A Note on Tim Burton's Vincent

Tim Burton’s Vincent

“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted — nevermore”!

The woman from The Yellow Wallpaper had been pushed into isolation like a “madwoman in the attic” and finally lost herself in the labyrinths of her own mind. Tim Burton’s short film, Vincent, ends with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” that ominously reminds me of this very woman and many others, who belong to the ilk of tortured artists— constantly misunderstood and ridiculed. They are forced to either conform or always feel alienated from society.

Vincent Malloy, a child of seven, is bombarded by his own macabre imagination that makes him, melodramatically, fall into a state of despair and helplessness when his mother asks him to go out and play (when all he wants to do is to weave an alternate reality for himself). In a constant state of excited and fanciful preoccupations, Vincent likes to live in a world of stories of the likes of Edgar Allan Poe’s. Although, it may all be a matter of fun for a child to play-act in such a manner when they do not want to do what their mother wants them to do —a sort of throwing a temper tantrum— it cannot be ignored that Tim Burton’s Vincent is not just a nursery rhyme. The exaggerated horror scenes cooked up by an overactive imagination of a child and his histrionic gestures do tend to overturn the grotesqueness of the situation into something comical. At the same time, there is a lingering sense that Vincent is anxious about having to compromise with his creative faculties in order to fit in. It is when your reality is inhospitable to the free flow of imagination that that imagination becomes your own gilded cage while it also incessantly plagues your conscience to break-out. For this very reason, Vincent stands as a symbol of artistic imagination, which has to constantly contest with reality and the normative to survive and express itself.

I believe that artists tend to let themselves be the subject of their chosen form of art, however inconspicuously and unwittingly. Thus, imagination also serves as an outlet for overwhelming and sometimes, debilitating emotions. In this respect, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, John Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, William Wordsworth's The Prologue, etc., form a canon of their own. Vincent also occupies this delicate space between the enervating struggle and the rebellion. In the end, either Vincent could fall into the trap of “the yellow wallpaper”, or he could become like his creator, Tim Burton.