Tim Burton’s “Filled” Spaces: Alice in Wonderland

Henri Lefebvre suggests that trying to talk about what he terms the “truth of space,” even in manifestly spatial forms like film, is always a challenging proposition, thanks to a preconception we commonly bring to the discussion. As he notes, “great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it” (15). And that idea, that sense of the empty and the filled, or a before and an after, simply distracts us from recognizing an important cultural dimension of space—that, as Lefebvre theorizes, “space is a social product” that we are always producing, always inhabiting, although seldom seeing (26). I want to suggest that this perspective is an especially useful one for assessing the work of Tim Burton, not only because he so often works with the manifestly constructed spaces of animation, but because his films so frequently foreground that work, addressing in a very direct way the nature of those spaces in which we live, that we so often overlook, as if they were simply “empty” and thus effectively invisible, but that ultimately have such a crucial social—as well as psychological—import. This is because his films repeatedly set their action in multiple spaces, worlds, or realms that, if often unseen, exist side-by-side, but that his narratives suddenly bring into contact and render visible—as in the cases of the lands of the living and the dead found in Beetlejuice (1988), the cookie-cutter American suburbia abutting the ancient castle of Edward Scissorhands (1990), big studio Hollywood and its alter ego Poverty Row in Ed Wood (1994), the metropolis of New York and the cursed Sleepy Hollow of Sleepy Hollow (1999), and especially a Victorian England and its Underland counterpart from Alice in Wonderland (2010).