Russell A. Potter

Dept. of English
Colby College
<rapotter@colby.edu>

 

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world . . . while taking a stroll outdoors . . . he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father and a mother . . . .¹
 

–Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

 

A schizophrenic out for a walk . . . thus Deleuze and Guattari frame the peripatetic, or as they would say, the nomadic position of their classic critique of Freud’s Oedipus complex. The world of this schizo subject is profoundly machine-made, “everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines–all of them connected to those of the body.”² And it is in just such a way that Edward Scissorhands, in Tim Burton’s film of the same name, enters the world; left alone and unfinished in the huge gothic mansion of his dead Inventor, not born but built, his only company other dusty machines, filling his days trimming intricate ornamental hedges with his bladed hands. And yet Edward’s own mark is that of the wound, for everything he touches is cut, severed, disjointed. In contrast, down below the mountain on which his mansion stands dwells a sedately postmodern collection of pastel-hued modular homes, each with its nuclear, Oedipal family, its pastel-hued automobile, and its well-watered, neatly manicured lawn.

 

And yet to simply construe Edward Scissorhands as an incarnation of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo would be to do both texts an unwitting violence, for like the prose monolith of the Anti-Oedipus, Edward Scissorhands discloses a cut, a blade, that severs the very narrative and theoretical strands that would seem to hold it together; coming-apart is what they are all about. Just so Milton, in a moment of delirious excess, wrote Comes the blind Fury, with th’ abhorred shears And slits the thin-spun life.³ Edward’s hands, though, are not hands of fury but hands of desire, of a desire that inescapably wounds everything it embraces. In this sense, they might appear to be thoroughly Oedipal hands–if one reads the wound they inflict as the mark of castration. Yet this wound is deeper and wider, it is the social wound which bleeds out the deferred pain of a banalized generation, the stain under the plush beige carpet, the leak in the somnifacient waterbeds of a suburban existence so attenuated that it has become, in Baudrillard’s terms, a mere simulacrum of itself.

 

Television and film, of course, are replete with such plateaus, whether it is in the encapsulated fragments of America’s Funniest Home Videos or in the hyperreal simulations of the “holodeck” on board the starship Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yet Edward Scissorhands stands somehow apart, a strange territory where the passions lost in the kitschy planet of Suburbia U.S.A. are recovered via–what else?–the Gothic. With its visceral excesses, its gargoyles of blood and sensuality, the Gothic offers a perfect compensation for the dead historical machinations of the postmodern. Founded itself in a reconstruction of a past that never was, the Gothic does not re-enact history, but withstands it (and its loss). Tim Burton’s twist–and a brilliant one it is–is to conjoin this vividly baroque Gothic with the Industrial Gothic of Charlie Chaplain’s Modern Times, where men re-enact catatonically the stiff and jerky motions of the machines they service, and that service them. Like the nefarious automated feeding-machine that nearly drives Charlie to distraction, the principal of the Burtonesque (as of the Chaplinesque) machine is that it do less well something which could be done far more easily by hand. The Inventor’s early inventions, like his cookie-making assembly line, precisely re-enact this scene, breaking eggs and cutting cookies with overcharged zeal; Edward, lacking precisely hands, is himself a consummate machine, in that he does everything less well, except cutting. Therein lies his mad art, and with it, at least temporarily, he reconfigures the postmodern aesthetic, scattering bulbous clowns, dolphins, and dancers among the previously sedate shrubberies of Burton’s postmodern suburbia.

 

Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic constructions of desiring-production give us, I would argue, an economics as well as a stylistics of the Gothic genre, both in its novelistic and cinematic avatars. The two-phase engine of desiring production is the pivot through which this structure articulates itself. In the first phase, the organs-partial objects–bodily parts disjointed from the whole–appear as persecuting machines: schizo voices undercut reality with paranoiac narratives, dead hands crawl out of the grave to avenge their killer, telltale hearts give the lie to narratorial sanity. In the second phase, the body-without-organs, or BwO, re-absorbs these partial and persecutorial fragments: the infamous schizo Judge Schreber swallows his larynx accidentally, but is healed by the “miraculating” rays that seem to radiate from his anus; the Blob absorbs its victims into an undifferentiated amoebic mass; the Golem returns to clay.

