A Colonial Tapestry: Race and Ideology in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure

Florent CHRISTOL

Fantasy films play a more fundamental part in the construction, dissemination, and
maintenance of prejudice than is commonly admitted. Precisely because fantasy films
can activate audience prejudices while preventing audiences from recognizing or, more
precisely, taking responsibility for such prejudices, they are ideal agents of social
alienation : their seemingly purity permits their pollution [...] because of their apparent
disconnection from social reality, fantasy films may permit repugnant social attitudes
to operate under the veil of innocence.
Joshua Bellin, Framing Monsters: Fantasy Films and Social Alienation,
13-23

The plot of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Tim Burton’s first, highly-successful
long-feature film, can hardly be summarized given that it resembles more a series of short,
highly visual burlesque vignettes than a coherent whole. Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens), a
character from a popular television show, is a child in the body of an explicitly effeminate and
seemingly asexual young white man. The film follows his quest for his stolen bike, a highly
technological gadget that he treasures beyond everything. After many adventures and strange
encounters that lead him to some iconic locations such as Fort Alamo and Hollywood, Pee
Wee finally retrieves his bike, having made along the way some friends who reappear at the
premiere of a Hollywood movie based on his story and recapitulating his fragmented
experiences.
Alongside Beetlejuice (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and the two Batman
movies (1989 and 1992), Pee Wee has largely been considered by film critics as a burlesque
visual extravaganza disengaged from any specific political or ideological agenda, apart from a
(supposedly) subversive and destabilizing attack on traditional gender politics through a resort
to queer or camp aestheticsi. Situating the film against the action-packed “hard-body”
tradition discussed by Susan Jeffords ii, Marsha Kinder sees Pee Wee’s queerness as
challenging the sexual and social norms of American society, thereby constituting a threat to
the patriarchal symbolical order and to the politically conservative representations
propounded by the “Reganite entertainments” popular at the time:
Pee Wee connotes a runt, or underdog — someone small, stunted, regressive or insignificant,
particularly in relation to an older sibling or father. And if you have seen him perform, you
realize that Pee Wee’s a little man playing a child, in a suit that’s too small for him, evading
the Reagan era just as Günter Grass’s Oscar did in The Tin Drum during the Third Reich. Pee
Wee uses electronic video wizardry not for power but for play. He never aspires to be the
father. [...] it’s Pee Wee himself who reigns over this post-modern world that challenges or at
least evades the patriarchy and that weakens the borderlines of gender, race, age, and species
which are so important to the symbolic order.iii
While this reading is certainly accurate in some ways, I believe that the film’s subversive
agenda propounded by Kinder is jeopardized or, at least, balanced, by a more politically
conservative (post-) colonial/imperial ideological strain running through it iv.
As the film opens, Pee Wee awakens from a dream in his brightly-lit bedroom. One
can notice that his bedroom wallpaper features warring cowboys and Indians, a very basic
figuration of the racial or “savage” war trope at the core of the Frontier myth studied by
Richard Slotkinv. I suggest in this article that the “imperialistic warfare/Western movie”
motifs of this tapestry functions as a mythological grid that both hides (in the background)
and renders explicit the colonialist ideology at work in the film. Because an exhaustive
examination of this issue is a task which falls largely beyond the scope of this paper, I will
only bring to the fore some motifs scattered along the film which, woven together, lend some
legitimacy to the idea that Pee Wee inhabits a sort of pre-Civil War, racially segregated
universe, the film’s grotesque aesthetics contributing to a conservative politics of historical
disavowal (the repressing of the counter-culture legacy) that partly challenges the popular
image of Burton as a subversive, carnivalesque artist debunking traditional American myths. vi

