrealist dynamics inform\u00E2\u0080\u0094and frequently disable the distinction between\u00E2\u0080\u0094high and low cultural production alike, does Burton effectively mimic the historical eviction of the surrealist, outmoded by camp taste, for the demode? And if so, in the present historical and cultural context, does this maneuver similarly forfeit the capacity to generate an uncanny turning inside out of the present via a comedy-of-past-errors, that is, to produce a cultural cataclysm allied to discontinuous modes of production? To be sure, there is general feeling in the academy that the real has turned into the surreal in the postmodern geographies of advanced capitalism, and that this is not so much \"troubling\" in its uncanniness as tranquilizing in its intoxication. After all, in the phantasmagoria of the postmodern city, surrealism's caving in of dream and reality, and of self and other, appears accomplished, if frequently marked by an about-face of its liberative effects. If in advanced capitalism, surrealism's critical jeopardy of self and other has become postmodernism's double indemnity of schizophrenic (a)subjectivity, then today's convulsive boring of kaleidoscopic peepholes into the opaque body-casing of the patriarchal subject\u00E2\u0080\u0094not to mention that of much totalizing postmodern discourse\u00E2\u0080\u0094has resulted in a reactive censorship, perceptible in the regimens of personal and social bodies. A s a critical reflex, I w i l l now introduce the bodies of the films themselves, broadly keeping these questions in mind: H o w , and to what ends, do the uncanny properties of Burton's camp-surreal 1) unmask the face of kitschy and/or tacky forms of popular cinema/culture? 2) accord to the contemporary existential schizophrenia that is related to a deterritorialization of representation within the performative space of popular cinema / culture? 3) screen the aesthetic/ideological transfusion between the contemporary playacting of \"crises\" of male subjectivity in the postmodern simulacrum and the historical currency of that political/psychic imaginary, common to fascism and popular horror / f i l m noir, involving the aggressive renegotiation of \"monstrous\" historical threats to personal/sexual masculine identity and authority? I. Anatomy of Pee-wee Herman: Camp Sites, Shopping, and the Semiotics of Tourism in Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) Burton's surrealist materiality of fantasy and symbolic figuration comes to light in the context of the dadaist/surrealist structuralist project. A camp compendium of surrealist principles, there is a traumatic uncanniness at work in Pee-wee's Big Adventure. The film performs uncanny mishmashings of animate and inanimate figures, ambivalent hookups of castrative and fetishistic forms, compulsive reenactments of erotic and traumatic scenes, imbroglios of sadism and masochism, of death and desire. If the quintessential surrealist pursuit is the hunt for the lost object, then Burton campily highlights the fact that this quest is as unnavigable as it is compulsive: not only is each new-fashioned object a stand-in or double for a lost one, but the lost object is itself a simulacral fantasy. It is in this regard that Pee-wee's Big Adventure can be interpreted as a camp-surreal \"drama of dismemberment\"; however, not only the practice of phallic investment but the process of reading psychoanalytically becomes the subject of camp humor. 1 3 Does the familiarity of \"commercial\" packaging and marketing alleviate the bizarreness, turbulence, and maZevolence of the primitive phantasies in which they are submerged? Tania Modleski's caution\u00E2\u0080\u0094that we refrain from valorizing characters like Pee-wee Herman as legitimate alternatives to the \"he-man types\" currently in fashion, along with Pee-wee's propensity to dominate in and through male lack\u00E2\u0080\u0094underscores a determining problem of postmodernity for feminists: even with the phallocentric subject dead, its ghost of male hysteria still runs the show. 1 4 Nonetheless, the play of spectatorship which is fostered by the film becomes a political activity inasmuch as it involves the reconsideration of cultural materials, including the body. Functioning within and abtrusely against the norms of classical narrative form to unsettle and reroute spectatorship in innovative ways, the thematics of disruptive desire in Burton's film challenge the desire for narrative consumption that it produces. In the capacity of Pee-wee's adventures to follow in the tracks of our own spectatorial interactions, the protagonist plays the part of the tourist whose exteriority vis-a-vis cultural images/artefacts is rescinded by border violations whereby the road movie scenario of \"the-familiar-made-foreign\" turns back, uncannily, toward scenarios of the familiar. Anne Friedberg's metaphorical alignment of shopping and tourism with contemporary spectatorship is applicable in this regard, as is her provocative notion that the side-effect of driving is the translation of landscape into (panoramic) image, into cinematic flow. 1 5 Indeed, in its domesticated mock-up of foreign and exotic \"elsewheres,\" Pee-wee's Big Adventure explicitly invokes the viewer as a cinematic tourist who, like Pee-wee, is privileged with a fluid and mobile mode of visuality that affords a sense, or glimpse, of the potential convertibility of culturally dominant pastimes. The Work of Suture in the Age of Postmodern Reproduction, or \"Snow on the Oedipal Stage\" in Edward Scissorhands (1990) As a postmodern cultural offspring of various filmic incarnations of the Frankenstein story, Edward Scissorhands reiterates the question of conception as one of both physical and ideological manipulation: what kind of agencies are responsible for the social and artistic construction, animation, and regulation of human bodies? 