 

Edward, too, inhabits this dual movement; while he is gentle, his immaculate and lethal hands have a mind all their own; the same hands which shape surreal topiary hedges with a gardener’s grace “accidentally” slash Edward’s own face, and the faces of those he loves. On a broader scale, Edward himself is the persecutorial agent of the suburban enclave whose practiced conformities he unwittingly shreds. Exhibited at a neighborhood barbecue, displayed in a classroom “show-n-tell,” a guest on a television talk-show, in every instance he severs and disjoints the body of the socius. Peg’s endeavor to graft Edward back into family and community leads instead to the rupture of the community’s own unarticulated sutures of desire, to the re-opening of scars that not even the “miraculating” cinematic machine of “love” can heal. The drama of Edward Scissorhands, consequently, is not the persecution and destruction of the “monster,” but rather the implosion of the Oedipal family, which is disclosed as monstrous–the drama, in short of Anti-Oedipus.

 

Just as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Edward Scissorhands mobilizes against the Oedipal/capitalistic strictures of desire. The unfinished thing about Edward is not the Oedipal signifier of the phallus, but rather his hands, producers of sensation, the quintessential synecdoche of sensitivity (handle with care, hand-made, touched, touching). In schizo-analytic terms, the hands, while “partial” like all desiring-machines, bring with their overload of sensation the illusion of becoming-complete. In drawings of the body scaled to represent the relative number of nerve endings in various organs, the hands loom grotesquely large over an insectine body, their mass figuring an excess of sensation. In the place of these sensory machines, Edward has fists full of blades, machines of anti-production, machines that can do only injury, even when he reaches to stroke or embrace. As much as Edward is gentle, his hands are remorseless; they twitch involuntarily at the approach of the unknown, and when his emotions overwhelm him they cut maniacally at bushes, clothing, and people.

 

It would be hard to imagine a scene more traumatic than that in which the Inventor, just as he is on the verge of presenting Edward with hands, falls to the floor in the spasms of death. When the gift is revealed, Edward’s eyes open wide, and he briefly attempts to touch these new hands in his scissored grasp. Then, as Edward looks on, the pleasure in the Inventor’s eyes is replaced with a look of panic; as he slumps to the floor the human hands are thrust onto Edward’s bladed fingers and fall, broken into fragments along with the sensations they might have produced. Reaching out to caress the Inventor’s face, Edward instead leaves a long red gash on his cheek. The Oedipal crisis of desire-as-lack (manque) is subsumed within the larger crises of desiring-production, whose machines, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “only work when they break down.” Edward’s problematic humanity begins with this breakage, but within the Gothic hallways of the inventor’s mansion it remains unproductive, a celibate machine whose tasks never extend beyond keeping the hedges trimmed in a garden no-one but Edward sees.

 

This isolation is broken when Peg, the neighborhood Avon Lady, and as such a (minor) agent of the capitalistic machine, comes to call. Overcoming her shock at the first sight of Edward, she recovers herself as soon as she sees the cuts on his cheeks (the narcissistic touch, too, opens only wounds for Edward). “At the very least, let me give you a good astringent,” she says as she pats the terrified Edward’s cheeks with a moistened cotton ball, “and this will help to prevent infection.” When she takes Edward home, she unwittingly opens a crisis within the unreal reality of her neighborhood; having brought the “real” (Gothic Edward, whose schizo hands will make the unheimlich out of the allzuheimlich) within the capitalist machine, all other values come into question–or rather, the absence of value as such is disclosed, as soon becomes evident in the dinner-table moralizing of Peg’s husband Bill. Edward’s true allies, however, are not the adults, who have already taken up their places within the capitalistic desiring-machines (cd players, stereos, kitchen appliances, waterbeds), but with children and adolescents, whose crisis is suddenly shown to be not domestic but fundamentally social. By re-enacting the Anti-Oedipal moment, Edward breaks open the “family unit” and discloses a cut that runs across the boundaries between the “nuclear” families in Peg’s neighborhood and the social production of desire.

