Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976)

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Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)

"Do you think I’ve gone round-the-bend?"
“I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, off-your head. But I’ll tell you a secret, all the best people are.”

Some of the opening lines of Alice in Wonderland seem to sum up both the film and its creators perfectly. Released in 2010, Alice in Wonderland takes on a new plot thanks to screenwriter Linda Woolverton. But Tim Burton treats the tale as his own. Complete with his whimsical artistic aesthetic, Alice and Wonderland may not be a strong enough film to stand on its own but fits perfectly into Burton’s catalog of films.

The film is set in English Victorian times, with elaborate and fantastic costumes; the “real world” outside of wonderland appears to be a scene out of Brideshead Revisited. Thanks to Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, the classic tan and pale blue Victorian corsets and petticoats are just as elaborate as the costumes seen in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. In fact, Alice in Wonderland draws on a similar theme – suppressed teenagers within a suppressive aristocratic world – as Marie Antoinette. Uncomfortable with and scornful of anything proper, Alice (played by Mia Waskikowska) wants out of everything relating to arranged marriages and extreme Victorian societal norms. She is an outsider, a Socratic rebel to say the least, always being reminded by others of her place in this world. “I was thinking what it would be like to fly,” Alice says during a posh English party. “Why would you waste your time thinking of impossible things?” exclaims her soon-to-be fiancé.

As we’ve seen in Heathers and Mean Girls, angsty teenage characters are often desperate to escape their own lives. When they finally do, they realize they are just as unhappy as they were before. Alice feels unfulfilled in Wonderland, where her role is set as the slayer of the Jabberwock in order to return peace to Wonderland. Like Veronica, JD, and Cady Heron, it is only at the end of this film that Alice discovers it isn’t where you are that determines whether you’re feeling content and happy despite outside influences and social norms.

Alice in Wonderland finds Burton continuing his exploration of a number of themes and cinematic styles that have become so closely associated with him. The film sheds light on why Burton maybe is one of the great film auteurs of our generation. What Alfred Hitchcock was to the Baby Boomer generation, Burton is to us, the dreamers and people of the XYZ generation. Auteurs like Hitchcock and François Truffaut stuck to what they knew best and rarely ventured outside a film genre. Hitchcock stuck to suspense, thrill, and aloof females. With Burton it’s a somewhat similar story, but instead of suspense there’s animation and this haunting obscure quality to the plot and characters. What Hitchcock achieved with films, such as Vertigo and Psycho, was this amazing feeling of suspense and thrill. With Burton, the audience is thrown into this dream-like world, escaping the somewhat violent and media-frenzy world we experience today. If anything Alice in Wonderland reaffirms Burton's consistent theme of parallel universes. Alice falls down a hole into Wonderland, just as Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas travels through a set of doors in the depth of the words into a universe of Christmas. Or as Victor Van Dort in Corpse Bride travels through this mystical and supernatural portal into the realm of the living dead. Or as Leo Davidson slips through time to a planet of the apes.

What Tim Burton conveys in his films, such as Alice in Wonderland, is an escape from reality into a universe of the wonderful and unthinkable, the impossible even. And sometimes, you need to think a few impossible things. Maybe even before breakfast.

Liz Rossman
British Literature II

Michael Lehmann's Heathers (1989)

Heathers is the first movie that Film Club has shown twice in eight years. Is it the best movie we’ve shown such that it bears repeating? Not necessarily – we think that honor would go to Cidade de Deus (City of God) – but Heathers fits neatly into this year’s theme, The Movies Go to High School, as it did eight years ago, when the theme was Adolescence on Film. And it is an excellent film.

You wouldn’t know it from the box office receipts. Heathers bombed when it opened in 1988, only earning roughly a million dollars (that’s about two million today). Compare that to Mean Girls which earned almost 130 million worldwide in 2004. So what accounts for the continued interest and screenings of Heathers? We would argue that it is a product of its satirical approach to its subject – conformity and cliquishness in the American high school.

If you’re not familiar with the nature of satire, it goes like this. Satire is a literary form that mocks, ridicules, or shames the behaviors – foolish, greedy, misguidedly earnest, or otherwise – of people who have power over us and carries that criticism to the society that allows it as well. English teachers often point to Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the writer suggested, in the 18th century, that the Irish might solve their economic and domestic difficulties if they simply sold their kids to rich people as food. No, he wasn’t serious; he was mocking people’s insensitivity to the impoverished and the ineffective Irish policies that exacerbated the situation.

Heathers takes on a less national political issue and instead focuses on the politics of social groupings within the high school community. In this way, it is very much like Mean Girls, except that because it was made 16 years earlier, we have to say that  Mean Girls  is a lot like Heathers. Whereas Mean Girls exhibits a relatively tame satire, though, Heathers pulls no punches. The Heathers, a triumvirate of social queen bees, is the equivalent of Girls’ Plastics, but not all of them will survive the movie. Mean Girls jokes about killing off the Plastics; Heathers actually does it. And a couple jocks, to boot. And while  Mean Girls attacks cliquishness per se, Heathers goes after social tyranny, homophobia, and the superficiality of judging people by how they look. So people get murdered, schools get blown up, students promote a national suicide day, and everyone says the F-word a lot. From this we come to understand just how undesirable these behaviors are. Satire, see?

Of course, this makes some viewers uncomfortable. In general, mainstream readers, viewers, and art-goers can be fairly literal minded. Satire, by its nature, is outrageous. If you took Heathers literally, you might conclude that it promotes the murder of adolescent jerks. But we at Film Club believe that you are a discerning and sophisticated movie-goer. We believe you can tell the difference between satire and realism. Just in case, we have a little test for you.

Our cartoon tonight is Chuck Jones’s iconic “Rabbit Seasoning,” in which Daffy Duck tries to distract hunter Elmer Fudd from the fact that it is duck hunting season by convincing him it is rabbit season. Bugs deftly and wittily turns the tables on him at every turn, usually resulting in Daffy getting his bill shot off. If you see this cartoon on TV, it is almost certainly edited; all the seconds of violence (a boom and a cloud of smoke around Daffy’s head, then his bill relocated in a place different from where it should be) gone, and with them the punch-line of most of the jokes. It is UNwatchable. But censors have determined that kids watching the cartoon might misunderstand the violence, that they might determine that it’s “okay” to shoot people. Studies support both sides of the issue – children are affected by constant exposure to violence on TV and in video games; children easily distinguish between “cartoon violence” and the real thing. So there’s your test: which are you?

We feel that both “Rabbit Seasoning” and Heathers ask the audience to think (and both use humor to do so). We’d rather have that than the alternative. So enjoy Heathers, but please don’t kill anyone.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser