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Ed Wood
7:26 AM
THE PARADOX OF TRANSVESTISM IN TIM BURTON’S ED WOOD
DEBORAH MELLAMPHY
Abstract: Tim Burton’s quasi-biopic Ed Wood (1994) features Johnny Depp as a transvestite that does not conform to any established conventions and who disrupts fundamental binarisms about basic human nature and identity. The image of Wood/Depp dressed in an angora sweater, blouse, skirt, tights, heels, wig and make-up is highly comical but it also undermines gender definitions and subverts the status quo. Such a confusing amalgamation of opposing gender signifiers disrupts the highly regulated semiotic system of clothing, constructing and equally deconstructing gender and gender differentiation. The divergent theoretical standpoints of Marjorie Garber and Robert Stoller are useful in illustrating the slippery nature of gender and what the transvestite signifies in Ed Wood. Garber argues that the transvestite is an important site of cultural anxiety disturbing the assigned sartorial boundaries between “male” and “female”, thus exposing the artificiality of the assigned social and cultural paradigms that clothing signifies. Stoller’s understanding of gender is quite the opposite to Garber’s, as he places an emphasis on the “real” sex of the cross-dressed individual and rejects the theory that transvestism, drag or cross-dressing can alter one’s original gender. For Stoller, gender cannot be transcended and for the male transvestite wearing feminine clothes allows him to reinforce sexual difference, thereby paradoxically emphasising his masculine identity: The image of Depp in this role equally conforms to both of these arguments whilst also dismissing them. This article also consider Depp’s star persona, as his feminine face and lean body connotating androgyny.
Read Full Essay:http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/19/22
Title Analysis: Ed Wood
This article is an adaptation of a paper I wrote in 2007 as an undergraduate at UC Irvine. Screencaptures are my own. Critical analysis is original, except where cited from other sources.
Film: Ed Wood
Director: Tim Burton
Title Designers: Robert Dawson and Paul Boyington
It is impossible to speak of the title sequence of Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994) without referencing the films of the man himself, director Edward D. Wood, Jr. Burton’s film explicitly lifts images, themes and other visual signifiers from Wood’s films and inserts them into the biographical narrative of Wood’s life. The most condensed set of referential symbols is in the credit sequence wherein objects and people that reoccur several times in the film are introduced. Most of these signifiers first appeared in Ed Wood’s opus from Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), which is the film Burton uses in the climax of Ed Wood.
Therefore, there are three levels of what Robert Stam calls “transtextuality…all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts” (Stam, 207). These are intertextuality, paratextuality, and metatextuality, all which work in relation to the three stages of the film: the title sequence, the making of the films-with-a-film, and the screening of the films-within-a-film. The title sequences sets the tone of the picture in its explicit citations of Ed Woodian tropes. The sequence works within the generic conventions of Ed Wood’s films: horror, science fiction, and melodrama but tweaks the generic formula slightly in its conscious use of humor, whereas the humor in the films of Ed Wood is unintentional.
Howard Shore’s soundtrack is also a metatextual reference, in that it uses electronic instruments like the theremin and the ondes Martenot to evoke a weird tone that calls to mind the otherworldly outer space of '50s sci-fi films. Although Ed Wood never had the budget for original music, the theremin was popular in science fiction film and television shows in the 1950s, the period in which Ed worked. The blending of sci-fi music and horror movie standards like wolf cries and dark, foreboding tones, helps to set the tone for films that deal in those genres. Shore's score is both serious and winking in its quotations of Wood's work. The score at once justifies the legitimacy of Wood's films and pokes fun at their camp appeal, using more lighthearted musical instruments like bongos to signal that Ed Wood, unlike the films of Ed Wood, is conscious of its comedy.
Director Tim Burton says that he and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski set out to capture “the flavor of Ed Wood, but not be Ed Wood, exactly” (DVD Audio Commentary). Burton notes that all Ed Wood films feature symbols of Ed’s personality embedded in filmic genre convention. There is a through-line across Wood’s work that makes an Ed Wood film instantly recognizable. Burton plays with these signs and symbols in the title sequence, which moves from different tableaus prominent in the Wood films featured in Burton’s film. The gothic haunted house is fromBride of the Monster (1955), Criswell's introduction and the headstone credits are from Plan 9, and the lightning motif is present in both films. Alexander and Karaszewski comment that all the symbols and characters in the film must have immediately “iconographic importance,” and shorthand for the introduction of key themes and tropes within the narrative (DVD Audio Commentary). This is exactly what the title sequence designed by Robert Dawson and Paul Boyington does. The tone of the film straddles the space between comedy and drama while adapting elements of Wood’s generic tableau, which is evident in the mixing of genre archetypes in the opening titles.
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