 

As the schizo, the outcast, Edward poses a threat not only to the “family,” but to all the other microfascistic machines that had guaranteed the inviolability of the unreal suburb. Esmerelda, the local born-again Christian, denounces Edward as bearing “the mark of Satan,” and attributes the problems which Edward’s presence produces to his diabolical mission (Edward’s answer, carving her shrubbery into a grinning demon’s head, gives a perfect schizo gloss on her paranoia).

 

The Hands

 

Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armor . . . .⁴
 

–Horace Walpole, of The Castle of Otranto

 

The hands–les mains (French amplifies the schizo by placing “hands” in a neutral and impersonal form)–floating and disembodied in the opening credits of Scissorhands, hands that will never find their way to Edward’s body. If the brain is coded as the seat of identity (the transfer of brains in Frankenstein and its heirs, the suspended brain common to so many science fiction scenarios)⁵–the hands are coded as the site of sensibility. The hands are right there in the “laboratory” scene; the horror at their transfer, their stitches is at least as great as the horror of the transferred brain. “There’s nothing to fear! Look! No blood, no decay . . . just a few stitches.” So Henry Frankenstein comforts his assistant when the monster’s hands arouse his terror. The horror of the transplanted hands is echoed by Henry’s own admixture of pride and fear at the work of his own hands–“Think of it! The brain of a dead man, waiting to live again in a body I made in [sic] my own hands (holds up his hands and gazes at them) . . . in my own hands!”

 

Henry’s lines, perhaps inadvertently, conflate two metonymic deployments of the hands: “a body I made with my own hands” and “(his) life is in my hands.” A similar condensation–though visual rather than linguistic–occurs in Mad Love (1932). A concert pianist named Orlac loses his hands in an accident, but is given new hands (taken from an executed murderer) by a demented surgeon named Gogol (Peter Lorre). These hands, however, seem to have retained their murderous propensity; Orlac’s playing deteriorates as the hands restlessly finger various lethal implements. At the same time, driven by desire for Orlac’s wife, Gogol attempts to drive Orlac insane by visiting him in disguise, donning artificial hands and a neck brace so as to convince him that he is the murderer come back from the dead. Orlac’s hands eventually come to the rescue, however; when Gogol assaults his wife, Orlac kills him with a single skilled throw of a knife.

 

This theme has been repeated (with somewhat less success) many times, most recently in Body Parts (1991), which in many ways is a kind of remake of Mad Love. Yet the re-suturing of the severed hand has hardly put an end to the terror of the hand all by itself. In The Hand (1981), Michael Caine plays a cartoonist whose severed hand embarks on a murder spree. Suggestively, Caine undergoes psychotherapy, and becomes convinced that the disembodied hand is a mere hallucinatory projection of his own murderous desire–a plausible solution, at least until the hand sneaks up on Caine’s therapist and strangles her while Caine watches from across the room. The hand, it would seem, has a mind of its own, if only because of its extraordinary intensity of sensation; a severed hand takes with it all that is palpable, caressable, the feelable–or brings with it all the callous(ed) insensitivity society attributes to a murderer, much as the “criminal brain” that Frankenstein transplants into his monster in the 1931 film version.