1 6 Burton allegorizes Edward's endeavor to discover meaning and value in a decadent landscape of postmodern consumerism. Hence, the dystopic projection of contemporary social relations is brought into a dialectical interaction with the utopic hope for spiritual salvation and redemption through an 'alien messiah'. If contemporary horror presents itself as an indicator of the present historical and social topography, then Edward's figurative inscription in the cultural landscape brings to the surface cultural anxieties relating to the ideological \"pinch\" of capitalist patriarchy and the sense of the apocalyptic engendered by postmodernism. With history thought to be abandoned and the myths produced from that history destroyed, the simulacrum fills in for the allegedly forsaken territory of the real. If the postmodern appears ghostwritten by the nostalgic repercussions in the horror film's intertextuality, then the weakening of the security afforded by such a tendency is physicalized in the categorical breakdowns and bodily corruption that holds fast the excessive iconography of individual assailability in both the horror genre and the postmodern text. In Burton's ironic and self-reflexive political myth, with the inevitability of violence engendered through language and representation, it is no accident that this process bears a striking resemblance to the system of suture. The narrative concretizes the abstract grammar of Lacan's psychoanalytic vocabulary while simultaneously subjecting its semic operations to a camp-surreal critique. Specifically, the film parodically theatricalizes the role played by suture theory in critical formulations (or implantations) about subjectivity, ideology and sexual difference in the context of postmodern experience, as well as spectator ship. By campily dramatizing the fact that the cut is the primary agency of cinematic disclosure, the film fosters a recognition of the indeterminacy of the operations of suture by establishing the image as a political map site for charting the bodily and social reality of the characters in the allegedly totalizing simulacrum. III. Posthum[or]ous Patriarchy and Malevolent Coffins: Staking Out Male Masquerades and Chimeras of Otherness in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) Exemplifying an operative mode of signification in a time of hysterical (male) subjects suspended in the simulacrum, Burton's Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) anatomize contemporary dramaturgical \"crises\" of (male) subjectivity in terms of excessive and violent reactions to the apparent loss of patriarchal privilege. Character identification with subjectivities beyond the pale of traditional conceptions of dominant masculine gender identity unmask the psychological implications of classical noir narrative involving the compulsive renegotiation of threats to personal/sexual identity and authority.17 Batman can be read as a camp emblem of high modernist individualism, the autonomous, self-determining subject/ego whose fault lines are none other than the hairline fractures of dominant masculinity. Burton's archeology of dead subjectivity and the thematics of male hysteria in an ironic hyperreality is conducted in terms of Batman's (dis)connection to home and origins, social capital/power, abject social Others (racialized, gendered as feminine), and textuality. The phallus is at all times the manufacture of the dominant fiction, and when that fiction turns out to be unfit to bear up under the exertion of historical trauma, the male subject, cast adrift within its idealizing (simulacral) configuration, might unexpectedly find himself stranded outside it. 1 8 To find this shadowy land of the lost, we need only look to the horror film's sensational, manic obsession with archaicism and liminality, to its play on the uncanny ambivalences of heim and unheimlich which serve to underscore the flaccidity of any identity which keeps up appearances upon the scaffold of abjection. Burton demonstates that the double's imaginary power and resonance\u00E2\u0080\u0094 the stage upon which the traditional male subject at once plays out his alienation from and familiarity with himself\u00E2\u0080\u0094turns on its immateriality, upon the fact that the double is essentially a phantasy. If contemporary culture exorcizes this phantasy, transubstantiates the action of the double from the Other as gaze and mirror into the blanched monotony of the same, then consciousness of the autonomous self is threatened, and the transparency of radical Otherness becomes the epicentre of terror in the so-called \"normal\" world, or sphere of patriarchal relations. Burton foregrounds the cleavage that exists between the mystique of male power (symbolized by the phallus) and the visible \"reality\" of men and masculinity; and it is this particular vacant space that is the (camp) site of horror, this uncanny space between masculinity's ungraspable ideal or symbolic and the real. Conclusion: Animating the Cadavre Exquis of Hollywood's \"apocalyptic adolescent\" What stakes strike at the art of Burton's camp-surreal films? These blockbusters are not simply popular ideological appliances for domesticating terror and repression through aesthetic experience, even if their humor appears to shield us from the violence arising from the endangered fantasy of dominant masculinity and the imagined sexual/cultural projections and disavowals upon which phallic identification is propped up in postmodernity. In place of \"the new sincerity\" thought to siphon out the irony or eclecticism in postmodern camp by putting teeth into a lost authenticity in an impossible past, today's culture/cinema could learn from Burton to model a politics less upon portrait of the people as an archaic myth of origins than upon a pragmatics of the popular as an ongoing carnival of disorderly dialogue. 1 9 N o t e s ^Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 189. 2Sarah Koffman, The Enigma of Woman, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1985), p. 56. 21 %or an excellent discussion of \"the female uncanny,\" which is outside the purview of my essay, see Tania Modleski, Loving With a Veangeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Methuen, 1984); and Patricia White, \"Female Spectator, Lesbian Spectator: The Haunting,\" Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories. Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). ^Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film. Feminism. Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 53. ^See Kaja Silverman, \"Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity,\" Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London I would argue that the potential to fly in the teeth of the rational subject with the aim of loosening a few of them is not undermined simply because, insofar as the standoff between the * semiotic/ feminine and the symbolic /masculine is open to cross-gendered identification involving permeable boundaries of individual subjectivity, the generic inscription of deviance for the purpose of managing and containing projected threats of difference and disorder represents a narrative strategy for consolidating and protecting the phallic regime of masculine identity against various forms of disruption. 7 A s a foil to the chimeras of knowledge and coherence which haunt realism (no less than the dominant fictions of omnipotent masculinity and/or nationhood), works of the fantastic put teeth in hallucinatory the nature of perception, thereby producing an an aura of uncanny ambivalence. Quoting Todorov, James Donald explains that \"the fantastic... plays upon the insecurity of the boundaries between the T and the 'not-I', between the real and the unreal.\" What are the gendered implications of such a split? If, as Donald puts it, \"the sublime... indicate[s] a tension between the joy of having a feeling of the totality and the inseparable sorrow of not being able to present an object equal to the Idea of that totality,\" then the sublime pertains to the uncanny space in which the imagined postmodern totality faces-off with its ungraspable ideal in the context of historically specific problems of identity construction. See James Donald, \"The Fantastic, The Sublime and the Popular Or, What's at Stake in Vampire Films?,\" Fantasy and the Cinema (London: BFI, 1989), p. 238; 245. I l l 8 For the Joker in Batman, as for most of Burton's male characters, feminine attributes are what figures negative pleasure-a feeling (of the death drive) in the bones of the patriarchal subject as at once the lure of ecstasy and the threat of its annihilation. However metamorphosed their topographies in Burton's films, the ground of this surrealist sublime-traditional beauty and contemporary glamour culture alike\u00E2\u0080\u0094remains the female body. ^Indeed, the construction of masculinity as male hysteria in the Batman films is fashioned as if to ward off feminization, but it unmasks the homoerotics of mimetic rivalry which regularly organizes classic Hollywood narratives of selfsame adversaries. Insofar as erotic sexual attractions are doubled by homoerotic ones sexual difference is redeployed. Homoerotic violence disinters a subterranean current of homophobia, racism and sexism, a dread of displacements or redistributions of power and difference. Burton's campy cliches make visible the operation whereby the mastery that \"postmodern\" texts no longer engender in accomplishing closure or eliciting narcissistic identification is conventionally reaffirmed insofar as the experience of submission and vulnerability is projected onto the gendered or racialized body or Other. alternate argument: By juxtaposing Bruce Wayne's living space, casino, and \"armoury\", and transcendent control room, Burton implies that in masculinist economies, as in capitalist ones, there is no longer any corresponding territory save the deterritorialized body of masculinity itself, the capital on which the flux of desire is inscribed. Moreover, in its decoding and deteritorializing, in its becoming an aphorism for all values in the exchange process, masculinity, like capitalism, radiates new physical and social energies and fleshes out productive capacity beyond all previous limits. However, in order to control and regulate this energy and productive potential, masculinity, like capitalism\u00E2\u0080\u0094as campily personified by that (in Marx's famous formulation) \"capitalist vampire\" Max Shreck\u00E2\u0080\u0094must defer and displace its own limits and reinscribe them in repressive channels, structures, and inhibitions. Put otherwise, masculinity, like capitalism, not only dismantles traditional values, identities, and social structures, but also has to reinstall and refortify them in man-made reterritorializations in order to work. No longer a material and productive variable, energy (like capital and government) has now become a vampiristic process feeding upon itself (which is why there is no real risk of its depletion). In this regard, the film is an allusion to Chinatown, whose critique of the socio-pathology of political and financial corruption similarly invokes mythic connotations of the life-blood being sucked from the civic body. Like Dracula, Batman is a saver, an ascetic. In fact, he has no body; it exists, but it is incorporeal, like the hyperreal commodity thought impossible as a physical fact. In a sense, the body as alienated labour, as a social relation, physically estranges the man from \"himself\". Like the capital with which he is associated, the vampire social product which is seen to exist without a body, which has exchange value without use value. Whether in terms of money (Marx) or the real (Baurdrillard), Batman's cultural capital, like phallic masculinity, is symbolically buried and exists as a \"resurrection effect\"; it is dead labour whose promiscuous seductions and productions are monopolistic, solitary and despotic. ^Peter Wollen, \"Delerious Projections,\" Sight and Sound, vol. 2, no. 4 (1992), p. 25. 