Postmodernist Goth

[September Virgin]

Edward Schizohands: The Postmodern Gothic Body by Russell A. Potter c.
1992 PMC 2.3

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better
model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's
couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship
with the outside world . . . while taking a
stroll outdoors . . . he is in the mountains,
amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or
without any gods at all, without a family,
without a father and a mother . . . .1

--Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

1.A schizophrenic out for a walk . . . thus Deleuze and Guattari frame the
peripatetic, or as they would say, the nomadic position of their classic
critique of Freud's Oedipus complex. The world of this schizo subject is
profoundly machine-made, "everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the
stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines--all of them connected to
those of the body."2 And it is in just such a way that Edward
Scissorhands, in Tim Burton's film of the same name, enters the world;
left alone and unfinished in the huge gothic mansion of his dead Inventor,
not born but built, his only company other dusty machines, filling his
days trimming intricate ornamental hedges with his bladed hands. And yet
Edward's own mark is that of the wound, for everything he touches is cut,
severed, disjointed. In contrast, down below the mountain on which his
mansion stands dwells a sedately postmodern collection of pastel-hued
modular homes, each with its nuclear, Oedipal family, its pastel-hued
automobile, and its well-watered, neatly manicured lawn.

2.And yet to simply construe Edward Scissorhands as an incarnation of
Deleuze and Guattari's schizo would be to do both texts an unwitting
violence, for like the prose monolith of the Anti-Oedipus, Edward
Scissorhands discloses a cut, a blade, that severs the very narrative and
theoretical strands that would seem to hold it together; coming-apart is
what they are all about. Just so Milton, in a moment of delirious excess,
wrote Comes the blind Fury, with th' abhorred shears And slits the
thin-spun life.3 Edward's hands, though, are not hands of fury but hands
of desire, of a desire that inescapably wounds everything it embraces. In
this sense, they might appear to be thoroughly Oedipal hands--if one reads
the wound they inflict as the mark of castration. Yet this wound is deeper
and wider, it is the social wound which bleeds out the deferred pain of a
banalized generation, the stain under the plush beige carpet, the leak in
the somnifacient waterbeds of a suburban existence so attenuated that it
has become, in Baudrillard's terms, a mere simulacrum of itself.

3.Television and film, of course, are replete with such plateaus, whether
it is in the encapsulated fragments of America's Funniest Home Videos or
in the hyperreal simulations of the "holodeck" on board the starship
Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yet Edward Scissorhands
stands somehow apart, a strange territory where the passions lost in the
kitschy planet of Suburbia U.S.A. are recovered via--what else?--the
Gothic. With its visceral excesses, its gargoyles of blood and sensuality,
the Gothic offers a perfect compensation for the dead historical
machinations of the postmodern. Founded itself in a reconstruction of a
past that never was, the Gothic does not re-enact history, but withstands
it (and its loss). Tim Burton's twist--and a brilliant one it is--is to
conjoin this vividly baroque Gothic with the Industrial Gothic of Charlie
Chaplain's Modern Times, where men re-enact catatonically the stiff and
jerky motions of the machines they service, and that service them. Like
the nefarious automated feeding-machine that nearly drives Charlie to
distraction, the principal of the Burtonesque (as of the Chaplinesque)
machine is that it do less well something which could be done far more
easily by hand. The Inventor's early inventions, like his cookie-making
assembly line, precisely re-enact this scene, breaking eggs and cutting
cookies with overcharged zeal; Edward, lacking precisely hands, is
himself a consummate machine, in that he does everything less well, except
cutting. Therein lies his mad art, and with it, at least temporarily, he
reconfigures the postmodern aesthetic, scattering bulbous clowns,
dolphins, and dancers among the previously sedate shrubberies of Burton's
postmodern suburbia.