 

To lose a hand, of course, is one thing; never to have one is another, and to have something else in their place still another. Edward is the consummate guest, well-trained in etiquette by the Inventor, but when he cuts the family meatloaf with his blades, not everyone will eat it–he has touched it with his hands, and it becomes in a sense unclean. As the opening scene of the film frames it, there once was a man “who had scissors for hands,” that is, both in the place of and as hands. In the place of hands, they are a disaster, cutting those Edward tries to help or hold; as hands they are the producers of his sudden success–as hedge-trimmer, dog-clipper, barber. A number of sexual double-entendres rotate around Edward’s hands, as the women in the neighborhood fantasize about their erotic possibilities: <

 

Joyce:

Oooh. Completely different.

Neighbor 1:

No kidding.

Neighbor 2:

He’s so…

Neighbor 3:

Mysterious.

Joyce:

Do you imagine those hands are hot or cold? And just think about what a single snip could do…

Neighbor 1:

Or undo

 

The men, for their part, are equally unnerved about Edward’s hands, but their uneasiness is translated into humor: “Whoa, that’s a heck of a handshake you got there, Ed.” One elderly male barbecue-goer does confide in Edward, however: “I have my own infirmity. Never did me a bit of harm. Took some shrapnel during the war, and ever since then, I can’t feel a thing. Not a damn thing. Listen–don’t let anyone ever tell you you have a handicap.” Edward is drawn out of this conversation, though, by Joyce and the other women, who line up to feed him mouthfuls of “Ambrosia salad” and other earthly delights. Their feeding marks the ineptitude of Edward’s hands (at that point employed as shishkebabs), as also their maternal and sexual interest in his body.

 

The Fabricated Body

 

Professor:

And you really believe that you can bring life to the dead?

Henry Frankenstein:

That body is not dead. It has never lived. I created it. I made it with my own hands from the bodies I took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere…

 
From its inception, the Gothic has posited and reproduced a legion of partial, disjointed, or decomposed body parts, which by their very existence accuse the waking world of a fundamental illegitimacy. The giant, disembodied hand whose mysterious appearance in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1761) gives the lie to Prince Manfred’s claims of nobility; the detachable hand that horrifies Sir Bertrand in Anna Barbauld’s “Sir Bertrand” (1792); the severed hand that establishes the guilt of its former owner in Mary-Anne Radcliffe’s Manfrone (1828)–function as the organs- partial-objects which disclose the founding aporia of the socius. The old man’s blind eye, and the relentless beating of his disembodied heart, speak the j’accuse of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as does the barrage of ventriloquized voices in Wieland; it ceases to matter whether they are “real” or “hallucinatory,” they are real enough to drive rationality into madness.

 

Something still more deeply terrifying takes place when, as in Frankenstein, these body parts are assembled to form the unwhole-y whole of the monstrous body. The horror and revulsion of this body is its disjunction–its organs have been separately acquired from a shadowy contingent of cadavers, then sewed back together in such a way that the stitch-marks show. The stitches in the makeup for Boris Karloff’s early film personation of Frankenstein terrify because they disclose the stitches within ourselves, the “dissolving sutures” that transgress our own body, inasmuch as it traverses the amorphous plane of the Body without Organs. This “BwO,” as it is often abbreviated, is a kind of anti-body, a repository of the not-body; organs cling to it as parasites or (in Deleuze and Guattari’s own metaphor) “like medals jingling on the chest of a wrestler.” The Oedipal, familial, oral-anal organization that has been imposed on the body exacts a terrific price–its price is no less than the BwO, whose desire will never be eaten by a mouth or contained by an anus.

 

The fabricated body of the Gothic is also a shadow of the terror of libidinal organization; it is positioned between the Oedipalized body with its territorialized zones and the zoneless BwO. Existing partly in both worlds, it is a threat to both, as well as a loving secret; no one who has kissed a lover’s scar can deny it. Every scar is potentially a mouth or an anus, or both–a kind of opening unmarked by libidinal fascisms. The fabricated body, covered with scars, is an erotic feast as well as a terror (that is, a tearer) of flesh. Edward’s facial scars are self-inflicted, “accidental”–and yet Peg Boggs spends the better part of Edward’s suburban sojourn trying to find the particular admixture of cosmetics which will conceal them. “We’ll cover up the scars and start with a completely smooth surface,” Peg muses at one point, but her efforts result only in a gooey paste that makes Edward look worse than ever.

 

Peg’s desire to smooth Edward’s scars thus can be read not only as a desire to erase the terror of Edward’s hands but as reaction against the horror that Edward’s entire body is an assemblage, a mass of sutures, a fabricated and anti-Oedipal anti-territory. We can see this not only through Edward’s leather armor (or is it his skin?), which jangles with studs and metal buckles, but through the scene staged as “The Etiquette Lesson.” Here Edward, lying in bed, thinks back to the impossible moment of his assemblage. As the camera pans around the room in the opening shot, we hear the Inventor’s voice declaiming a lecture on etiquette: “Should the man rise when he accepts his cup of tea?” The camera pans past an oversize book, its pages turned by a sudden breeze; at the word “man” we see Edward’s bodily development. In the early sketches he resembles others of the inventor’s robots, with an egg-like torso and a spherical head; in later drawings arms are attached, and the torso is filled out; the face is given features, the arms a more hominid form. Like the Inventor’s other creatures, Edward is held together by a series of belts–figurations, like Frankenstein’s scars, of his body’s partiality. We see the addition of the scissor hands, and their (unfulfilled) replacement by human ones.

 

When the camera arrives at Edward, we see that he is not yet himself assembled; his torso and head rest on a kind of workbench, with arms and legs lying laid nearby. At length the Inventor closes the book of etiquette, proclaiming it “boring,” and opens a book of poems (which turn out to be limericks). In a voice of mock-solemnity, he intones

 

There was an old man from the Cape
Who made himself garments of crepe.
When asked, “Will they tear?”
He replied, “Here and there,
But they keep such a beautiful shape.”

 

The “clothing of crepe” (pre)figures Edward’s own fragile skin, the fragility of the Inventor’s wrinkled skin, the fragility of his body and bodies in general. Edward, not yet bodied himself, smiles tentatively, and the Inventor parentally intones “That’s right. Go ahead, smile. It’s funny!” Yet the paradox here is that the inventor himself is both more and less than a parent, and Edward more and less than a child. Edward truly possesses language before he possesses a body, and as a result he can consciously inhabit zones which others will only know in dreams–and (“on the other hand”) he can make mistakes no human child would make. To be born, and to grow, in an Oedipalized family is one thing–and to be built, to come into being partially whole and yet wholly partial, is another. Edward’s inception is not a conjunction but a disjunction, as the planned hands are broken and lost (they shatter upon impact) and he remains not incomplete but unfinished.

 

Edward’s secrets–that no amount of make-up will cover our scars, that the libido has nothing to do with families and everything to do with society at large (economics, houses, hedges, malls, talkshows, food), that our own sanity has been purchased as the result of a kind of extortion or holding-hostage of our bodies–are, in the end, too much to bear. Jim, as the quintessential fascist, wants him out: “You destroy everything you touch!” he yells. Kim, moved by the uncanny recognition that her home is not her home, her parents are not her parents, her boyfriend is not her boyfriend, alone knows and moves to Edward’s side. But she cannot remain, not at least if this film is to have something we could call an ending, something that can re-contain just enough of the terror it discloses so that we can all go back home to our waterbeds and sleep in peace.