1 2 N o t unlike the biological body (according to a genetic model), the social body (according to a fascist model) loses its \"natural\" defences and becomes susceptible to perverse effects and unpredictable malfunctions in ratio to the increasing dexterity of its prostheses, that is to say, overprotection, overcoding and overmanagement. Burton physicalizes the postmodern coroner's report that virulence has taken over the work of the unconscious, that immunodeficiency now accounts for all afflictions, and that terrorism now accounts for all violence. And in so doing, he lights into fascist ideology from within its own manufacture of masculine subjectivity\u00E2\u0080\u0094lights into it with precisely what this subjectivity blacks out. In the context of AIDS culture, insomuch the characters are less able to pin faith on their own antibodies, they are increasingly in need of protection from outside. At both the level of the individual body and the civic body, the artificial santization of environments indemnifies faltering immunological defences. Not unlike the vapire's coffin, Batman's opaque body casing in which he retreats renders him benumbed/bereaved yet overprotected, condemned to artificial immunity, compulsive transfusions in order to combat death at the slightest contact with the outside world. 1 3Peter Wollen, \"Delerious Projections.\" Sight and Sound, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 24-27. 1 4 Cornel l West, \"The New Politics of Difference.\" October, no. 53 (1990), pp. 105. 15 Andrew Ross describes Batman as a \"film where the racial problematic is highly coded to the point of public invisibility,\" and interprets it as \"a veiled commentary on race relations in the eighties.\" (29) He underlines a principal concern in Batman, yet dismisses its expression as a \"feeble, almost parodie gesture towards white liberal guilt in its attempt to present both characters in a cycle of dependency.\" He writes: Hoodlem and vigilante-one helped to create the other, and vice versa; now each helps to define the other, vengeance feeding off its victim's intimidation of the avenger. This is the nearest the film gets to acknowledging how deviance is constructed by the powerful; how deviant categories, especially those marked with a racial component, are the product, and thus the sole responsibility of those whose interests are further served by portraying themselves and their protectorate as being threatened by deviance.\" (32) Ross argues that Batman \"embarks on a narrative whose full range of identifications depends upon a wholly occluded racial subtext... a veiled commentary on race relations in the late eighties,\" but asks \"how indirect is this commentary when many elements for a simple allegorical reading of racism are so clearly present in the film?\" (30-31) See Andrew Ross, \"Ballots, Bullets or Batmen: can cultural studies do the right thing?\" Screen, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring 1990). In \"Colonialism, Racism, and Representation,\" Robert Stam and Louise Spence argue persuasively for an alternative model of approach: \" A comprehensive methodology must pay attention to the mediations which intervene between 'reality' and representation. Its emphasis should be on narrative structure, genre conventions, and cinematic style rather than on perfect correctness of representation or fidelity to an original 'real' model or prototype. We must beware of mistakes in which the criteria appropriate to one genre are applied to another... Satirical or parodie films... may be less concerned with constructing positive images than with challenging the stereotypical expectations an audience may bring to a film.\" Robert Stam and Louise Spence, \"Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: A n Introduction,\" Movies and Methods\u00E2\u0080\u0094 Vol. II: A n Introduction, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 641. 1 6 H o m i K. Bhaba, \"Of Mimicry and Man:The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,\" October, no. 28 (Spring 1984), p. 128. Of course, it is not just the Black who is labelled as Other in dominant discourses; the above scenario is drawn from feminist psychoanalytic theory, which pinpoints the fetish as the mechanism whereby a partitioned belief bears up under, and bears out, discrepant stereotypes which accumulate around the fetishized body. If colonialist discourse involves operations of mimicry which correspond psychoanalytically to the mechanism of fetishization (its dialectic of presence and absence, as in Homi Bhaba's theoretical account), then Batman and Batman Returns render the ambivalent position of both blacks and women in relation to dominant culture and its representations as a reflexively visible structuring principle of the text. 1 7Burton's eccentric, camp-surreal films playfully furnish the real\u00E2\u0080\u0094the surfaces and textures of everyday life in the postmodern world\u00E2\u0080\u0094with an uncanniness, an aura outside the pale. Recognizing how cinematic expressions of race and gender relations become sedimented into contemporary film narratives and genres, Burton italicizes the cinematic construction and representation of racial and gendered Otherness as ongoing symbolic expressions, specifically, in 113 fantasy and horror's racialized metaphors and allegories. The combined factors of generic and narrative dependence on monstrous difference, increased technological possibilities for rendering the alien Other in terms of simulacra, and the apparent inexhaustability of fantastic narrative projections, diagrammatically render socially (and textually) pent-up sexual and racial discourses. Burton's fantasic narratives redefine the double as a consequence, not an origin. Just as the Platonic tradition partitions legitimate and illegitimate claimants to the idea, segragates good iconic copies that take after the idea and bad fantasmatic simulacra that simulate it, sexual adversaries Batman and Joker stand for good and bad masculinities; just as the Platonic tradition put the simulacrum under restraint not just as a retrograde copy minus an original, but because it controverted the principle of identity, the order of original and copy, of idea and representation, so the Joker\u00E2\u0080\u0094defined in terms of fantasmatic the simulcrum\u00E2\u0080\u0094assumes a Plutonic, uncanny quality that is analogous to that of surrealist fantasy. l^Tf the traditional hero's function