4.Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic constructions of desiring-production give
us, I would argue, an economics as well as a stylistics of the Gothic
genre, both in its novelistic and cinematic avatars. The two-phase engine
of desiring production is the pivot through which this structure
articulates itself. In the first phase, the organs-partial objects--bodily
parts disjointed from the whole--appear as persecuting machines: schizo
voices undercut reality with paranoiac narratives, dead hands crawl out of
the grave to avenge their killer, telltale hearts give the lie to
narratorial sanity. In the second phase, the body-without-organs, or BwO,
re-absorbs these partial and persecutorial fragments: the infamous schizo
Judge Schreber swallows his larynx accidentally, but is healed by the
"miraculating" rays that seem to radiate from his anus; the Blob absorbs
its victims into an undifferentiated amoebic mass; the Golem returns to
clay.

5.Edward, too, inhabits this dual movement; while he is gentle, his
immaculate and lethal hands have a mind all their own; the same hands
which shape surreal topiary hedges with a gardener's grace "accidentally"
slash Edward's own face, and the faces of those he loves. On a broader
scale, Edward himself is the persecutorial agent of the suburban enclave
whose practiced conformities he unwittingly shreds. Exhibited at a
neighborhood barbecue, displayed in a classroom "show-n-tell," a guest on
a television talk-show, in every instance he severs and disjoints the body
of the socius. Peg's endeavor to graft Edward back into family and
community leads instead to the rupture of the community's own
unarticulated sutures of desire, to the re-opening of scars that not even
the "miraculating" cinematic machine of "love" can heal. The drama of
Edward Scissorhands, consequently, is not the persecution and destruction
of the "monster," but rather the implosion of the Oedipal family, which is
disclosed as monstrous--the drama, in short of Anti-Oedipus.

6.Just as in Deleuze and Guattari's work, Edward Scissorhands mobilizes
against the Oedipal/capitalistic strictures of desire. The unfinished
thing about Edward is not the Oedipal signifier of the phallus, but rather
his hands, producers of sensation, the quintessential synecdoche of
sensitivity (handle with care, hand-made, touched, touching). In
schizo-analytic terms, the hands, while "partial" like all
desiring-machines, bring with their overload of sensation the illusion of
becoming-complete. In drawings of the body scaled to represent the
relative number of nerve endings in various organs, the hands loom
grotesquely large over an insectine body, their mass figuring an excess of
sensation. In the place of these sensory machines, Edward has fists full
of blades, machines of anti-production, machines that can do only injury,
even when he reaches to stroke or embrace. As much as Edward is gentle,
his hands are remorseless; they twitch involuntarily at the approach of
the unknown, and when his emotions overwhelm him they cut maniacally at
bushes, clothing, and people.

7.It would be hard to imagine a scene more traumatic than that in which
the Inventor, just as he is on the verge of presenting Edward with hands,
falls to the floor in the spasms of death. When the gift is revealed,
Edward's eyes open wide, and he briefly attempts to touch these new hands
in his scissored grasp. Then, as Edward looks on, the pleasure in the
Inventor's eyes is replaced with a look of panic; as he slumps to the
floor the human hands are thrust onto Edward's bladed fingers and fall,
broken into fragments along with the sensations they might have produced.
Reaching out to caress the Inventor's face, Edward instead leaves a long
red gash on his cheek. The Oedipal crisis of desire-as-lack (manque) is
subsumed within the larger crises of desiring-production, whose machines,
as Deleuze and Guattari put it, "only work when they break down." Edward's
problematic humanity begins with this breakage, but within the Gothic
hallways of the inventor's mansion it remains unproductive, a celibate
machine whose tasks never extend beyond keeping the hedges trimmed in a
garden no-one but Edward sees.

8.This isolation is broken when Peg, the neighborhood Avon Lady, and as
such a (minor) agent of the capitalistic machine, comes to call.
Overcoming her shock at the first sight of Edward, she recovers herself as
soon as she sees the cuts on his cheeks (the narcissistic touch, too,
opens only wounds for Edward). "At the very least, let me give you a good
astringent," she says as she pats the terrified Edward's cheeks with a
moistened cotton ball, "and this will help to prevent infection." When she
takes Edward home, she unwittingly opens a crisis within the unreal
reality of her neighborhood; having brought the "real" (Gothic Edward,
whose schizo hands will make the unheimlich out of the allzuheimlich)
within the capitalist machine, all other values come into question--or
rather, the absence of value as such is disclosed, as soon becomes evident
in the dinner-table moralizing of Peg's husband Bill. Edward's true
allies, however, are not the adults, who have already taken up their
places within the capitalistic desiring-machines (cd players, stereos,
kitchen appliances, waterbeds), but with children and adolescents, whose
crisis is suddenly shown to be not domestic but fundamentally social. By
re-enacting the Anti-Oedipal moment, Edward breaks open the "family unit"
and discloses a cut that runs across the boundaries between the "nuclear"
families in Peg's neighborhood and the social production of desire.