 

Edward Is Dead: Long Live Edward

 

Many film critics, such as Pauline Kael, have faulted Edward Scissorhands for what they see as its maudlin sensibility (Kael calls it “Frankenstein’s monster by way of L. Frank Baum”)⁶ or its melodramatic denouement. All this assumes, of course, that some generic codes have been violated, or at least that the audience has somehow been led to expect some other kind of ending. Leaving aside the fact that the Gothic itself is historically an outgrowth of the sentimental, there is no reason to expect that the drama at work in this film be univocal, even at the start (something which is signalled immediately in the juxtaposition of suburban tract homes and gothic castle). I would argue indeed that several filmic machines are at work here, each with its own imperatives: the Gothic Romance (as in Wuthering Heights–storm-crossed lovers against the world of social conventions), the Dark Hero genre (this was after all the film Tim Burton made immediately after Batman), the Adolescent Horror Carrie), not to mention the sensitive-creature-from-another-world (long before E.T., there was The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Revenge of the Creature (1955)).

 

Yet the strongest narrative underlying Edward Scissorhands, as I have suggested above, is clearly that of the filmic Frankenstein. And, as the inheritor of that tradition, Edward is driven to re-enact–albeit with many suggestive differences–the inexorable expulsion and persecution of the monstrous. The scene is so familiar as to be a cliche; all one needs is a few dozen “peasants” armed with torches storming the door of some castle. Yet Burton’s film displaces that cliche by rendering ambiguous any comfortable distances of time, place, or social class– in the process indicting the very audiences most likely to view his film. Indeed, by taking Edward out of the mansion and into the suburbs Burton re-enacts the history of the Gothic; “Mrs. Radcliffe” (of Udolpho) moves in next door to “Mrs. Smith” (of Mrs. Smith’s Pies), and it turns out they have known each other all along.

 

In the commodity-fetishism of Burton’s suburbs, chronology is deliberately scrambled, such that commodities, like the clip-art cutouts of postmodern collages, drift about in their own free play of signification. 90s appliances, such as CD players, exist side-by-side with 50s fixtures such as boomerang tables and lava lamps; the parents are from 60s sitcoms but the kids are from 21 Jump Street. The cars–at least those we see up-close–are of early-70s vintage, as are the houses seen in exterior shots. Yet even here, the pastel coloration–one might even say, colorization–of these houses refuses a simplistic mimesis. Like Andy Warhol’s brightly colored silkscreens of Mao Tse-Tung or Marilyn Monroe, these houses are in effect coloring-book reproductions whose hyperveracity gives the lie to realism. The final effect is a kind of timeless time, a place without chronology or geography–in short, the suburbs as seen by those whose lives remained somehow untransgressed by history.

 

Yet the apparent smoothness of this untrammelled suburban territory belies the alienation–both of others and of itself–which is the founding ethos of the suburbs. In her recent study, Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines, Constance Perin argues that one thing that suburbia U.S.A. has always done, and done well, is to stare at, ostracize, alienate, and expel those (re)marked as different.⁷ The modalities of suburban demonization indeed seem to follow remarkably similar patterns, whether the person so demonized is a newcomer, a retiree, a “handicapped” person, or a someone “just passing through.” Edward, while initially welcomed almost manically, is soon regarded with deep suspicion, especially after the break-in at Jim’s parents’ house; by serving as the scapegoat for this crime, Edward marks both himself and his adoptive “family” as outcasts.

 

It is Kim’s boyfriend Jim who proves to be the ultimate local agent of this suburban fascism, just as he is the ultimate Oedipal subject. Jim’s father keeps his electronic toys in a locked room outfitted with state-of-the-art burglar alarms; as Jim himself says in a dinnertable jab, “they keep things pretty much locked up. My father has his own room for his stuff to make sure I can’t get any use of it.” For “when the family ceases to be a unit of production and of reproduction . . . it is father-mother that we consume”⁸:

 

Kim:

But that’s breaking and entering!

Jim:

Look, my parents have insurance up the rear, okay? What’ll it cost ’em–a little hassle? That’s about it. A week and my dad’ll have a new and better everything.

Kim:

We can’t!

Jim:

Look, there’s a guy who’ll give us cash for this stuff!

Kim:

Jim, I don’t want to.