is to rope off acceptable social positions and dramatize the relationship of the individual to the social order, then this conservative function clearly has political and ideological significance. Burton's \"Batman\" films transparently reveal how the cinematic rhetoric and style of the traditional hero stipulates a social positioning in which disempowered groups such as blacks and women are consistently defined in a subordinate status. Arguing that aspects of pleasurable looking turn on the annexation of the black male body through symbolic domination and control recalls classical feminist arguments concerning the relationship of the (male) spectator to the female image. By approximating the spectacular black body iconographically, Batman's body armour literally incorporates a kind of racist romanticism of the excessive physicality and sexual potency of the black male. Similarly, traditional cinema manufactures a structure of seeing within which the black body is constituted as the object of the look, thus reproducing traditional relations in society. But although Batman represents a popular archetype in a popular cultural form, and ambivalently underwrites the reproduction of established social relations, popular conceptions of heroism arguably become unmoored from traditional expectations because familiar rituals of heroic power, problematically accomplished in narrative terms, are not presented as functional for social regeneration. l^See Houston A. Baker Jr.,\"Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s,\" in Technoculture. eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. 205. 20See Baker Jr., Houston A. \"Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s,\" Technoculture. eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1991, pp. 197-209. 21jerry Aline Flieger, \"Baudelaire and Freud: The Poet as Joker.\" Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, eds. Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen. London: Associated UP, 1987, pp. 266-281. 2 2 A n n e Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 141-42. Burton's film suggests that in view of the ambiguous determination of new technological models of social intercourse (complexly structured social practices embossed in cultural codes of communication), the historical instrumentality of ethereal imaging stategies deserve at least as much attention in our culture as their more palpable materialist determinants because they have implications for the rehearsal of notions of gender within the performative space of contemporary culture, wherein visual fascination is superceded by control over simulated interactions. 114 ^Moreover, t n e j 0 k e r ' s peformative strategies point up the prevalence of the trendy media promotion artists (like Burton?) who have exploited their prominance as \"art star\" impressarios. Burton thus parodies the politics of public attention given the popularization and democratization of media culture whereby crass commercialization becomes a communication structure for interacting with the public. ^Gera ld Mast, \"Soviet Montage,\" A Short History of the Movies. 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p. 184. 2 ^Laura Mulvey, \"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\" Movies and Methods\u00E2\u0080\u0094 Vol. II: A n Introduction, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 309. 26ln his discussion of Batman. Jim Collins describes the main characters' \"conflicting but complementary\" engagement with strategies of image play in terms of hijacking/deformationQoker) and appropriation/retrieval (Batman). See Jim Collins, \"Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.\" Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993,) pp. 253-254. 2 7 According to this \"ideology of spectacle,\" whereby knowledge is impossible outside of vision, a supply of images is tantamount to an amunition supply. By staging a sucession of face-offs between personal/social identity and the popular cultural fantasy of omnipotent masculinity in the context of new communication technologies, Burton makes explicit the sense that the heroic manhood, conventionally determined by the spectacular male body in American culture, is now negotiated domestically by consumers via electronic home-theatre marketing scenerios of multisensory interfacing and masculine fascination and control; hence the integral connentions between bodily malfunction, faulty programming and virulence. 2 8 See Seamus Deane, \"The Real Thing: Brian Moore in Disneyland,\" Irish University Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring 1988), p. 77. 2 9 See Frank Burk, \"Fellini's Casanova: Male Hystrionics and Phallackcentrism,\" ed. Christopher Sharret, Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in the Postmodern Narrative Film (PostModernPositions, Vol. 6). Washington, D. C : Maisonneuve Press, 1993, p. 154. 1 1 5 Conclusion: Animating the Cadavre Exquis of Hollywood's \"apocalyptic adolescent\"1 Perhaps the contemporary artist continues to be subversive by being non-adversarial in the modernist sense, and has retained our pop cultural past partly in order to explore the site where pleasure was last observed, before it was stoned by the gentry and mob alike, and re-created as monster. -Tania Modleski- 2 ... isn't it possible to argue, with the surrealists, that bad taste should take its place alongside the fantastic, the uncanny and the sublime in a carnival of resistance to the hegemony of the beautiful? -James Donald- 3 Movies of recent times have treated dystopian themes, leaning heavily towards the vision of chaos. But they have amended dystopian narratives in postmodern terms, often imbuing a negative vision of the future with comic or campy motifs. They intermingle the dark and the comic, as if we are at once to take the threat of dystopia seriously and then again not... it might be useful to try and make some political sense out of these vaying dytopian images and themes in the movies, since they offer us evidence of how popular art imagines our political future. -James Combs- 4 Burton's