Deadly Toys

Pee Wee’s bedroom is filled with retro merchandise (old vinyl records, puppets) and
pop culture kitsch (Godzilla dolls, a Gremlin toy, and various Disney figures). In many ways,
Pee Wee himself, with his rigid bodily expression, looks like a human-sized mannequin. In
several shots he is framed surrounded by puppets, a visual composition which highlights his
own resemblance to the toys. Associated with ideas of childhood innocence, the assortment of
grotesque and monstrous figures in Pee Wee’s bedroom creates a visual backdrop that seems
innocuous enough. However, it is this very condition of “seeming innocence” which makes
them perfect vehicles for ideology. This idea is explored inter-textually through the presence
of the Gremlin toyvii. Gremlins (1984) has often been viewed as a subversive Christmas tale
turning Frank Capra’s vision of Americana upside-down. As a consequence, the film’s highly
conservative racial and social politics have largely been ignored. In his magisterial study of
the American Frontier myth, Richard Slotkin points out the frequent association in American
popular culture and conservative bourgeois ideology of “lower” social classes (immigrant
workers, urban wage-earners...) with “savage” races (Indians, Asians, Blacks) with whom no
dialogue is possible and who can only be dealt with by resorting to extreme violence
(vigilantism, terrorism, lynching...).viii This association has often been used by politicians as a
means to demonize and scapegoat a potentially revolutionary working class and reaffirm the
hierarchy of power within American society. Along the lines of this cultural tradition, Joe
Dante’s movie establishes a series of visual and thematic connections between the monstrous
gremlins, a race of savage dwarfish monsters, and ethnically-defined working-class
immigrants. The gremlins come from the “seedy” underground of Chinatown (the first shots
of the film, echoing the tradition of film noir, depict the place as a hellish inferno, filled with
smoke and shadows), and they sing the dwarves’ mining song from Snow White and the Seven
Dwarves (Walt Disney, 1937), an inter-text which associates them with a freakish “lower”
proletarian class. They also proliferate and multiply throughout the film, thereby giving shape
to a racist bourgeois stereotype familiar enough: the hyper-sexualisation of “lower”
races/classes. This association is fore-grounded by the fact that the gremlin in Pee Wee’s
bedroom sports a “Mohawk” haircut, which visually links him to “savage” Indians from
classic western movies. In Dante’s film, the anarchistic gremlins wreaking chaos on civilized,
middle-class America are eradicated through the use of lethal force: the lead protagonist traps
the “savages” in a movie theater and uses gas to make the theater explode.
 According to Michael Ryan, disaster films (one of the generic layers of Gremlins),
popular in the 1980’s, rely on Ronald Reagan’s

[…] vision of an America of restored small-town life, folksy communities where

friendly white businessmen and their wives could thrive without being bothered by big
government or the urban poor and non-whites. This older, middle-class, middle-
American world was particularly sensitive to the threats disaster films metaphorize –
social critics, disgruntled workers, […] liberated sexuality, economic recession.” ix

Under cover of carnivalesque subversion (the use of burlesque humor, the potentially
liberating frame of Christmas, a satirical denunciation of materialism, etc.), Gremlins
ideologically relates to the politically conservative “Reaganite” entertainments popular at the
time. In so far as it expresses the fears of the “race war” panics and the genocidal fantasies
described by Richard Slotkin (the diegetic solution to the problem does come from an act of
complete extermination),x Gremlins (re)produces the politically conservative discourses
running through many popular movies from the 1980s xi. Through these cultural and
mythological associations, the gremlin toy in Pee Wee’s bedroom contributes to the
dissemination of a coded imperialist ideology while at the same time rendering it “invisible”
through fetishistic strategyxii. After all, it is “only a toy,” and a toy based on a fictional
character taken from a “pure” fantasy at that. But fantasy films, as Joshua Bellin and other
critics have shown, have enormous social impact, they model individual behaviours as much
as more realistic narratives, but in a less overt way due to their apparent disconnection from
reality, which enables the viewer to avoid experiencing guilt or responsibility for the
satisfaction their violent cultural script provides.xiii

Clowns, Freaks and Fetishes

As Pee Wee is about to leave his bedroom, a full shot reveals a framed picture of
George Washington, the patriarchal founder of a nation, near a highly exotic statue/trophy: an
ostrich, upon which is seated a freakish/pygmy warrior effigy. This contrasting juxtaposition
of Washington and the African statue may evoke the cultural memory of Joice Heth, the “first
American freak,” a black woman who, according to legend, was Washington’s first maid and
was later exhibited by P.T. Barnum in his American Museum. Rosemary Garland Thomson
describes Joice Heth as “the quintessential American freak. A black, old, toothless, blind,
crippled slave woman, she fuses a combination of characteristics the ideal American self
rejects.”xiv The cultural legacy of Heth and Barnum also bring to mind memories of the freak
show which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries in North America, were
highly politicized sites inseparable from a racist, imperialist worldview. A belief in the
undisputed superiority of western culture (and the inherent racial inferiorities of other people)
propounded by imperialist ideology, made this exotic spectacle highly popular until well into
the 1930sxv.
Through the probably unconscious but nevertheless present cultural connection to
Washington’s “freakish” nurse and the freak show legacy in American culture, Pee Wee’s Big
Adventure reaffirms the links between white power and the reification of the racial Other
prevalent in colonial ideology. The fact that the Eastern/African looking effigy is sitting on an
ostrich also reinforces a racist prejudice associating Eastern people with “funny-looking”
animals. In her study of the circus in American culture, Janet Davis notes that the ostrich was
an animal favored by the Auguste clown. xvi Davis also underscores the way circus toys for
children enabled the naturalisation of power relations between Imperialist self and exotic
“savages”:
 Circus novels for children were common at the turn of the century, as were circus toys.
Schoenhut’s popular Humpty Dumpty Circus (1903) was a wooden, jointed play set of
circus athletes and animals which could be twisted into myriad poses. Both toy
manufacturers and circus proprietors used contemporary imperialism to create salable
commodities. [...] The modern child often first glimpsed the exotic Other through
circuses and toys, a formative encounter that helped make colonial power relations part
of the unconscious, “natural” world of child’s plays. xvii

