Quick thought...

When I say that the name Tim Burton has become a cliché, I’m aware that things are a mite more complicated than that. Sure, saying you were a Tim Burton fan used to mean something; you were a little bit oddball, you had a slightly skewed sense of humour, a fascination with the morbid, the gothic, the unexamined. Recently I attended the Tim Burton Exhibition at Federation Square, Melbourne. The queue awaiting admission in itself was enough to make me sit up and take notice as it was approximately the length of Quetzalcoatl tied to a nine-headed hydra using a printed transcript of the Internet as a rope. I think that was the point at which I really woke up to the reality of what I’m now trying to grapple with. Now we are at the stage where the phrase “It reminds me of Tim Burton”, is thrown around on DeviantArt like a diseased dead cow over a castle parapet and where any non-3D animation that doesn’t resemble a 1930’s Disney cartoon down to the letter is instantly branded with the term. Or so it seems.

To some extent Burton’s work has always simultaneously and somewhat uncomfortably straddled the line between mainstream and sideline pop culture, like an unfortunate rodeo stuntman balanced precariously on twin horses both of which are trying to ride off in opposite directions. What accounts for this, is that thematically much of the director's work parodies the sameness of everyday life in Western society. The exemplar of this, of course, is Edward Scissorhands with its pastel-colour pastiche of American suburbia, but so many of his own drawings and paintings provide a unique perspective on instantly identifiable scenes and figures from everyday life.

Which is of course what makes assigning the label “cliché” as ironic as it is problematic.

Art imitating life? Another overused phrase. Nonetheless, I think there’s a rich vein of humour to be mined in the fact that an artist whose work parodies the mainstream has drifted slowly in the direction of the mainstream after the fact. The same type of twisted irony, in fact, which might well appeal to the maestro himself.