9.As the schizo, the outcast, Edward poses a threat not only to the
"family," but to all the other microfascistic machines that had guaranteed
the inviolability of the unreal suburb. Esmerelda, the local born-again
Christian, denounces Edward as bearing "the mark of Satan," and attributes
the problems which Edward's presence produces to his diabolical mission
(Edward's answer, carving her shrubbery into a grinning demon's head,
gives a perfect schizo gloss on her paranoia).

The Hands

Shall I even confess to you what was the
origin of this romance? I waked one morning in
the beginning of last June from a dream, of
which all I could recover was, that I had
thought myself in an ancient castle (a very
natural dream for a head like mine filled with
Gothic story) and that on the uppermost
bannister of a great staircase I saw a
gigantic hand in armor . . . ..4

--Horace Walpole, of The Castle of Otranto

10.The hands--les mains (French amplifies the schizo by placing "hands" in
a neutral and impersonal form)--floating and disembodied in the opening
credits of Scissorhands, hands that will never find their way to Edward's
body. If the brain is coded as the seat of identity (the transfer of
brains in Frankenstein and its heirs, the suspended brain common to so
many science fiction scenarios)5--the hands are coded as the site of
sensibility. The hands are right there in the "laboratory" scene; the
horror at their transfer, their stitches is at least as great as the
horror of the transferred brain. "There's nothing to fear! Look! No blood,
no decay . . . just a few stitches." So Henry Frankenstein comforts his
assistant when the monster's hands arouse his terror. The horror of the
transplanted hands is echoed by Henry's own admixture of pride and fear at
the work of his own hands--"Think of it! The brain of a dead man, waiting
to live again in a body I made in [sic] my own hands (holds up his hands
and gazes at them) . . . in my own hands!"

11.Henry's lines, perhaps inadvertently, conflate two metonymic
deployments of the hands: "a body I made with my own hands" and "(his)
life is in my hands." A similar condensation--though visual rather than
linguistic--occurs in Mad Love (1932). A concert pianist named Orlac loses
his hands in an accident, but is given new hands (taken from an executed
murderer) by a demented surgeon named Gogol (Peter Lorre). These hands,
however, seem to have retained their murderous propensity; Orlac's playing
deteriorates as the hands restlessly finger various lethal implements. At
the same time, driven by desire for Orlac's wife, Gogol attempts to drive
Orlac insane by visiting him in disguise, donning artificial hands and a
neck brace so as to convince him that he is the murderer come back from
the dead. Orlac's hands eventually come to the rescue, however; when
Gogol assaults his wife, Orlac kills him with a single skilled throw of a
knife.

12.This theme has been repeated (with somewhat less success) many times,
most recently in Body Parts (1991), which in many ways is a kind of remake
of Mad Love. Yet the re-suturing of the severed hand has hardly put an end
to the terror of the hand all by itself. In The Hand (1981), Michael
Caine plays a cartoonist whose severed hand embarks on a murder spree.
Suggestively, Caine undergoes psychotherapy, and becomes convinced that
the disembodied hand is a mere hallucinatory projection of his own
murderous desire--a plausible solution, at least until the hand sneaks up
on Caine's therapist and strangles her while Caine watches from across the
room. The hand, it would seem, has a mind of its own, if only because of
its extraordinary intensity of sensation; a severed hand takes with it all
that is palpable, caressable, the feelable--or brings with it all the
callous(ed) insensitivity society attributes to a murderer, much as the
"criminal brain" that Frankenstein transplants into his monster in the
1931 film version.

