A review of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland
As you many of you know I have grown up with Wonderland in my head. From as far back as I can remember it was Lewis Carroll’s story of an innocent and often naïve Alice encountering a terrifyingly fascinating world of the bizarre that left me in awe of the rabbit holes we could fall into in our own backyards. So I came to Burton’s sequel of Wonderland with some loyalty to Carroll’s original vision and hope that Burton was able to capture the essence of the Wonderland that I fell into as a child. But disappointment ensued; wonderland was a changed world.
In Alice’s return, we found changes that reflect, I would guess not so much Burton’s artistic vision but the limits of Disney’s collective imagination. These limits, I believe, are most strongly influenced by an agenda to appeal to a Judeo-Christian cosmology, of which Carroll’s original wonderland clearly defies. In Disney’s wonderland the absurd is not allowed a place in the plot. The movement counter to reason that perpetuated Carroll’s game of chess is ordered into something that resembles the final battles of good and evil in every epic fantasy that has come before.
Carroll did not seem to fear in his writing of wonderland that the details would bore us. For me, it was the details reasonable and absurd that made the narrative into something comparable to our own lives and dreams. We see in Disney’s tale a wonderland that resembles the land of so many of the fantasy films in the way that the details characteristic of dream life are put aside for a suspenseful battle scene.
Disney introduced war and death to Wonderland. Alice literally has to walk on the heads of those who have been killed by the Red Queen (a character who in Carroll’s tale is but an empty) But Burton has allowed realities that Carroll never intended to inform wonderland and to become the hinges of the plot. The evil of the Red Queen and her Jabberwocky is real in Disney’s wonderland Before all threatening forces were figments of imagination and could be conquered with the mind, but now we are drawn into a battle- one of only two distinct outcomes straying far from the twists and turns of Carol’s original tales that left none dead, but just altered.
The jabberwocky has gone from a force larger than all characters in wonderland (including the Red King and Queen) to a force of domination controlled by the Red Queen who is no longer another character in a long tale of insane figures, but evil in every sense. Disney gave the Jabberwocky weight that was never there making it into a symbol of evil’s work in the world of wonderland. In Carroll’s wonderland, the quest of the game of chess and the glory all seemed inconsequential. The defeat of the Jabberwocky was originally the realization for Alice that the threat of harm was an illusion, a mere manifestation of her own fear. The game of chess was made into a universal struggle, no longer personal for Alice. Her actions, literally having to kill the Jabberwocky now determined the fate of all of wonderland.
Alice goes from being a figure that moves haphazardly through times, sizes and situations with no direction but trying to get home, to being a savior, warrior figure. Wonderland has awaited her return to defeat evil. It was not self knowledge, appreciation of the limits of imagination or the conquering of communities’ collective fears that saw us to the end of Alice’s post-adolescent adventure, but a war that ended in death of the enemy and the casting out of evil into isolation.
It should be no surprise that Disney introduces names and imagery that alludes to the Christian God (are we in Wonderland or Narnia) by naming the once contradictory and confused caterpillar Absalom (from the Hebrew meaning father of peace) and having him play a wisdom figure that transforms and follows Alice back into the world as an ongoing source of wonder and strength into her new capitalist trading adventures with China. Absalom holds the text that knows and predicts the future. The text is sought after as a living document that holds all wisdom and informs the outcome of all of wonderland. From what was Disney trying to save wonderland from? Wonderland in Disney’s eyes waited for Alice’s return with great expectation as the only chosen one (according to Absalom’s text that predicts the future). The parallels are obvious and not ones that Carroll ever intended.
My comparisons here just scrape the surface of the motivations and themes behind the two wonderlands, and they go very deep. It makes me wonder where the next little girl looking into the rabbit holes in her backyard searching for that which could challenge her imagination and match the absurdity of reality will find wonderland.
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