Although they seem to exist only in the escapist world of childhood games and fantasy, the
freakish toys/puppets/effigies littering Pee Wee’s bedroom are, in fact, related to ideas of
racial hierarchy typical of a colonial, imperialist ideology.
The theme of slavery and of the enlistment of “inferior” races as exploitable resources
is sustained by the presence of a robotic Abraham Lincoln in Pee Wee’s kitchen. When
“turned on,” “Robot Lincoln” cooks pancakes at a fast pace. Ironic inversion turns the
President who contributed to ending slavery in the USA into a slave cooking for a white
“master.” Emptied of his iconic original semantic substance, Lincoln is turned into a fetish
embodying the reification of human work theorized by Marx. He is also a literal rendition of
the machinist idea of the slave: “One of the common justifications for slavery,” Benjamin
Reiss observes, “was that [...]; but in a perfect state of slavery, [blacks] would become, if
guided by a master’s rational will, something like machines or prosthetic devices. (“They are
labor-saving machines themselves [...]!” a wicked master asserts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin).”xviii
Reproducing the orgiastic display of merchandise in the bedroom, Pee Wee’s front
garden is filled with an accumulation of fetishistic trophies from Western movies (plastic
Indians and horses), expressing and disavowing an imperialist ideology through the reification
of the racial Other. Pee Wee’s garden is also littered with ethnic-looking garden gnomes,
several of which are wearing sombreros, hats that have often been used to signify
“Mexicanness” in western movies set in Texas, “a state brimming with folklore and the key
signifiers of the frontier experience: the Alamo, Davy Crockett, cattle drives, frontier justice,
Indian wars”xix (Significantly, Pee Wee’s road movie later leads him to Fort Alamo xx). This
landscape metaphorically associates Pee Wee with a racist white landlord ruling over a world
of material fetishes and mechanical or robotized slaves.

After leaving his home, Pee Wee goes to the town square to buy some tricks from the
gag shop. The town is almost completely devoid of racial minorities, as if set in the rich all-
white suburbs of the 1950s.xxi But this absence is “compensated” by the very visible statue of
an Auguste clown at the centre of the square, which indirectly reintroduces the notion of race.
Indeed, the clown has often signified racial difference in American culture:

[...] clowns often played unconscious racial stereotypes that helped reinforce social
norms. Some circus programs contained portraits of clowns in literal blackface, with
huge red mouths and bulging eyes, strumming energetically on a banjo, but often, the
Auguste clown’s blackface was metaphorical. He created his racial identity through the
act of “whitening up” with thick pancake. His greasy whiteness and exaggerated bodily
zones — huge red mouth, lolling, paint-encircled eyes, big fake nose, ears, and feet —
made his look strikingly similar to blackface. xxii

The utilitarian aspect of the clown for Pee Wee (he uses it to chain up his bike) underscores
its “inferior” hierarchical position and slavish function within the universe inhabited by Pee
Wee.
 The racial, even racist dimension conveyed by the clown statue assumes a more
manifest shape in the gag shop where Pee Wee goes to pick up the latest novelty items. An
automated monkey wearing a hat welcomes the customers in front of the store windows. The
monkey, a traditional racist metaphorxxiii is, like Lincoln’s robot, used as a convenient item to
sustain consumerism. Inside the shop, a storekeeper who bears the stereotypical features of a
Jewish caricature stands alongside the statue of an African boy dressed in the kind of exotic
clothes that have often been a way for Western culture to depreciate Easterners by associating
them with ideas of archaic tradition and backwardness. xxiv The use of a red back and side
lighting, seemingly diegetic but used in an overtly expressive way, lends both figures a
demonic expression.
The theme of racism is made explicit through Pee Wee’s arch-enemy, Francis Buxton
(Mark Holton), an obese white man living in a colonial house watched over by an Asian
slave. In the scene taking place in his house at the beginning of the film, several shots focus
on the hunting prizes, stuffed lions and elephants filling up his living room. These trophies are
culturally tied to ideas of possession and domination over inferior “species/races”. An
explicitly racist character, Francis functions as a scapegoat who can be morally condemned
and through whom the less obvious racist representations in the film can be disavowed. xxv