Jim:

What–you don’t want us to have our own van like Denny’s when we could be all by ourselves whenever we like? Huh? With a mattress in the back?

Kim:

Well, why can’t you just do it?

Jim:

Because my father keeps the damn room locked. We need Edward to get in.

vKim:Well, can’t you take the key, like, when he’s sleeping or something?Jim:You don’t understand. The only thing he holds on to tighter is his dick.Kim:huhm…Jim:C’mon, Kim. Razor Blades’ll do anything for you!Kim:That’s not true!Jim:Oh no? Why don’t you ask him?

 

In the end, Edward performs this sacrifice for Kim, whom he has loved from the moment he sees her face in the mandatory assemblage of family photographs (all families are simulacra, D&G might say) that adorns Peg’s mantelpiece.⁹ And yet Kim does not know until some time later that Edward knew all along that the house they were breaking into was Jim’s, and that he knowingly committed this crime for her. When she finally learns the truth, she recognizes at once what Bataille might call the sovereign abandon of Edward’s gesture and despises Jim. Jim’s recognition of Kim’s rejection sets off his maniacal determination to destroy Edward, even if he can only alienate Kim further by doing so. Thus, in a classically gothic denouement, Kim’s shift of love and allegiance exposes the inhumanity of the “human” and the humanity of the “inhuman.”

 

Yet there is something more here, something beyond a mere farce of the Oedipal drama. In schizoanalytic terms, Edward has not merely broken the Oedipal equation, he has short-circuited it. Edward, like Frankenstein’s monster in the 1931 film, is somehow allied to electricity; asked by the talk-show host about whether he has a girlfriend, Edward touches the microphone stand with his hand, grounding it out and spraying sparks all over the stage. Now, having taken for a moment Jim’s place in the Oedipal chain, he draws its flow outward, away from the nuclear family; he grounds it out, unbinding its libidinal cathexes. Edward does not simply castrate (one knife would be sufficient for that–why have ten?), he unhinges all organs from their Oedipal affixations, he pulls the surface of the Body Without Organs taut, turning velcro into teflon. The Oedipal crisis is itself placed in crisis; its “undoing” turns out not to be castration after all, but indifference.

 

Jim, left not only without the phallus but without recourse to the Oedipal narrative which offered his only prospect of ever claiming it, is thrown into a frenzied spiral of jealousy. He is activated, as it were, as the community’s agent to expel the intruder who has threatened its libidinal and social borders. No one is willing to throw Edward out, but no one is willing to stop Jim from throwing him out. The local policeman, suggestively, is on Edward’s side, giving an undertone of the many films of the 50s which implicitly or explicitly took up the question of unpopular justice (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird), in the place of what he regards as an imaginary threat, he drives to the mansion’s gate and fires his revolver into the air, telling the neighbors that “it’s over” and that they “can all go home now.” But where is “home”? Jim’s not there, wherever it is; even as Edward is running, slicing off the clothes he wore during his stay at the Boggs’s, Jim is swigging Jack Daniel’s in the back of his friend’s van, getting his “courage” up for the inevitable confrontation.

 

While following the conventions to a point, the final scenes of the film offer a subtle yet crucial set of differences–differences which, as in other parts of the film, initiate slippages that belie their apparent conventionality. Edward flees to his “castle,” with Kim and Jim right behind him; the suburban “peasants” are held in reserve. Jim sets about killing Edward with mock-Eastwood machismo, first with a gun, and (when that fails) by breaking beams over his back. Kim intervenes, and ends up atop the prostrate Edward; in one uncanny moment she grasps Edward’s hand and menaces Jim with it. When Edward and Jim face off a moment later, it seems that Kim has finally given Edward the cue for what he must do, as he snips the thin-spun life out of Jim’s chest with a single thrust of a finger. Locked out of his parents’ Oedipal sanctum, and superseded by Edward in Kim’s affections, Jim dies quickly and easily–as Deleuze and Guattari say, “4, 3, 2, 1, 0– Oedipus is a race for death.”¹⁰ His body, discovered below the window, does not even hold enough interest to make the neighbors linger. What the neighbors want is Edward, and Kim gives “him” to them; descending the stairs, she seizes upon one of the inventor’s discarded alternate hands. “He’s dead,” she proclaims to the neighbors, waving the hand aloft: “See?”

