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The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood.

Article Excerpt
The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood by Alison McMahan, New York and London: Continuum 2005. 262 pp., illus. Hardcover: $85.00. Paperback: $21.95.

I bet you didn't know that the last time you walked out of your multiplex, deflated from another bloated, plotless, loud, special-effects extravaganza, you had just experienced something called pataphysical cinema. Such is Alison McMahan's claim in her book on Tim Burton. Going beyond the boundaries of a typical auteur profile, the book uses Tim Burton as a case study for understanding the Hollywood blockbuster and as a challenge to classical narrative film. McMahan writes that films like Burton's Batman (1989), Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (1996), or Stephen Sommers's Van Helsing (2004) are attacked by critics because they do not contain deep characterization, strong plots, or many of the elements that are traditional markers of quality.

McMahan appropriates a manifesto from the College of Pataphysics--a French, postwar offshoot of the Surrealists and DAD& originally inspired by Alfred Jarry who coined the term a half century earlier--in order to explain how these recent Hollywood films make meaning. According to her, these films make fun of established systems of knowledge, especially academic and scientific; follow an alternative narrative logic using special effects in a self-conscious, blatant way; and feature thin plots and thinly drawn characters, relying on intertextual references from outside of the world of the story.

Using an avant-garde movement to describe mainstream filmmaking is a counterintuitive and rather clever move. McMahan takes the elements of pataphysical art, however, without paying much attention to the political thrust of the artists who created it. This maneuver makes some sense when dealing with Burton, a Hollywood nonconformist whose films have definite affinities with the absurdist tradition. But his films, as well as the more conventional Hollywood films McMahan discusses, do not seriously undercut dominant modes of cinematic storytelling or parallel the modernist avant-garde art challenge to establishment views of theater and painting.

McMahan believes that directors have been getting pataphysical since the magician, Georges Melies, first began...