I went to see Tim Burton's Dark Shadows at yesterday's matinee. Color me purple with perplexity.
The film opens with a complaint. Barnabas Collins' family has been shipped to Maine by the British crown to erect a shipping and fishing village. They do so admirably, but the scion (Barnabas) bangs a maid (who is quite lovely but apparently unloveable). Barnabas spurns the maid in favor of a well-born girl. I'm feeling "under the weather" and can't remember the name of the maid (Angelique?). But the well-born girl is Victoria.
The maid (angelique) is into the black arts and puts a spell on Victoria such that she sleepwalks to a heathy cliff's promontory and makes like a bird. Ker-splat. Barnabas is less than pleased, but when he confronts the maid, she shuts him in a coffin.
Two centuries later, Barnabas is discovered by construction workers putting in a sewer line, and they open the box. Barnabas comes out and drinks their blood. The maid has turned Barnabas into a vampire so as to have repeated chances to earn his love over the centuries. Barnabas (played by Johnny Depp) goes to his Gothic mansion where a pile of misfits (led by Pfeiffer) is barely keeping the financial empire afloat while they deal with their inbred problems via a dysfunctional therapist (Helen Bonham Carter). Within weeks, the cannery is going strong under Barnabas' renewed direction. Barnabas has entreprenurial capacity. His family was not aristocracy when they came from England, but this vampire (heh heh) is sucking the blood out of the ocean and feeding it to people across America.
His rival is the witch (Angelique), who's still alive and is the CEO of a fish company in the same town, and is gobbling all the profits from Barnabas' company. They make love, but she keeps ending up on top. Barnabas doesn't see this in a good light. He dreams of the girl Victoria who has lept off a promontory centuries before.
Victoria (Vicky) knocks on his door and applies for a job as a nanny. She's a very thin blue-blooded girl. She looks like she's 16 in some frames and like she's 30 in others. She's ethereal. But Barnabas also wants her for children. He says, "You have broad hips for child bearing."
She has it all, apparently. She's ethereal, but made correctly.
I don't know what's the matter with the maid-witch. She proposes to Barnabas that they team up. Barnabas will have none of it.
The attitude toward capitalism on the part of Tim Burton is that it's some kind of black magic. And yet, Barnabas also has a work ethic. And a certain fury, and an admirable drive. The maid-witch firebombs his fish factory, which is a reference to union mafia activity, and their tendency toward sabotage, and toward monopoly.
Barnabas wins the capital war. Ultimately, he also kills the witch (whose beauty is all on the surface), in an all-out furious (but very stupid and unnecessary battle) and gets the good girl, who exists through the centuries as a perpetually available type. Her only evolution is that she is no longer "Victoria." She now goes by "Vickie."
In a curious subplot (the film is set in 1972), Barnabas meets with a group of hippies in the Maine woods. Their leader says that war is going to turn to peace. One of the chicks says to Barnabas, all girls want is love man, not money. (This infuriates Barnabas, and he destroys the group in a Dionysian fireball and sucks their blood -- as he is apparently all about war and money.) There was something reminiscent of Manson in all this, but it wasn't spelled out.
So ultimately, after centuries, Barnabas gets together with Vickie, who turns Goth in the last scene.
I got my hair cut after the film while waiting for my daughter to come out of dance. I asked the woman cutting my hair if she had seen it. She had seen it three times. "It keeps getting better," she said. "You later see how all the details fit. The daughter was a weirwolf all along!"
The movie isn't good enough to see twice. The firebombs lack passion, and the plot is out of a screenwriting for dummies book. But the attitude toward capitalism is one that I recognize. There is a growing sense that all great fortunes have come from black magic and are therefore illegitimate. The UN (which itself exists on land the US gave to the world inside of the world capital of capitalism -- NYC -- has asked us to return Mt. Rushmore to the Indians -- as if all property that is owned by the US is illegitimate since it is based on violence -- or -- property is theft -- as Proudhon wrote).
The only way we can redeem ourselves is to turn Gothic. Which means to have an exquisite sensibility, and to live for love. And yet, it means we will prey on others for their blood. This is ok, because we are spiritual aristocrats. Because we are aristocrats, we are entitled to treat the workers as our livestock. So in a sense the world of the film comes full circle. Those who were originally put down as mere working class people centuries ago, are now the new aristocrats.
We shouldn't have to make money, we should just make love.
The film annoyed me immensely, as does the mentality behind it.