collections of cinematic ephemera can be seen as anticollections in their repudiation of nostalgic estimations of the \"classic\" as a transcendent form. But his particular generic and imagistic collections involve more than this denial. Indeed, the stockpiling and organization of Burton's collections of cinematic ephemera serve to hyperbolize dominant features of the exchange economy\u00E2\u0080\u0094its seriality, abstraction, fads and fashions\u00E2\u0080\u0094and thereby constitute an extreme form of consumerism which ambivalently authorizes mode and fashion to flare simultaneously towards the past and the future.5 Of course, an inventory of Burton's camp-surreal principles does not paint an unclouded picture of how the outmoded can be radical, the auratic convulsive or the culturally down-and-out redeployed as insurgent anarchy. The outmoded as archaic smacks of the traditional, the reactionary; the demode 116 nothing but parodie, affirmative at the last; aura and apoplexy look to be at odds. I have argued, however, that by capitalizing on the tension between cultural capital and cultural currency, between fashion modes and production modes, Burton casts the cultural detritus of past moments left over in capitalism\u00E2\u0080\u0094 artisanal relics, outworn fashions, time-honored images\u00E2\u0080\u0094dead against the amour-propre of its present moment. Indeed, to the contemporary epidemic of culture collecting, of deploying the images and figures of primitive and outmoded modern artifacts, the Penguin's political pre-campaign slogan, \"What you put in your toilet, I put on my mantle,\" represents a historical detournement of the late-capitalist cultural economy, of the projected totality of (post)modern production and consumption. In Burton's ouevre, outmoded images may call to account the late-capitalist product with past images either deadened or outside its purview, as when an object or space remindful, or having an aura of a different formative mode, social configuration, or anatomy of feeling is disinterred, in apostasy. If Burton's aesthetic deployment of the outworn, the archaic, and the auratic opens onto surrealism, then this door is darkened by fascism's shadow. Still, technological and generic invention/reproduction can only be dialectical, critical, when conversant with the past. Much of the dominant and seductive discourse on postmodern art has made light of this dialectic, especially in its absolute embodiment of the textual and the anti-auratic. To be sure, the postmodernist architecture of Burton's films is built upon a modernist burial ground of images; and his reanimation of pseudo-auratic creatures\u00E2\u0080\u0094puppets, dolls, mannequins, automatons\u00E2\u0080\u0094parodies that of the marketplace and academy alike, where the auratic is exiled and the threadbare is outstripped. If the outmoded and the postmodern are problematic because they are caught up in a 1 17 single lane of historical development, then this is also the mainspring of power for both terms, for it is the congestion of productive modes/meanings that the postmodern can run over. And just as heterogeneous spaces and times can be critically (re)aligned in the present, so too can these discriminations be phobically sized up. It is in exactly this regard that the historically outmoded antagonism between surrealism and fascism has made the scene again: \"uncannily.\" 6 The overwhelming popularity of political \"monsters\" like Penguin and Max Shreck, and even Batman, provide an example of how, during certain historical periods, people may desire a political power structure\u00E2\u0080\u0094even fascism\u00E2\u0080\u0094 which doesn't necessarily serve their interests. In response to our present social and historical conjuncture, Burton pays a lot of attention to how subjects are fashioned as a result of the production and investment of desire on the playing field of the social. In Beetlejuice (1988), for instance, the characters exhume the (dead) patriarchal subject and disinter a surrealist diorama beneath the house, a phantasmatic showcase that closely approximates both the multiplex cinema and shopping mall which (in Anne Friedberg's formulation) markets the pleasures of \"imaginary mobility as psychic transformation.\" 7 In the Reagan era, the figure of Beetlejuice campily epitomizes the Golem whose inactive clay awaits animation through the incantation of a secret password. Indeed, to some extent, the patriarchal subjects in Burton's camp-surreal repertoire at once requisition and supervise the break up of male subjectivity and the alterity of culture, and suggest what is at stake politically in rethinking the popular through the uncanny. Any campaign that amalgamates politics and aesthetics might give us the shivers, for to aestheticize politics without politicising aesthetics\u00E2\u0080\u0094and so refashioning both terms\u00E2\u0080\u0094is to motion in the direction of monstrous fascism. However, Burton's camp-surreal movies gestures in another direction, albeit more ambivalently and with more complicity than, say, Chaplin's The Great 1 1 8 Dictator (1940), towards a cultural politics and a political culture that take stock of the inevitable/desirable heterogeneity and fragmentation of personal and social identity constructions. Burton's uncanny camp surreal aesthetic is a reflex to his vision of cultural heterogeneity, a camp-surreal photoengraving of the untotalizable field of social relations. He physicalizes the social machinery of complex power relationships in terms of discourse-as-violence, puts thresholds (and strongholds) of legibility/intelligibility through their paces, and thereby opens up a space for the imagination of aesthetic and social alternatives. Undertaking the surrealist political stategem (overlooked by certain Marxist idealisms), Burton flies in the teeth of the capitalist rationalization of the objective world via the late capitalist irrationalization of the subjective world. Rather than fetishistically fastening on the machine as object or image, Burton locates it in social processes. No disarming