Mark Sinker says:
Here’s what I love about Tim Burton: the inextricable knot of his constant absolute contrary rage. He is angry at Hollywood for
i. ignoring him even as they
ii. endlessly eagerly embrace and hire him.
How can they SO TOTALLY NOT “GET IT” and STILL LIKE HIS WORK grrr argh bah hmphh! And periodically he delivers stuff which is so contorted by fury and this’ll-teach-em spite that it really barely functions (cf eg Mars
Attacks!”), and there’s more than just a tremor of that self-destructive passion passing through tNbC: in which – just to stress the point for those who never saw it – Santa Claus is kidnapped and (very nearly) tortured at the behest of Jack Skellington, the King of Halloween, who takes his place and delivers eg severed shrunken heads and dread instead of presents and jolly cheer, until at the last hurried minute, true loving kindness triumphs and everything is put right after all grrr argh bah hmphh!
So if you think all that matters is the ending, then yes, SELL OUT ya big Goth Nonce!!
BUT HERE ARE THE REASONS WHY THIS SHD NOT BE YR ONLY RESPONSE:
i. Endings are not meanings
ii. True love maybe, but the love object is SEWN TOGETHER OUT OF CORPSE FRAGMENTS hurrah!
iii. The exact precise centre of this film – it wd be nice to hang a get-out-of-intellectual-jail-free slavoj-zizeky label-explanation on it, abt the “impossibility of the gift” or some such – is when Jack Skellington races his sleigh and dead reindeer across the face of the moon while the people below FIRE GIANT HOWITZER SHELLS AT HIM!
iv. bcz recall that Santa entered the Western PopCult bloodstream as a result of the genius propaganda-work of US Civil War cartoonist Thomas
Nast, as the North imposed industrialised pagan materialism on the racist Xtian heirarchies of the South…! (this settlement possibly just recently ended?)
v. so that Skellington, as avatar of all witchwood pre-Xtian iconicity and communal joy as SWEPT ASIDE and ICONOCLASTED by the puritans, gets momentarily to show again the necessary darkness at the heart of the santa story, where the helpin’ elves = imps of the polymorphous perverse and “I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES” = eternal return of the human desire to consume the world hurrah
vi. and you can tell by the loving care of the input which elements in this stand-off burton sides with (inc.even the defeated Ooga-Booga, who sings and dances in pure heathen Max Fleischer jazz-age hommage) (ie he sounds and acts black, even though he’s drawn
green) (and yes he’s the villain and is defeated BUT the world-as-shd-be is not possible w/o him)
vii. bcz burton’s bottom line is strictly anti-one-god pokemon-pantheistic: you gotta COLLECT em all bcz one day you gnna NEED em all (and meanwhile the world fills up.w all the little animist franchise-figurine godlings from this and other burton projects)
viii. plus also skellington’s ghost dog ZERO is the doggiest cartoon dog ever and I DON’T GENERALLY EVEN LIKE DOGS