13.To lose a hand, of course, is one thing; never to have one is another,
and to have something else in their place still another. Edward is the
consummate guest, well-trained in etiquette by the Inventor, but when he
cuts the family meatloaf with his blades, not everyone will eat it--he has
touched it with his hands, and it becomes in a sense unclean. As the
opening scene of the film frames it, there once was a man "who had
scissors for hands," that is, both in the place of and as hands. In the
place of hands, they are a disaster, cutting those Edward tries to help or
hold; as hands they are the producers of his sudden success--as
hedge-trimmer, dog-clipper, barber. A number of sexual double-entendres
rotate around Edward's hands, as the women in the neighborhood fantasize
about their erotic possibilities:

Joyce:
Oooh. Completely different.
Neighbor 1:
No kidding.
Neighbor 2:
He's so...
Neighbor 3:
Mysterious.
Joyce:
Do you imagine those hands are hot or cold? And just
think about what a single snip could do...
Neighbor 1:
Or undo

The men, for their part, are equally unnerved about Edward's hands, but
their uneasiness is translated into humor: "Whoa, that's a heck of a
handshake you got there, Ed." One elderly male barbecue-goer does confide
in Edward, however: "I have my own infirmity. Never did me a bit of harm.
Took some shrapnel during the war, and ever since then, I can't feel a
thing. Not a damn thing. Listen--don't let anyone ever tell you you have a
handicap." Edward is drawn out of this conversation, though, by Joyce and
the other women, who line up to feed him mouthfuls of "Ambrosia salad" and
other earthly delights. Their feeding marks the ineptitude of Edward's
hands (at that point employed as shishkebabs), as also their maternal and
sexual interest in his body.

The Fabricated Body

Professor:
And you really believe that you can bring life to the dead?
Henry Frankenstein:
That body is not dead. It has never lived. I created it. I made
it with my own hands from the bodies I took from graves,
from the gallows, anywhere...

14.From its inception, the Gothic has posited and reproduced a legion of
partial, disjointed, or decomposed body parts, which by their very
existence accuse the waking world of a fundamental illegitimacy. The
giant, disembodied hand whose mysterious appearance in Walpole's Castle of
Otranto (1761) gives the lie to Prince Manfred's claims of nobility; the
detachable hand that horrifies Sir Bertrand in Anna Barbauld's "Sir
Bertrand" (1792); the severed hand that establishes the guilt of its
former owner in Mary-Anne Radcliffe's Manfrone (1828)--function as the
organs- partial-objects which disclose the founding aporia of the socius.
The old man's blind eye, and the relentless beating of his disembodied
heart, speak the j'accuse of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," as does the
barrage of ventriloquized voices in Wieland; it ceases to matter whether
they are "real" or "hallucinatory," they are real enough to drive
rationality into madness.

15.Something still more deeply terrifying takes place when, as in
Frankenstein, these body parts are assembled to form the unwhole-y whole
of the monstrous body. The horror and revulsion of this body is its
disjunction--its organs have been separately acquired from a shadowy
contingent of cadavers, then sewed back together in such a way that the
stitch-marks show. The stitches in the makeup for Boris Karloff's early
film personation of Frankenstein terrify because they disclose the
stitches within ourselves, the "dissolving sutures" that transgress our
own body, inasmuch as it traverses the amorphous plane of the Body without
Organs. This "BwO," as it is often abbreviated, is a kind of anti-body, a
repository of the not-body; organs cling to it as parasites or (in Deleuze
and Guattari's own metaphor) "like medals jingling on the chest of a
wrestler." The Oedipal, familial, oral-anal organization that has been
imposed on the body exacts a terrific price--its price is no less than the
BwO, whose desire will never be eaten by a mouth or contained by an anus.