liberal humanism or romantic anti-capitalism, Burton scraps neither the reverie nor the reality of the body becoming machine/commodity in a conservative nostalgia for a \"real,\" \"genuine,\" \"natural,\" \"authentic\" man (like Expressionism or contemporary advertising). On the contrary, his hybrid aesthetic of surreal camp frequently resists this selfsame mythology with camp humor and with surrealism's psychic repercussions in the context of postmodernity's own neo-Sachlichkeit. Burton's live action puppet shows make plain the fact that what can be concretely expressed at any given time is reciprocally determined by the whereabouts of bodies and their possible combinations. He theatricalizes the interface of the corporal and incorporeal, thus enabling different regimes of signs to account for how bodies are incorporeally made over by statements, how the face acts as a site where signs are constantly reterritorialized, and how 1 19 fragmented and heterogeneous \"becomings\" are put into play by that deterritorialization. That the films bare scars of oedipal and familial reterritorialization is not up for debate. What is important is that the reterritorializations (archaisms, reversions) of Burton's moving pictures underscore how, with desire, assembly is required, and is most \"authentically\" made manifest in figures of \"becoming-other\" through profane couplings and fantastic alliances. No doubt inheriting a few optical cataracts from surrealist sexual politics and insights into the hookups between psychic energy, landscape, architectural form, and social mythology, Burton undertakes an archaeology of patriarchal subjectivity as fossilized in (post)modern spaces. Surrealism concerns the uncanny point where contraries brush up against one another, and Burton's camp tableaux put teeth into apparently polar opposites, especially figures that ambivalently evoke an erotogenic and dismembered body, and scenes that ambivalently hint at innocuous games and sadomasochistic aggressions. Because the psychic splintering of the male subject (convulsive identity) is founded on the physical splintering of the female/(feminized) image (compulsive beauty), and because the intoxication of the one may come at the expenditure of the other, Burton ambivalently resurrects these problematic surrealist ideals. Liberatory lookouts are overcast by mysogynistic effects, by the ambivalent exacerbation and exploitation of sexist fantasies belonging to the feminine (especially blood ties between the fluid and the fragile, the fatal and the masochistic), and by the surrealist obsession with psychosexual regression, whereby the female/ (feminized body of the Other) is violently represented. The potentially (or unavoidably) masculinist repercussions of the surreal liaison between the uncanny and castration call for critical reservations, notably, with 120 regard to the question of whether the uncanny\u00E2\u0080\u0094perhaps no less than camp or deconstruction\u00E2\u0080\u0094effects a \"real\" crisis of masculine identity, or whether it simply involves a (re)colonizing of psychic and social territories ambiguously fraternized with the feminine. More,, however much the binary opposites of masculine and feminine are collapsed, the very move to cave them in (as with the surrealist valorization of the hysterical figure) possibly involves an appropriation around the masochistic position. And what of the connection between the Other's deconstructive supplementarity and the uncanny? Burton's deconstructive practice restores to his films that contradiction between lack and excess as a property of filmic discourse itself, and brings home the text as uncentered play. On the one hand, through a deconstructive supplementarity, Burton exploits the very \"outside\" of the surrealist uncanny, as critical edge; on the other hand, so long as the discourse of woman-as-supplement remains the property of socially marked male subjects who speak woman-as-object, Burton will ambivalently recompose (however inadvertently) the metaphysical structure of subject/object. The resurrection of the decorative and the extravagant is nowadays diagnosed as a symptom of modernism's historical slump, but masculine parade has camped out in the shadows of modernism's chiaroscuro projections since the latter's corporeal striptease. Burton explores ways to divorce and deconstruct the spate of antinomies that fashioned modernism's identity: functional/festooned, useful/disposable, auratic/simulated, machine/organism, masculine/feminine, West/East, and so forth. In his oeuvre, deconstruction originates not so much from the disavowal as from the projection, from the side of the negative, the Other, the supplement (the ornamental, the outmoded, the popular, the feminine, the Orient, and so forth). Occasionally, the hybrid and 121 contradictory \"nature\" of Burton's catalogue of sexual/racial/artistic Others not only ambivalently reflects, but also rejects, these antinomies of modernism. Pee-wee, Edward, The Joker, and Catwoman can be read as poststructuralist figures insofar as their textual acrobatics appear bereft of critique. Rather than signaling untrodden points of resistance around which a \"critical\" subject could enter Gotham's endless labyrinth of textuality and libidinal politics (stage left?), their poststructuralist maneuvers smash the subject and do honor to its dissolution in a gesture of transgressive, (neo)Nietzschean laughter and supercilious disdain. During a press conference at the end of Batman, with the Joker exterminated and the status quo seemingly affirmed, Commissioner Gorden confidently brags to a crowd of journalists that \"Public safety in Gotham City is no longer a laughing matter.