identity theft
by Douglas Messerli
Scott
Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (screenplay), Tim Burton (director) Big Eyes / 2014
Before she can even adjust to the new
marriage, he has stolen the two things she loves most in her life: her daughter
and her art. He steals away the child not through paying any unusual attention
to her, but by challenging the young girl’s memory of her mother and severing
their relationship as he puts Margaret to work at creating the saucer-eyed
nymphets that dominate her art, which he quickly grabs away by taking the credit
for creating, insisting that the Keane signature with which the married
Margaret now signs her work, is his, while hissing out to her calm her
demurrals that “lady art doesn’t sell."
With the help of a local newspaper writer
working on celebrity columns, the shyster Keane was able to somehow get front
cover newspaper, television, and radio attention for a product that the noted
art critic John Canady (played here by the always watchable Terence Stamp) proclaimed
as being “atrocious.” Despite the cynicism of other local art gallerists to the
contrary, is it any wonder that Walter desired to take some of the credit for
creating the art itself?
But Walter wanted all the credit, turning his wife into a virtual slave, who, hidden
away for hours each day, created closets and closets of the stuff. Perhaps even
more importantly, the work she was pouring her heart into was not precisely what
one might imagine as the best definition of “art.” Burton’s film, presumably, would
like to argue otherwise, hinting that its creators would like its audience to
engage in such questions as “who decides what’s good or bad?” and, as with
issues such as Warhol argues, “how can anything so beloved by so many be
anything but good?” The filmmakers even proffer the possibility, in their often
inane declarations, that Margaret was a sort of pre-feminist, willing in the
end, to fight to get her own name and identity back.
If Margaret had her identity stolen
through her art, so too had she created an art that, although imminently
recognizable, had no identity itself. Every gamin, be it boy or girl, dressed
as a harlequin or in Hawaiian garb, playing with a dog or simply moping around
a darkened corner, is precisely like every other one of its kind: a thing
(unrecognizable ultimately as a depiction of a human being) of horrifically
large peepers.
Why unsophisticated US consumers were so
attracted to these monstrous figures —monstrous, when we recall that that word
is derived from meanings that express a “warning” or “demonstration”—that point
to one thing only, their unnaturally enlarged eyes, is inexplicable. One might
almost be tempted to argue that it expresses either immense sentimentality of
post-war US culture (“aren’t these unidentifiable interplanetary figures
absolutely adorable?”) or, possibly, the postwar adult generation’s purposeful
goal of terrifying their children the way the war had terrorized them. Fortunately
my parents preferred rustic rural scenes and faux Monets to cover our suburban house halls!
It should come as no surprise that the
only art historical reference Margaret makes mention of is her admiration for
Modigliani, who painted exceptionally elongated necks? For her art clearly
represents, much as it did for her gold-digging husband, merely a gimmick
rather than an engagement to comprehend something within the world or one self.
It is also absolutely predictable that
even when Margaret does succeed in regaining her name, she gives over her life
once more to a force bigger than her, the religion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—who
firmly believe in a patriarchal-based society in which abortion, marriage
outside the religion, homosexuality, and even political involvement with the
world around them is a sin. They can drink (as everyone in this film
does—heavily), and they can sue.
And it’s hardly surprising that a film
devoted to the abolishment of what makes someone different from someone else,
should ultimately lose its own identity, hammering down its subjects with
simple-minded prescriptions of humankind. Amy Adams does her best to reveal a
real being beneath the meek and nearly speechless Margaret by expressing
through facial and other body gestures a whole range of internalized tensions. Waltz
is nearly perfect at playing the Jekyll and Hyde alterations of charmer and
abuser. But these roles, like the nasty hiss of Canady’s proclamations, are so
one-dimensional that even these talented actors have a difficult time in
showing us anything to care about.
But the only vertiginous sensation one
might feel in Burton’s film is expressed in the artist’s own distress in
observing her large eyes being pasted across the faces of everyone she meets in
a local supermarket.
Los Angeles,
April 21, 2015
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