16.The fabricated body of the Gothic is also a shadow of the terror of
libidinal organization; it is positioned between the Oedipalized body with
its territorialized zones and the zoneless BwO. Existing partly in both
worlds, it is a threat to both, as well as a loving secret; no one who has
kissed a lover's scar can deny it. Every scar is potentially a mouth or an
anus, or both--a kind of opening unmarked by libidinal fascisms. The
fabricated body, covered with scars, is an erotic feast as well as a
terror (that is, a tearer) of flesh. Edward's facial scars are
self-inflicted, "accidental"--and yet Peg Boggs spends the better part of
Edward's suburban sojourn trying to find the particular admixture of
cosmetics which will conceal them. "We'll cover up the scars and start
with a completely smooth surface," Peg muses at one point, but her efforts
result only in a gooey paste that makes Edward look worse than ever.

17.Peg's desire to smooth Edward's scars thus can be read not only as a
desire to erase the terror of Edward's hands but as reaction against the
horror that Edward's entire body is an assemblage, a mass of sutures, a
fabricated and anti-Oedipal anti-territory. We can see this not only
through Edward's leather armor (or is it his skin?), which jangles with
studs and metal buckles, but through the scene staged as "The Etiquette
Lesson." Here Edward, lying in bed, thinks back to the impossible moment
of his assemblage. As the camera pans around the room in the opening shot,
we hear the Inventor's voice declaiming a lecture on etiquette: "Should
the man rise when he accepts his cup of tea?" The camera pans past an
oversize book, its pages turned by a sudden breeze; at the word "man" we
see Edward's bodily development. In the early sketches he resembles others
of the inventor's robots, with an egg-like torso and a spherical head; in
later drawings arms are attached, and the torso is filled out; the face is
given features, the arms a more hominid form. Like the Inventor's other
creatures, Edward is held together by a series of belts--figurations, like
Frankenstein's scars, of his body's partiality. We see the addition of the
scissor hands, and their (unfulfilled) replacement by human ones.

18.When the camera arrives at Edward, we see that he is not yet himself
assembled; his torso and head rest on a kind of workbench, with arms and
legs lying laid nearby. At length the Inventor closes the book of
etiquette, proclaiming it "boring," and opens a book of poems (which turn
out to be limericks). In a voice of mock-solemnity, he intones

There was an old man from the Cape
Who made himself garments of crepe.
When asked, "Will they tear?"
He replied, "Here and there,
But they keep such a beautiful shape."

The "clothing of crepe" (pre)figures Edward's own fragile skin, the
fragility of the Inventor's wrinkled skin, the fragility of his body and
bodies in general. Edward, not yet bodied himself, smiles tentatively, and
the Inventor parentally intones "That's right. Go ahead, smile. It's
funny!" Yet the paradox here is that the inventor himself is both more and
less than a parent, and Edward more and less than a child. Edward truly
possesses language before he possesses a body, and as a result he can
consciously inhabit zones which others will only know in dreams--and ("on
the other hand") he can make mistakes no human child would make. To be
born, and to grow, in an Oedipalized family is one thing--and to be built,
to come into being partially whole and yet wholly partial, is another.
Edward's inception is not a conjunction but a disjunction, as the planned
hands are broken and lost (they shatter upon impact) and he remains not
incomplete but unfinished.

19.Edward's secrets--that no amount of make-up will cover our scars, that
the libido has nothing to do with families and everything to do with
society at large (economics, houses, hedges, malls, talkshows, food), that
our own sanity has been purchased as the result of a kind of extortion or
holding-hostage of our bodies--are, in the end, too much to bear. Jim, as
the quintessential fascist, wants him out: "You destroy everything you
touch!" he yells. Kim, moved by the uncanny recognition that her home is
not her home, her parents are not her parents, her boyfriend is not her
boyfriend, alone knows and moves to Edward's side. But she cannot remain,
not at least if this film is to have something we could call an ending,
something that can re-contain just enough of the terror it discloses so
that we can all go back home to our waterbeds and sleep in peace.