\" On the contrary, from the fantastic, transgressive and liberating adventures of Burton's camp-surreal gallery of \"monsters\" we can ascertain that political closure is a joking matter, and also that the critical potential of fractional, hybrid, and \"monstrous\" identities for an aspiration towards real communities that live in a state of becoming is, like comedy, a serious business. What do we then make of Burton's allegorical stylistics, which inscribe a desire to trespass the teleological limits of narrative, but avoid jeopardizing the 'bodies' of the films themselves? One could possibly speculate that it is authorship itself that is quarantined from the contamination of history, since the discourse of gender running through the films implies that what is at stake is male mastery, and the bones of belief that the narratives pilfer from the reliquary of representation might be read as a eucharistic investment in patriarchal real estate. I would still maintain, however, that the activity of deconstruction, the project of defamiliarization, of exposing habitual meanings as cultural 12 2 inventions is by no means undermined by the uncomfortable sense that the ritual aping of white, heterosexual male privilege only evidences that the rules have changed but the game has stayed the same. Burton's stagecraft animates how dominant masculinity is made over in cultural narratives; how its representational structures impact upon the political practices of en-gendering social experience; and how its psychoanalytic myths and fantasies are historically schematized and inflected. To be sure, a question which continually rear ups in view of the deconstructive disclaimer of male (artistic/critical) mastery is whether it puts on a performance of non-mastery in order to come home to another kind of mastery: a touch-and-go phallocracy caving-in on itself. However, Burton recognizes the persistency with which male narratives of gender are reproduced in feminist theories of cultural production, and underlines the oscillation between gender representation and what necessarily exceeds the space of representation. It is by taking apart the machinery of visual fascination internally, and by thematising his own ongoing implication with it, that Burton confronts the social and cinematic construction of (sexual) identity; for in his vision, engenderment is culturally produced as in the inventor's body shop, in the sense in which his Warholian factory produces goods or commodities, and in so doing manufactures different sets of social relations. Far from repudiating gender or slenderizing it to the level of individual performance, Burton is careful to work out the historical and political terms under which both male and female characters become gendered and embodied. To be sure, his camp-surreal critique of gender as ideologically and technically engineered produces a historical trauma of gender that throws a proverbial wrench into the postmodern gears of today's cinematic \"bachelor machines.\" 123 Indeed, if we paid attention to the implications of Burton's postmodern camp surreal as a model, we might be obliged to reassess the procedures by which we ascribe meaning to our culture through representation. For although Andrew Ross rightfully contends that camp rarely offers \"a direct relation between the conditions it speaks to\u00E2\u0080\u0094everyday life in the present\u00E2\u0080\u0094and the discourse it speaks with\u00E2\u0080\u0094 usually a bricolage of features pilfered from fantasies of the bygone,\"8 camp-surreal recycling of the past is not always nostalgic or reactionary; it can be critical as well. In my view, such ambivalence does not sabotage politics, but is a proviso for any political interference or (re)appraisal (as well as a symptomatic effect) of the horsepower of postmodernism's motorcade of images, and a possible means of hotwiring or hijacking such vehicles. To today's overshadowing of the uncanny, Burton rejoins that unflagging repression which underwrites its homecoming. Unless our (de)realizing postmodern dreamscapes (i.e., landscapes, cityscapes, and cinemascapes) are considered a postmodern fulfillment of the surreal, Burton's camp-surreal is far from defunct. On the contrary, it campily muffles the frequently trumpeted postmodern ideologemes that capitalism no longer has an outside, that determining principles are ungraspable, that radical critiques are impossible, that liberation can only be simulated, that revolutionary acceleration along political thoroughfares is now a spinning of tires in a simulacral pothole. His body of work suggests that existential and representational dead ends are themselves narratives which hammer the body of the past out of its never-having-been and thus jeopardize elective futures not-yet-anticipated. Burton's camp-surreal endeavors to stump conservative postmodernism with its own forfeited reveries, puts to the proof its habit of taking the will for the deed, and may even intimate a way to bloodsuck the uncanny energies stored in bygone cultural forms of expression for alternative political aims in the present. 124 Notes -*-A term by which the German Expressionists referred to themselves, according to Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1952). 2Tania Modleski, \"The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory,\" Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). ^James Donald, \"The Fantastic, the Sublime and the Popular... Or, What's at Stake in Vampire Films?\" Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald. London: BFI, 1989, p. 247. 4James Combs, \"Pox-Eclipse Now: The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Popular Movies,\" Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, ed. Christopher Sharrett, Postmodern Positions, Vol. 6 (Washington, D. C : Maisonneuve, 1993), p. 27. ^Susan Stewart provides an excellent discussion of \"ephemera proper\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094collections comprised of disposable artefacts\u00E2\u0080\u0094to which my thinking about postmodern cinema is indebted. See her On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1984). 6 H a l Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 212.1 am grateful to Foster for suggesting the cultural currency of this historical showdown. ^Friedberg, op. cit., p. xi. ^Ross, op. cit.. p. 159. 125 Bibliography: Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max. 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