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

Mark Waters' Mean Girls (2004)

The best villains in film do not believe that they are evil. A movie’s “good” and “bad” sides that create conflict are often relative, a complexity that makes both the characters and the movie more enjoyable. Imagine taking on the role of a villain. You can’t think: “My character knows what he (or she) is doing is bad but does it anyway.” That’s not real. The villainous characters must truly think that their side or course of action is the right way.

In Joss Whedon’s film, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog (2008), for example, the main character (played by Neil Patrick Harris) has a goal; he wants to make it into the Evil League of Evil, and he must commit murder for his application to be successful. But watching him, understanding his motives and his goals and his life, the viewer ends up rooting for him. Really. You root for the villain, instead of the hero, because even when he’s doing bad, he believes it’s for the best. And because in understanding that, you have sympathy for him.

In other films, the ones that take a more two-dimensional approach to heroism, villains still exist, but they are not presented in the in-depth way that Dr. Horrible does. We here at Film Club like complex villains. And we think this accounts for some of the most truly evil, but also most amazing, characters of all time: Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight; Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates from Psycho; Edith Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz; and finally, Rachel McAdams’ Regina George from Mean Girls.

But the beauty of Mean Girls is not just in the way that it avoids the cliché “good girl” vs. “mean girl, or the way that the obvious villain, Regina, is portrayed. It’s the way that the true villain is brought out of hiding. Cady, the main character played by Lindsay Lohan, is a perfectly clean slate, a character who the way evil might develop in all of us. Throughout the film,  Cady may start out pure and honest, but as the film progresses she loses her moral balance and an imperfect sense of the line between right and wrong.

At the beginning of the film, Cady doesn’t even know there is a line. As time goes on, she sees where it is, but afterwards, as mean girl events spiral out of control, her view is distorted. Why does this happen? Because the film’s true villain, Regina, distorts Cady’s perception of the world. That’s how evil she is. And Cady’s naiveté and innocence work against her. Yet at no time does Regina throw back her head and laugh evilly – moo-hoo-ha-ha-ha-haaaa! – because she’s not a caricaturish villain; she’s just a girl in high school who likes to be in charge and get others to do things her way.

Cady’s “fall” in her conflict with Regina, doesn’t make her completely evil either. But no longer is she spotless. And, in fact we can see that very few of the characters in Mean Girls are perfect heroes in the madness of high school. And many have mean streaks. Fortunately, there’s no one like that at SPA. Just keep telling yourself: “It’s only a movie!”

Kaia Findlay
Film Club Publicist

Henry Selick's James and the Giant Peach (1996)

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George Dunning's Yellow Submarine (1968)

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Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946)

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Disney's Fantasia (1940)

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Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

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Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

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Brad Bird's The Iron Giant (1999)

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Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993)

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Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

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Dave Fleischer's Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941)

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Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930)

The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg in 1930, is an adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat. It stars the iconic Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola, a cabaret singer, and Emil Jannings, as Immanuel Rath, a teacher at a boy’s Gymnasium.

This film is known for marking the start of the historical Dietrich-Sternberg collaboration, and also being one of the first German films to employ sound. But, this film provides more than just these two milestones.

Lola and Rath are two drastically different characters. Rath embodies austerity while Lola epitomizes liberation. The narration follows the authoritative Rath down his path of self-destruction. The film begins with Rath catching his students looking at risqué photos of Lola Lola, the headliner at the local cabaret The Blue Angel. Rath then goes to the club, in attempt to stop them in the act. Much to his demise, there he meets Lola, the infatuation begins, and his integrity crumbles.

Many look at this film as an allegory for the state of Germany before the first World War – Rath symbolizing Germany’s peremptory disposition and Lola representing the countering force. Rath’s downfall, then, would represent Germany’s ruin. Whether or not this was Sternberg’s intention, The Blue Angel captures the sentiment of the time and the downtroddeness that defeat yields.

Cinematically the dark shadows render a sinister effect, and the characters always seem at the edge of danger. Lola personifies this mood. She embodies a dark exoticism not seen in prior films, an unbridled sexuality not present prior in the cinematic world. Her sexuality, however, is not what makes Lola a compelling character; it is her inaccessibility. She possesses both masculine and feminine traits, passivity and muscle, and her fluctuation between these traits give her power and depth. This energy inspired the femme fatales of the later film noir movement.

Looming danger, sexuality, cultural revival, and the emancipation of women were prevalent in the Weimar Republic, and this film provides a window into the condition of the German state.

This film’s significance, however, does not solely lie in its historical context. It is also an examination of the human psyche. Stemberg uses the relationship between Rath and Lola, and their fluctuating dependence on themselves and society, to question man’s self-reliance. Ultimately he questions whether or not satisfaction can be derived from others, and from the self.

Although this film possesses many cinematographic conventions of the time it still holds poignancy. Stemberg’s use of imagery, jest, and character interplay provide a palpable gateway to the past and a connection to the current cinema

Ella Coon
Film Club Co-President

Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

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