Edward Is Dead: Long Live Edward

20.Many film critics, such as Pauline Kael, have faulted Edward
Scissorhands for what they see as its maudlin sensibility (Kael calls it
"Frankenstein's monster by way of L. Frank Baum")6 or its melodramatic
denouement. All this assumes, of course, that some generic codes have been
violated, or at least that the audience has somehow been led to expect
some other kind of ending. Leaving aside the fact that the Gothic itself
is historically an outgrowth of the sentimental, there is no reason to
expect that the drama at work in this film be univocal, even at the start
(something which is signalled immediately in the juxtaposition of suburban
tract homes and gothic castle). I would argue indeed that several filmic
machines are at work here, each with its own imperatives: the Gothic
Romance (as in Wuthering Heights--storm-crossed lovers against the world
of social conventions), the Dark Hero genre (this was after all the film
Tim Burton made immediately after Batman), the Adolescent Horror Carrie),
not to mention the sensitive-creature-from-another-world (long before
E.T., there was The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Revenge of the
Creature (1955)).

21.Yet the strongest narrative underlying Edward Scissorhands, as I have
suggested above, is clearly that of the filmic Frankenstein. And, as the
inheritor of that tradition, Edward is driven to re-enact--albeit with
many suggestive differences--the inexorable expulsion and persecution of
the monstrous. The scene is so familiar as to be a cliche; all one needs
is a few dozen "peasants" armed with torches storming the door of some
castle. Yet Burton's film displaces that cliche by rendering ambiguous any
comfortable distances of time, place, or social class-- in the process
indicting the very audiences most likely to view his film. Indeed, by
taking Edward out of the mansion and into the suburbs Burton re-enacts the
history of the Gothic; "Mrs. Radcliffe" (of Udolpho) moves in next door to
"Mrs. Smith" (of Mrs. Smith's Pies), and it turns out they have known each
other all along.

22.In the commodity-fetishism of Burton's suburbs, chronology is
deliberately scrambled, such that commodities, like the clip-art cutouts
of postmodern collages, drift about in their own free play of
signification. 90s appliances, such as CD players, exist side-by-side with
50s fixtures such as boomerang tables and lava lamps; the parents are from
60s sitcoms but the kids are from 21 Jump Street. The cars--at least
those we see up-close--are of early-70s vintage, as are the houses seen in
exterior shots. Yet even here, the pastel coloration--one might even say,
colorization--of these houses refuses a simplistic mimesis. Like Andy
Warhol's brightly colored silkscreens of Mao Tse-Tung or Marilyn Monroe,
these houses are in effect coloring-book reproductions whose hyperveracity
gives the lie to realism. The final effect is a kind of timeless time, a
place without chronology or geography--in short, the suburbs as seen by
those whose lives remained somehow untransgressed by history.

23.Yet the apparent smoothness of this untrammelled suburban territory
belies the alienation--both of others and of itself--which is the founding
ethos of the suburbs. In her recent study, Belonging in America: Reading
Between the Lines, Constance Perin argues that one thing that suburbia
U.S.A. has always done, and done well, is to stare at, ostracize,
alienate, and expel those (re)marked as different.7 The modalities of
suburban demonization indeed seem to follow remarkably similar patterns,
whether the person so demonized is a newcomer, a retiree, a "handicapped"
person, or as someone "just passing through." Edward, while initially
welcomed almost manically, is soon regarded with deep suspicion,
especially after the break-in at Jim's parents' house; by serving as the
scapegoat for this crime, Edward marks both himself and his adoptive
"family" as outcasts.

24.It is Kim's boyfriend Jim who proves to be the ultimate local agent of
this suburban fascism, just as he is the ultimate Oedipal subject. Jim's
father keeps his electronic toys in a locked room outfitted with
state-of-the-art burglar alarms; as Jim himself says in a dinnertable jab,
"they keep things pretty much locked up. My father has his own room for
his stuff to make sure I can't get any use of it." For "when the family
ceases to be a unit of production and of reproduction . . . it is
father-mother that we consume"8:

Kim:
But that's breaking and entering!
Jim:
Look, my parents have insurance up the rear, okay?
What'll it cost 'em--a little hassle? That's about it. A
week and my dad'll have a new and better everything.
Kim:
We can't!
Jim:
Look, there's a guy who'll give us cash for this stuff!
Kim:
Jim, I don't want to.
Jim:
What--you don't want us to have our own van like
Denny's when we could be all by ourselves whenever
we like? Huh? With a mattress in the back?
Kim:
Well, why can't you just do it?
Jim:
Because my father keeps the damn room locked. We
need Edward to get in. vKim:
Well, can't you take the key, like, when he's sleeping
or something?
Jim:
You don't understand. The only thing he holds on to
tighter is his dick.
Kim:
huhm...
Jim:
C'mon, Kim. Razor Blades'll do anything for you!
Kim:
That's not true!
Jim:
Oh no? Why don't you ask him?