 

This disembodied hand, of course, is no guarantee, but it is readily taken as one by the assembled crowd. One thinks for a strange moment about Freddie Kruger’s bladed glove in Nightmare on Elm Street; while the glove itself may be removed and hidden in the basement, it doesn’t prevent Freddie from coming back (not only in that film, but in a long string of lucrative sequels). Yet the horror of Edward Scissorhands is a veritable antipodes to Elm Street and its sequels. Its ethic is not the fear of the nightmare Other, but a realization that in expelling otherness is born self-alienation, an alienation which Edward and his hands disclose, and the crisis of adolescence understands, but the more thoroughly Oedipalized adults have forgotten, plowed under, surrounded hedges and fences. Oh keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to men / Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

 

And so the film closes in upon itself, even though closure is not quite what it offers. We pan back again from Edward’s house, and into the window of the room where Kim, now white-haired, sits recounting the tale of Edward to her granddaughter. One wonders aloud: and what was her history, the history of some other love, that has descended into this young girl who sits under a heavy coverlet listening to her grandmother’s tale. And the difference: “You see, before he came down, it never snowed . . . but now, it does.” The snow, the flurry of ice-flakes, turns out to be the detritus from Edward’s relentless sculpting, a statement of love via surreality and excess, even as Edward effectively is pushed back into a mythic realm, to the status of a kind of local sky-god. A fairy tale after all–or is it? In some strange way, the frame-narrative is unable to quite contain Edward– he is neither killed in the manner of Frankenstein’s monster, nor saved (like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast). Kim pronounces what ought in the circumstances to be the magic words: “I love you”–and yet nothing happens. Edward remains untransformed and unassimilated; his ice sculptures freeze time, and in them Kim remains a young woman dancing in the snow. Immaculate in their lifelessness, these figures of ice themselves constitute a kind of machine, a memory palace, where Edward is not the fabricated but the fabricator. From the shreds of these fabrications, snow descends on us all, the snow of our doing–and undoing.

 

Notes

 

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lee. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 2.

 

2. Anti-Oedipus, 2.

 

3. John Milton, “Lycidas,” lines 75-6, in The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 160.

 

4. Horace Walpole, letter to William Cole (March 9, 1765), qtd. in The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey, ed. Andrew Wright (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), xi.

 

5. See for example Donavan’s Brain (1953), in which the brain of a dead millionaire keeps a scientist chained to its will; The Man Without a Body (1958), in which a man’s talking head is kept artificially alive; The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1959), where a man preserves his dead wife’s head in a pan of nutrient solution, and embarks on a quest for a body to attach to it–or more recently the well-known Star Trek episode where Mr. Spock’s brain is stolen and wired into a planet-regulating computer network.

 

6. See Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: New Age Daydreams.” The New Yorker vol. 66 no. 44 (Dec. 17, 1990): 115-121.

 

7. See the suggestive chapters “Penalizing Newcomers,” “Tattling on Neighbors,” and “Imperfect People,” all in Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988).

 

8. Anti-Oedipus, 265.

 

9. Edward’s own schizo assemblage (which significantly is not on the mantelpiece but in the fireplace) consists of newspaper clippings with headlines such as “BOY BORN WITHOUT EYES READS WITH HIS HANDS,” “I’LL NEVER DIET AGAIN,” and “NEWLYWEDS, 90 & . . . TO HAVE A BABY”–an anti-Oedipal anti-family whose membership is open only to those (re)marked as singular.

 

10. Anti-Oedipus, 359.