Who the f**k is Alice?

If Wonderland had only manifested itself once Alice had fallen through the vaginal rabbit hole then we might in fact share Alice’s conviction that her time in Wonderland is all a part of her dream. But Wonderland is Carroll’s and now Burton’s creation, as is Alice, and their creation spills either side of the hole. Wonderland begins with the start of the film and ends when the credits role, and is not confined to an underworld as such, and so we find we don't believe Alice when she repeatedly declares that this is all a dream: not because we know Wonderland to be real, but because we know she’s right about one thing – this is a dream – but wrong about the other: this dream is not hers.



“Why is it you’re always too small or too tall?” the Mad Hatter asks Alice. It's because Alice is not only a character in the story, she is an 'event'. Or rather, her body and its persistent growing and shrinking is an event: one that recurs throughout the story. Its unruliness, its disorder, Alice’s lack of control over it – in fact, the lack of control any character has over Alice’s body – is of major concern, revisited in the story from many angles – literally, graphically.

We see, graphically, in the excess and disorder of Alice’s body, how this adventure in Wonderland must be someone else’s dream: for it’s observed from the outside, not experienced from the inside, and therefore she can never be The Alice; she can never be herself. As she is frequently accused of being by the other characters, this Alice is an unwitting, accidental impostor in Carroll’s and Burton’s dream of a female – a girl-turning-woman – who they have called Alice. She is larger than life, she is exaggerated, fantastical – she bursts through the confines of the usual female body. Then in turn she is small and infantile, vulnerable, small enough to clamber over men’s faces. We have seen this girl/woman many times before: she is the fetishised figure of the feminine.



As a ‘figure’, a ‘motif’, an ‘event’, Alice is denied any form of agency usually enjoyed by the protagonist of a story, because she is always more object than subject. She cannot be The Alice, whoever that might be, because her body, her beauty, does not belong to her. Alice is the property of everyone who watches her, (so that includes us), setting her on a faulty, fraudulent quest from the outset, because there is no way for her ever to belong to herself and no possibility of her retrieving the “muchness” the Hatter has accused her of losing. She cannot lose something she never had in the first place.

So who is Alice? No one knows, and nor are they likely to while film-makers – especially those with claims upon the realms of the uncanny – regurgitate tired, over-used themes and figures and indulge themselves in equally tired, over-used myths about the madness and anarchy of ‘the feminine’.



Oh and guess what? There’s a monster in need of castration. And what could be fit for that task, I wonder? Oh let me think: could it be a sword? Yes? Well that’s handy because there just so happens to be one lying around. Somebody (the caterpillar? Or the White Witch?) says to Alice: “The Vorpal Sword knows what it wants; you just have to hold onto it.” Now there’s an instructive euphemism for any young woman.

*Spoiler alert*: And so, after much fannying around, Alice cuts off the head of the monster, thus vanquishing the sexual queen – and “evil” – and reinstating the virginal queen – and “goodness” – so that all may live happily unmolested throughout "Wonderland". Banality triumphs – well, it sort of limply drops its swords and slumps about looking relieved – and someone does a silly dance. Oh how delightful and all so unexpected. (Yawn).

Burton explores the extraordinary, or so I’m sure he’d like to think, but no floppy-eared, squished-caterpillar of a “feminist” reworking can save Burton’s Wonderland from the ordinary. As a finale, we are meant to believe that a re-imagined business-woman Alice happily hops off to colonise the new world, opening trade routes as she goes. I wouldn’t buy it: not for all the tea in China.



It’ll take more than a blue-screen-ful of exaggeratedly gnarled tree-roots or grandiose waterfalls to disguise this very ordinary world. And no amount of red paint on white roses is going to fool us into believing that this is The Alice. The Alice in Wonderland of Carroll and Burton is just a bit too much of a muchness.

Burton's blond moments

Clearly Tim Burton, like Hitchcock (among others), has a thing about blonds and makes them mean something in film. He is not the only one. As far as I can tell, filmmakers are only taking meanings applied to certain colours by society and exaggerating them on screen. Hitchcock's blonds were always more ambiguous (representing Hitchcock's version of the nature of innocence – its manipulative and seductive powers - rather than representing a conventional understanding of innocence itself), but Burton is generally less subtle.







Admittedly, the polarization between light and dark – blondness and darkness – in Burton’s characters is not always so simply divided. The struggle between light and dark that takes place between the two female characters over the body of a male in Sweeney Todd is subtler in Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow.





In Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow the blond females embody something closer to the Hitchcockian model of the inherently seductive temptress who will surely bring about the hero's demise, and the struggle takes place internally, in the interior of the relationship between each respective Johnny Depp character and his blond muse.





But more often than not, the model in Burton films is simpler: Blond = good girl (or guy), innocence and vulnerability. Brunette = morally ambiguous and complex (if not outright bad) girl (or guy). Which woman does the hero of Planet of the Apes end up with? The complex, intelligent, fierce, physically challenging and ambiguous ape? The embodied union of brain and bestiality? Or the submissive, helpless, imbecilic, and almost completely voiceless blond woman? The embodiment of emptiness and nothingness? How could it be the first, when such a union between a man and woman could threaten our society's oh so comfortable social order?





(I thought that film was endlessly disappointing - can you tell??)

In Sweeney Todd, the archetypes are divided into pairs: there is the blond (innocent, pure, vulnerable) couple: Anthony and Johanna. And there is the dark (ambiguous, morally questionable, dangerous) couple: Mrs Lovett and Sweeney Todd.





There is a battle for survival going on between the two, and there is a battle for Sweeney going on between the (non)forces of Blondness (embodied by Johanna and her mother - they are interchangeable - hardly a whole character each) and the forces of Darkness (Mrs Lovett). In the end, the Aryan model reigns supreme through passivity. Usually it does not have to do anything: darkness will inevitably bring about its own destruction. The colour-coded conclusion? In Cinema Land, the survival and preservation of purity is both inevitable and desirable. It is eternally worth fighting for.





So, they're just films. This is just movie language. Does any of it really matter? Do I just have something against blonds?? Of course not. The problem is that colour-coding and its significance in the social unconscious may not have an impact on daily life with the people we know, but once you make an image, and you create a story around that image, and use that image for a particular purpose or to convey a particular message, you load that image with meaning. The colours of that image are an incredibly powerful way to control a message and manipulate the spectator. That's when the image and its colours affect what we think on a daily, social level.

The most obvious recent example of this away from cinema, in my mind, is the Madeleine McCann case. That image of her that is everywhere: its intention to convey the very embodiment of innocence and vulnerability. But the very fact that there is an agenda behind the presentation of the image makes that image anything but innocent. It is deliberately playing on the associations we make between blondness and innocence. Would this child have had such a global media circus surrounding her if it had been a young black girl in that picture, or if she’d even been just a little less blond?



Should we really be continuing to colour-code human attributes and characteristics with such banality, lack of imagination or sense of social responsibility? I'd have hoped that, by now, there was really no more need to bang on about choosing representations of humanity that deviated from the usual (black and white) suspects. But it would seem that filmmakers could do with some reminding.

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innocence, johnny depp, tim burton, hitchcock, blond moments, sleepy hollow, edward scissorhands, planet of the apes, sweeney todd, colour coding purity