25.In the end, Edward performs this sacrifice for Kim, whom he has loved
from the moment he sees her face in the mandatory assemblage of family
photographs (all families are simulacra, D&G might say) that adorns Peg's
mantelpiece.9 And yet Kim does not know until some time later that Edward
knew all along that the house they were breaking into was Jim's, and that
he knowingly committed this crime for her. When she finally learns the
truth, she recognizes at once what Bataille might call the sovereign
abandon of Edward's gesture and despises Jim. Jim's recognition of Kim's
rejection sets off his maniacal determination to destroy Edward, even if
he can only alienate Kim further by doing so. Thus, in a classically
gothic denouement, Kim's shift of love and allegiance exposes the
inhumanity of the "human" and the humanity of the "inhuman."

26.Yet there is something more here, something beyond a mere farce of the
Oedipal drama. In schizoanalytic terms, Edward has not merely broken the
Oedipal equation, he has short-circuited it. Edward, like Frankenstein's
monster in the 1931 film, is somehow allied to electricity; asked by the
talk-show host about whether he has a girlfriend, Edward touches the
microphone stand with his hand, grounding it out and spraying sparks all
over the stage. Now, having taken for a moment Jim's place in the Oedipal
chain, he draws its flow outward, away from the nuclear family; he grounds
it out, unbinding its libidinal cathexes. Edward does not simply castrate
(one knife would be sufficient for that--why have ten?), he unhinges all
organs from their Oedipal affixations, he pulls the surface of the Body
Without Organs taut, turning velcro into teflon. The Oedipal crisis is
itself placed in crisis; its "undoing" turns out not to be castration
after all, but indifference.

27.Jim, left not only without the phallus but without recourse to the
Oedipal narrative which offered his only prospect of ever claiming it, is
thrown into a frenzied spiral of jealousy. He is activated, as it were, as
the community's agent to expel the intruder who has threatened its
libidinal and social borders. No one is willing to throw Edward out, but
no one is willing to stop Jim from throwing him out. The local policeman,
suggestively, is on Edward's side, giving an undertone of the many films
of the 50s which implicitly or explicitly took up the question of
unpopular justice (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird), in the place of what he
regards as an imaginary threat, he drives to the mansion's gate and fires
his revolver into the air, telling the neighbors that "it's over" and that
they "can all go home now." But where is "home"? Jim's not there, wherever
it is; even as Edward is running, slicing off the clothes he wore during
his stay at the Boggs's, Jim is swigging Jack Daniel's in the back of his
friend's van, getting his "courage" up for the inevitable confrontation.

28.While following the conventions to a point, the final scenes of the
film offer a subtle yet crucial set of differences--differences which, as
in other parts of the film, initiate slippages that belie their apparent
conventionality. Edward flees to his "castle," with Kim and Jim right
behind him; the suburban "peasants" are held in reserve. Jim sets about
killing Edward with mock-Eastwood machismo, first with a gun, and (when
that fails) by breaking beams over his back. Kim intervenes, and ends up
atop the prostrate Edward; in one uncanny moment she grasps Edward's hand
and menaces Jim with it. When Edward and Jim face off a moment later, it
seems that Kim has finally given Edward the cue for what he must do, as he
snips the thin-spun life out of Jim's chest with a single thrust of a
finger. Locked out of his parents' Oedipal sanctum, and superseded by
Edward in Kim's affections, Jim dies quickly and easily--as Deleuze and
Guattari say, "4, 3, 2, 1, 0-- Oedipus is a race for death."10 His body,
discovered below the window, does not even hold enough interest to make
the neighbors linger. What the neighbors want is Edward, and Kim gives
"him" to them; descending the stairs, she seizes upon one of the
inventor's discarded alternate hands. "He's dead," she proclaims to the
neighbors, waving the hand aloft: "See?"

29.This disembodied hand, of course, is no guarantee, but it is readily
taken as one by the assembled crowd. One thinks for a strange moment about
Freddie Kruger's bladed glove in Nightmare on Elm Street; while the glove
itself may be removed and hidden in the basement, it doesn't prevent
Freddie from coming back (not only in that film, but in a long string of
lucrative sequels). Yet the horror of Edward Scissorhands is a veritable
antipodes to Elm Street and its sequels. Its ethic is not the fear of the
nightmare Other, but a realization that in expelling otherness is born
self-alienation, an alienation which Edward and his hands disclose, and
the crisis of adolescence understands, but the more thoroughly Oedipalized
adults have forgotten, plowed under, surrounded hedges and fences. Oh
keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men / Or with his nails he'll dig
it up again!

30.And so the film closes in upon itself, even though closure is not quite
what it offers. We pan back again from Edward's house, and into the window
of the room where Kim, now white-haired, sits recounting the tale of
Edward to her granddaughter. One wonders aloud: and what was her history,
the history of some other love, that has descended into this young girl
who sits under a heavy coverlet listening to her grandmother's tale. And
the difference: "You see, before he came down, it never snowed . . . but
now, it does." The snow, the flurry of ice-flakes, turns out to be the
detritus from Edward's relentless sculpting, a statement of love via
surreality and excess, even as Edward effectively is pushed back into a
mythic realm, to the status of a kind of local sky-god. A fairy tale after
all--or is it? In some strange way, the frame-narrative is unable to quite
contain Edward-- he is neither killed in the manner of Frankenstein's
monster, nor saved (like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast). Kim
pronounces what ought in the circumstances to be the magic words: "I love
you"--and yet nothing happens. Edward remains untransformed and
unassimilated; his ice sculptures freeze time, and in them Kim remains a
young woman dancing in the snow. Immaculate in their lifelessness, these
figures of ice themselves constitute a kind of machine, a memory palace,
where Edward is not the fabricated but the fabricator. From the shreds of
these fabrications, snow descends on us all, the snow of our doing--and
undoing.

Dept. of English
Colby College
<rapo...@colby.edu>

Copyright 1992 Russell A. Potter

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Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. by Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lee. (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1983), 2.

2. Anti-Oedipus, 2.

3. John Milton, "Lycidas," lines 75-6, in The Complete Poetry of
John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday,
1971), 160.

4. Horace Walpole, letter to William Cole (March 9, 1765), qtd. in
The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger
Abbey, ed. Andrew Wright (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1963), xi.

5. See for example Donavan's Brain (1953), in which the brain of
a dead millionaire keeps a scientist chained to its will; The Man
Without a Body (1958), in which a man's talking head is kept
artificially alive; The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1959), where a man
preserves his dead wife's head in a pan of nutrient solution, and
embarks on a quest for a body to attach to it--or more recently the
well-known Star Trek episode where Mr. Spock's brain is stolen
and wired into a planet-regulating computer network.

6. See Pauline Kael, "The Current Cinema: New Age Daydreams."
The New Yorker vol. 66 no. 44 (Dec. 17, 1990): 115-121.

7. See the suggestive chapters "Penalizing Newcomers," "Tattling on
Neighbors," and "Imperfect People," all in Belonging in America:
Reading Between the Lines (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988).

8. Anti-Oedipus, 265.

9. Edward's own schizo assemblage (which significantly is not on
the mantelpiece but in the fireplace) consists of newspaper
clippings
with headlines such as "BOY BORN WITHOUT EYES READS
WITH HIS HANDS," "I'LL NEVER DIET AGAIN," and
"NEWLYWEDS, 90 & . . . TO HAVE A BABY"--an
anti-Oedipal anti-family whose membership is open only to those
(re)marked as singular.

10. Anti-Oedipus, 359.

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