Burton Black

Abstract

Perhaps no observation about his work could be more obvious than that Tim Burton has a biting fascination with black in particular and obscurity in general. In any of his films we can find darkness gravely positioned, in some more centrally than in others. To look at his drawings and water-colors, thickly stained with a substantial pen dipped in darkest ink, ink the color of Hades, is to be confronted, possibly lured, by a substantiality of line and contrast, a boldness of assertion, a stiff punctiliousness. The dense blackness of the lines confers confidence and suggests the unequivocal. One must rove willy-nilly around Burton’s world to encompass a substantial collection of his blacks, not only in fragmented passages in the films—Helena Bonham Carter in a raven black eye-patch and spider black shawl in Big Fish (2003), for example—but also in his predilection for including images—repeatedly and with burgeoning emphasis—of such heavily besmirched faces as Johnny Depp’s. There is a penchant not merely for makeup in general—Depp’s Mad Hatter takes this perhaps to its limits—and thus for the pretense of disguise that it offers, but for the pronunciation of the arch, impulsive, swiftly definitive black line, and a feeling for the richness of shadow. A striking—yet for me not quite magical—composition in Big Fish has Ed Bloom, Sr. (Albert Finney) fishing in a stream at dusk, a platinum wash of sunlight dropped across the placid mirror gray waters with long, pensive swaths of vegetation on both banks reaching off to the horizon and echoed in mysterious shadow on the water’s surface, a shadow that is what Nabokov called an “exact, beautiful, lethal reflection” (62).

Back in his student days at the polytechnic, while helping a classmate’s younger sister—a sleepy, wan girl with a velvety gaze and a pair of black pigtails—to cram elementary geometry, he had never once brushed against her, but the very nearness of her woolen dress was enough to start making the lines on the paper quiver and dissolve.

(Nabokov, The Enchanter 5)