A Boy and His Bike

If, as I have suggested earlier, Pee Wee is himself a puppet, a sort of human-sized
Pinocchio, he cannot venture outside of his home/puppet theatre without a magical object
allowing him to maintain the belief that he is a real, breathing human being, and not a lifeless
mannequin. In psychoanalytical terms, what he needs is a fetish. For Freud, the fetish stands
for the imaginary maternal phallus, a belief that enables the subject to resist symbolical
castration and prevent him from entering the world of the symbolic (the Law of the Father),
with all the consequences it entails (the recognition of the Other, the acceptance of social
responsibilities, etc.). In other words, the fetish enables the subject to remain in a state of
“blessed” childhood and to hold on to “magical”/childish beliefs. I want to argue here that Pee
Wee’s main fetish in the film is his bike, a heavily accessorized vehicle that he keeps hidden
behind a secret door in his garden. When Pee Wee goes to pick it up, the mise en scène
foregrounds its fetishistic dimension through a montage of close-ups detailing its various parts
as a patriotic-sounding piece of music runs on the soundtrack. The apprehension of the bike as
a kind of sacred artifact is underscored by the use of a light coming from the bike itself and
projected onto Pee Wee’s face. This effect lends the vehicle a sort of magical dimension. (It is
ironically contrasted with an Indian totem in the garden, an object traditionally endowed with
sacred properties but which is here reified and used as a decorative item).
Pee Wee loses his bike — the imaginary but empowering phallus that enables him to
“function” outside of his home — in front of the bike store. As a direct result of this trauma,
his fragile relationship to external reality breaks down. His alienation is expressed by canted
shots and an ominous score, a pastiche of Bernard Herman’s score for Psycho (1960), a film
which, significantly, deals with someone becoming psychotic due to a failed Oedipus
complex. Pee Wee’s castration anxiety — the result of the loss of the fetish — is symbolized
through a confrontation with a series of grotesque characters assuming a demonic, clownish
expression. Frightening mimes on a bike (foreshadowing the Penguin’s troops in Batman
Returns) pass by, mocking him. The unchained clown on the square sinisterly grins at him. In
a bizarre dream, Pee Wee sees nightmarish clowns with curly African wigs taking his bike to
a hospital. Clownish surgeons pretend to fix it but they give it to devils that burn it in a
sacrificial fire, in a spectacular, Broadway-like rendition of castration anxiety. Danny
Elfman’s circus/carnival-like score greatly contributes to heightening the alienating affect
described by Wolfgang Kaiser in his study of post-Renaissance grotesquexxvi. Instead of
being a site of laughter and liberation in the Bakhtinian traditionxxvii, the carnivalesque
becomes oppressive and obscene.
This transformation of folk characters associated with festive popular practices into
uncanny, frightening figures is well accounted for by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. In
The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, they note that, after the Renaissance, in order to
secure their newfound identity and establish themselves as clean, upright, civilised, and
sanitised, the bourgeois started to separate themselves out from the “ordinary”
peasant/working-class folk. One of the ways to symbolically mark their social distinction was
to reject the carnival, its violence, disorder and its scatological rites, and to associate it
exclusively with the province of “popular” classes. xxviii As a consequence, within bourgeois
culture and imaginary, the carnivalesque has become a site of potential terror and alienation
where the bourgeois subject runs the risk of “running into” the socially repressed
class/sexual/racial Other.
I have argued earlier that, in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Pee Wee needed a fetish to
help him sustain his magical and conservative beliefs (that he was not a puppet and that the
world he inhabited was a sort of pre-Civil War colonial fantasy in which the Other was
enslaved and fetishized). I have also contended that this fetish was his bike. Therefore, when
Pee Wee loses it, the external world of the Other (be it sexual, racial, social, etc.) kept at a
distance or sublimated by the fetish, returns with a vengeance, assuming the uncanny guise of
a carnival of terror. For Pee Wee, the quest for the lost bike will then be propelled by a
conservative desire to assuage his anxiety by repressing the many-shaped Other through the
re-establishing of boundaries between himself and the world. Pee Wee’s often erratic,
clownish behavior ultimately hides a conservative bourgeois mentality preoccupied with
notions of purity, cleanliness, and isolation.

