Theater Review: Edward Scissorhands

Edward Scissorhands
Directed by Matthew Bourne
Ahmanson Theater
December 12 -- 31, 2006

Edward Scissorhands is a flawed hero with immense gifts, destined to be destroyed, born of the mourning of a father for his dead child. He is somehow alive, equipped with a heart as large and clumsy as the large blades that hang from what presumably are the knobs of his arms. We all know the 1990 film. Edward is brought out of his seclusion by an Avon lady, he transforms and inspires the suburbs, and eventually must flee back into hiding, having had to kill as to not be killed and having been cast out by those that should of embraced and learned from him.

In the hands of Tim Burton and Caroline Thompson, the story of Edward was a rare achievement -- a timely critique of society with many layers of intense emotion affectation not through irony as much as much as ancient myth and tragedy. Now, Matthew Bourne, famous for his daring recreations in dance of Swan Lake and other classics, offers another version at the Ahmanson Theater, turning the coded dance of life, with its flourishes and falls, on the fringes of cities into a literal dance on stage.

In both versions, an elderly woman named Kim Boggs tells us Edward’s story. In her youth, she was a normal girl, well liked and admired. She was a cheerleader and a member of the popular crowd. She dated a handsome jock. But what she thinks of later in life was not of any of these things but of Edward, an unconventional, immensely talented freak that was in love with her. Early in her life, he appeared to her as a prophet of beauty that she was not yet ready to handle, and that her simple, deplorable life was incapable of embracing.

Using a narrator is a powerful device. In Bourne’s case, it is less the telling of the narrator we are concerned with, but more the use of her eyes, a vision distorted and made fanciful by the wages of memory and self-delusion. With Bourne’s new production, we get a new voice, a new Kim, but this voice has a dangerous effect on Burton’s story and undermines much of its original resonance. We see Bourne’s Kim at both the beginning and the end of the production as with Burton’s film, but the clarity of her voice and memory alter Burton’s original story, not particularly its incidents, but with its mood and its ultimate resolve.

As the original story is told, Burton gave us a story of the romantic and physical revenge of a sensitive underdog against the popular crowd. Long after Edward has faded away into the his father’s castle, Kim pines for him, remembering the joys he brought and regretting the way she treated him. In a head to head battle against Kim’s jock boyfriend at the end of the film, Edward wins – he uses the instrument of his art, his scissors, to impale Kim’s insensitive meathead. Kim could not see Edward’s love at the time. Edward flees the world and, as in most artist myths, finds a way to enhance the world while not being actually involved with it – showering the matted, pale boredom of ordinary life with layers of snow from his ice sculpting.

In Burton’s film, Kim’s memory is less culinary and indulgent than in Bourne’s vision. Through the Cheryl Carasik's set decoration's arrangment of the housing development into perfect plots, Kim’s pastel coated memories washed the very thickness out of the houses, the walls become fragile and the fences not posted deep. The washing of her memory becomes a metaphor for the type of life that eventually kills Edward. The sets seem familiar, and the clothing worn by characters, though dated, seem very contemporary. You could see Burton’s Kim as one of the generation that came of age in the early nineties, and her future is our future.

Bourne’s version, equipped with a different and often more powerful medium in theater and dance, reveals the scenes of Kim’s memory for what they actually are, taking Burton’s beautiful sets a step further into the use of veils. Bourne’s set has the feel of memory, allowing some recollections depth and other mere surface. The world is more distant, firmly in the late fifties and early sixties complete with Jackie O clothing and Leave it to Beaver charm. The veils, literally hanging from the ceiling, are both beautiful as well as delusory. They are the thin veils of living, of comfort, of comparison to our neighbors of a time lost, of the American innocence that still layers some minds over and plumbs our collective psyche of the ultimate blame we that must assign ourselves to be honest. In a way, Bourne’s version is perhaps more true, maybe we never see our horrors and never reconcile with the hurt we give others.

(Warning: Possible Spoiler)

The problem with Bourne’s version, however, is that he turns Kim into a sentimental optimist instead of an Burton’s old lady on the path to wisdom, a person who saw that her actions had an effect on others, that it turned away the only person who could have changed her path. This is the wisdom of the twilight. Bourne’s Kim only has only the musing of a midday dream. Bourne’s Kim turns Edwards into an apparition, a fleeting beauty instead of what Burton mandated for Edward, that he be a real person, capable of real pain. More importantly in Burton’s Film, Edward is able to be really hurt, he is able to ultimately retire into his castle – his snow tumbling down on a snowless plain a symbol of beauty but also that beauty again must be born out of mourning.

Edward Scissorhands, in Burton’s version, remains incredibly poignant not because of its contemporary symbols (actually the goth look of Edward now feels quite dated) but because the story is an update of various tragedies and myths. The most notable and the oldest is the story of the Greek God Hephaestos, who fell from Mount Olympus and ended up bringing man the skills they needed to build civilization. Edward and Hephaestos are very similar. Both are lame in the eyes of society yet bring the gifts that enable society to actualize its potential. Edward brings fresh innovations and dazzling effect to ordinary things like hairstyles, hedge trimming, and dog grooming. He becomes famous for this, a media darling. Like Hephaestos, he was sought for his skills by both the ordinary and the heroic.

But the gifts of God to man are rough gifts. They are looked upon with envy and allow humans a power that they can’t control. They open the repressed creativity and gifts of people that have repressed them. For this reason, when looking to Edward Scissorhands, we also think of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, civilization paying the price for its own power. At the moment that the community is at its flourishing, its hedges spectacular and its hairstyles on the cutting edge, that it becomes capable of its most horrible acts. It represses and kills again that which it revived in itself. Remember, modernism was at its ultimate power and optimism for the future when it created two world wars and the holocaust.

The Bourne version, though Bourne is British like Burton, is more Americanized than Burton’s version. Kim the narrator caricatures her past, putting all the characters into safe categories like the good wife, the tramp, the politician, and, what seems to be the motivating factor in Bourne’s version, the religious. In Burton’s film, religion was present in the presence of a character which was half witch, half Christian. She attempted to rouse and eventually helped provoke, but could hardly be the full cause of Edward’s downfall. In Bourne’s version, religion is both incendiary and an explanatory factor in the eventual departure of Edward’s spirit.

The point is that people do not need religion to kill, and Burton knew this. Therefore, the opera of Edward’s death in the film is a tragedy which damns every suburban inhabitant whether they could see it or not. In doing this, Burton’s film is not merely a reprise of thematic elements of Greek drama, but relies on its structure as well -- the fall of the hero, the downfall of the great and powerful person. Kim Boggs, the cheerleader and the perfect would be hero, reveals her inherent lack of resolve and belief. She does not die, but sends Edward the beautiful artist away. Her regret as narrator shows her understanding of her moral failing, her inability to match her image in society to the correct path of action.

The Bourne version, on the other hand, ultimately lets Kim and, since they are not as popular or revered as her, the Suburbanites off for their crimes. By having Edward evaporate at the end of the dance kills the emotional impact of the production because Edward ceases to be what he had to be all along, a real person capable of being harmed. Bourne’s version is much more gilded with pleasure, more candyland than Goth. Edward gets lost in it.