Conclusion

As a film director, Burton has often been seen as an outsider with anarchistic,
rebellious aspirations, a subversive artist working from within the system. xxix Although we
have but only briefly skimmed over some issues related to the overall argument formulated at
the beginning of this paper, the analysis provided here should lead us to question this status.
Despite the fact that Burton’s first feature-length movie exhibits all the aesthetic signs and
tropes of a subversive, counter-cultural work of art (the clownish, burlesque dimension, the
satire of small-town America and of Hollywood entertainment, etc.), ideologically it relates in
many ways with the conservative “Reaganite entertainments” prevalent at the time, xxx which
may contribute to explaining its popular success at the time. Living in his own self-centered
world, Pee Wee does not use the carnival (the Day of the Dead, which he stumbles on when
reaching Mexico, or the various masquerades he engages in) as a weapon in order to subvert
the symbolic order, the Law, but to get back a materialistic object enabling him to sustain his
beliefs and reaffirm the main fiction upon which the film is founded: that the socially
progressive sixties never happened, that the Civil War never took place, that America is still a
segregated country, a blessed nation of simple, innocent folks protected from social, racial
and sexual threats by fragile borders that require constant care and vigilance. This diffuse
atmosphere of paranoia will quickly assume more radical and nightmarish shapes in the form
of clumsy social workers imperilling a bourgeois home (Beetlejuice), or aggressive circus
clowns attacking the city from below (Batman Returns). In the end, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
may be less the work of an iconoclastic clown than that of a court-jester whose subversion
ultimately ends up reinforcing the traditional hierarchy of power within American society and
strengthening established racial and social prejudices.
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Biography
Florent Christol received his PhD in American cinema and history from the University of
Poitiers. His research on carnivalesque representations in American culture has been
published in journals such as Simulacres, CinémAction, Cinémas, Lignes de fuite. He has
contributed chapters in several books, including Cinéma et Histoire (Michel Houdiard),
George Romero, un cinéma crépusculaire (Michel Houdiard), Le Sud au cinéma (Presses de
l’école Polytechnique), and Représenter l’horreur (Rouge Profond). He teaches classes on
Tim Burton and on the American horror film at the University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3,
and is currently writing a book on the cultural myth of the Foolkiller in American horror
cinema (under contract Rouge Profond editions) and on Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (under
contract with Vendémiaire editions).

i
Three articles in the special issue on “Male Trouble” in Camera Obscura n°17 (1988) are
devoted to the subject. See also Bryan Bruce, “Pee-Wee Herman: The Homosexual Subtext,”
CinéAction n°9 (Summer 1987), 3-6; and Rob Winning, “Pee Wee Herman Un-Mascs our
Cultural Myths About Masculinity,” Journal of American Culture 2, n°2 (Summer 1988), 57-
63.
ii
Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies. Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1994).
iii
Marsha Kinder, “Back to the Future in the 80s with Fathers and Sons, Supermen and Pee
Wees, Gorillas and Toons,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 42, n° 4, 1989, 2-3.
iv
Although both terms have been given various definitions by scholars over the years, I
authorize myself within the confines of this discussion to use them as virtual synonyms in so
far as, historically, both forms of social constructions and cultural dynamics have contributed
to the creation and maintenance of unequal relationships between civilizations through
physical force (army, police) and/or the imposition of cultural hegemony.
v
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,
1600-1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1973).
vi
See for instance Antoine De Baecque’s Tim Burton (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2010).
vii
The Disney toys could also have been discussed here, but other writers have elaborated on
the racist and misogynistic aspects of classic Disney films. Although dated, the most famous
study on the subject remains Ariel Dorfman, How to Read Donald Duck, Imperialist Ideology
in the Disney Comic (International General, 1998).
viii
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 52.
ix
Michael Ryan, op. cit. p. 56
x
“Mythology reproduces the world with its significances heightened beyond normal measure,
so that the smallest actions are heavy with cosmic significances, and every conflict appears to
press toward ultimate fatalities and final solutions. The American mythology of violence
continually invokes the prospect of genocidal warfare and apocalyptic, world-destroying
massacres; and there is enough violence in the history of the Indian wars, the slave trade, the
labor/management strife of industrialization, the crimes and riots of our chaotic urbanization,
and our wars against nationalist and Communist insurgencies in Asia and Latin America to
justify many critics in the belief that America is an exceptionally violent society” (Richard
Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industralization,
1800-1890 (Harper Perennial, 61)).
xi
On this point, see Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica. The Politics and
Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
xii
In the Marxist sense, the fetish enables the subject to repress the knowledge of the social
work which went into the production of an object and to believe in the latter’s autonomy, as if
it was sprung from nature. As in Freud’s conception, the fetish is granted the religious
function of a totem to which the subject yields in order to avoid coming to terms with social
reality and the recognition of the sexual, racial and class Other. On a social scale, the fetish
functions to repress History and the realities of social/class struggles.
xiii
Joshua Bellin, op. cit., 7-8.
xiv
R.G. Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and
Literature (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1996) 59. On the topic, see also Reiss, The
Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2001).
xv
For a history of the freak show, see Robert Bogdan, Freak Show, Presenting Human
Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
xvi
“Physically masked, the clown worked with the stubborn, humorous mule, neither horse
nor donkey, and the pig, a fully liminal, fully humanized animal at the circus. He also drove
ungainly teams of ostriches instead of horses” (Janet Davis, The Circus Age, Culture and
Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
2002, 170)).
xvii
Janet Davis, op. cit., 34-35.
xviii
Benjamin Reiss, op. cit., 127
xix
Christopher Sharett, “The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Planks of
Reason (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1996) 270.
xx
I explore the ideological implications of Pee Wee’s visit to the Alamo in an essay to be
published in a special issue of Profils américains (Tim Burton: A Cinema of Transformations,
ed. Gilles Ménégaldo. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017).
xxi
Only two black characters in minor roles appear in the film.
xxii
J. Davis, op. cit., p. 174. Blackface clowns portrayed African American characters by
blackening their face using burnt cork and then using white make-up to make their lips
standout so their expressions were easily seen (See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface
Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Under different guises, this cultural tradition crops up in several Burton movies, starting with
Beetlejuice. Played by Mickael Keaton, Betelgeuse is a sexually uninhibited, macabre
Auguste clown. He sports a white make-up and the area around his eyes is covered with black
paint. Hired to scare away an obnoxious bourgeois family, his anarchistic, sexually
threatening “lower class” behavior quickly turns him into the bigger threat.
xxiii
See Bellin, op. cit., and Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth. Race, Politics,
and Popular Culture (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).
xxiv
The foundational work on the topic remains Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage,
1979).
xxv
It could be argued that the movie-within-the movie at the end of the film plays the same
function. An action-packed film starring James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild fighting ninjas,
the movie is a seeming indictment of Hollywood and of the hard body/action film tradition
studied by Susan Jeffords. One could say that the obvious stereotypical aspects of the film
(Brolin frees Fairchild from a savage Asian threat) serves to clear the embedding narrative of
its racist connotations, taking upon itself the flaws of the film the way Dorian Gray’s picture
absorbs the moral ugliness of its model.
xxvi
In The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Kaiser describes the grotesque as the feeling of
alienation felt by the individual subject when the familiar and commonplace is undermined by
the uncanny or alien: “it is our world which ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would
be unable to live in this changed world. The grotesque instills fear of life rather than fear of
death” (Geoffrey Harpham, “The Grotesque: First Principles,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, Vol. 34, N°4, (1976), 462.
xxvii
Mikhaïl Bakhtin has analyzed the carnival as a historical tradition and aesthetics
subverting official powers through the celebration of the marginal and the freakish (Rabelais
and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
xxviii
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986), 178.
xxix
See Antoine De Baecque, op. cit. See also Berthomieu, Pierre. Hollywood, le temps des
voyants. Pertuis : Rouge Profond, 2013.
xxx
Movies such as the Indiana Jones series (particularly the Temple of Doom), John
Guillermin’s remake of King Kong (1976) or the Star Wars movies, have been perceived by
some film critics and cultural historians as a form of symbolical backlash, undermining the
subversive or progressive representations of race, class or gender achieved in the 1960s and
promoting a politically conservative agenda. According to Tony Williams, “In addition to
retreating from radical social themes, 1980s Hollywood regressed stylistically and
thematically to classical Hollywood narrative structures” (The Family in the American Horror
Film, London: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1996, 164-165). See also Robin Wood,
Hollywood, from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.