After the initial credits, we are situated in a warm, cosy bedroom with the Grandma (Kim) who is telling the story; she is telling the story of Edward Scissorhands to her Grand-Daughter, as she tells and describes the castle, the child adds her opinion. When this starts to happen, it satires the fairytales of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, just re-invited, with the two characters swapped around. Within the room there is a big contrast, the bed is oversized for this little girl, its larger than life, its making the girl look small, representing that the bed is a safe place, and a secure place that is snug and very protected. In the film, there is a very stereotypical grandma, she being very motherly, being very caring, telling a bedtime story to the little child, telling the story around a fireplace, rocking in her chair, telling it in a story-teller way. The reality of it is that the film is keeping the way we see old people alive, not being so deceptive, and keeping it as it is. The bedroom and the outside are contrasted in almost every single aspect; the room is full of warming, soothing and bright colours such as orange and yellow, giving it that safe feeling, its signifies the loving feel within the film, and you see everything that takes place as it starts with an extra long shot, so we can see how safe it is, and how everything in the bedroom is placed soothingly together. Although, when the grandma’s starts to tell her story and talks about the castle with the ‘monster’ of Edward in it, there is an immediate change of colours. It becomes dark, icy and isolated, totally different to the bedroom, it is very symbolic; the outside signifies an unhappy and dark feeling. Here again, showing that this film is trying to signify a horror gothic genre.
Soon after we see the suburban town, the atmosphere is very tidy and perfect, the grass is green and neatly cut, the cars are shining, everything is decorated, nothing out of place and the houses are perfect pastel colours, and they match in a way that altogether the neighbourhood signifies a utopia. The ‘perfect’ place. However, on the other hand, the housewives make it is contrasted to what we believe the place is, trying to deceive the audience. The first housewife is a bit hard on peg, crude, curls in her hair and let’s face it, a bit overweight. So really not so perfect like we expect her house is shown to be. The next housewife is impatient, not very kind, and only interested in herself, although she flirts quite a lot as she gets lonely making that the reason on why she does it. Really you expect her to be kind and everything you expect her to be of that what her home tells us. As we move on, we come to the third housewife. This housewife is very childlike, very young, dependent on other people, and wants many silly things she doesn’t really need. Not very mature and irresponsible, especially to be a wife. She’s being the child within her. So far, we haven’t seen one perfect housewife. Finally, the last housewife is a loner, rather odd. A bit crazy and hardly anyone knows or talks to her or wants to talk to her as she has many different views to her surrounding neighbours. However, Peg is rather different to the rest, she works to get her own money as well as be a good mother/housewife. Peg the Avon lady goes to the castle because she wants to sell her products, needs the money and customers, as no-one buys them, but then again, Peg is secretly being nosey as no-one goes up there, no-one knows what the castle is about, she wants to find out about it, in a way where it shows really, she’s trying to sell her products. Showing the audience, that the neighbourhood isn’t what we expect it to be, and is deceptive because something is bound to go wrong.
The Avon lady in a way is represented very symbolically, and stereotyping a mother figure, she is very caring and takes Edward into her home, looks after him as mothers would do, she looks out for him, and she’s raising a happy family. Peg and the castle are both contrasted in different ways to each other, and it’s a bit like good versus evil, Peg is very innocent, neat, tidy, and truthful and even brightly coloured, where as the castle is derelict, looks very dangerous, total opposite of peg, nothing like her. When Peg enters the Castle Garden, it is very surprising, to her and the audience, its a very creative garden, you expect it to be untidy to be down as the Castle is, but the Garden is very deceptive compared to the castle it belongs to. It makes you think, what kind of person makes this, and why is it like this? And of course you think that someone who is kind, caring and proud has obviously produces a neatly cut, never seen before garden. You have a garden, a castle, and the garden is the total opposite of what you think, just like the suburban town.
Edward represents people in an unusual way but also in a stereotypical way, just like Edward you see him as a scary person, well your first instincts is that he is a scary person because the way the lighting with him in the background all you see is the sharp scissors he’s a very alienated character, but really he is very childlike, doesn’t know what is going on really, seems to be dangerous but really there is a huge false understanding, and that’s why Peg acts the way she does when she first sees Edward. When she enters the castle her stereotype changes, as well as the music changes, its calm and sweet and as she begins to walk up the stairs and see Edward the music becomes more dramatic, bolder and louder, giving the audience the feeling of suspense. The way the music changes and the type of horror music playing gives you the feel that something bad is going to happen, but then she see’s Edward and starts to act all motherly, but when Edward comes into the light, and you see him in his leather suit and scars all over his face her first instinct is to back away. She’s scared of Edwards, she fears him, she gasps because of what she see’s, she starts to walk back, and Edward walks towards her, Peg then automatically gestures him to stop, but Edward is calm, very child like, very innocent and Peg realises he is ok, she then changes back to the stereotype of a mother, she’s caring once again, she asks sweet calm questions like ‘’are you alone’’. Once Peg has asked all these questions, she doesn’t even give Edward the chance to answer them, she takes control. She begins touching his face, tries to change him and mould him, trying to cover up the nasty scars until she decides to take him and look after him there and try and change him. She does all this because she knows he isn’t harmful, he is just confused and a guiltless character.
At the beginning of this essay I mentioned that Edward Scissorhands had references of sleeping beauty, this is one of the fairytale conventions, because Edward is like the beast, and he falls in love with Pegs Daughter who is the Beauty, although it would never work because they are just so different, Edward would never be safe in the suburban town and Kim would never be happy in the castle, all locked up. Other fairytales that can relate to this film are fairytales such as Jack and the Beanstalk, the reason I think this is because Peg is a small person, she is tiny, and here she goes into a humongous castle, the door to the castle is twice the size of her, and then she looks up to the big hole in the roof, the size of the hole is engulfing her, making her look really small. At the end of it all we are again given the view of Suburbia, this place is represented as perfect but as we all know after watching the film, looks can be deceiving. This signifies that although the outside appearance might look perfect, really everything inside looks completely different, and this is just like Edwards, he looks like a monster on in the outside, but on the insides he is nice and just wanted to be understood, accepted, just the other monsters we know, like Frankenstein, looks evil but on the inside is a nice and caring and just wants to be normal. And at some point everyone feels like Edward at some point, everyone sometimes feels misunderstood and excluded and all he wants to do is fit in, but he never can, he isn’t safe in suburbia, where as the castle is the only place he will be. At the same time, Tim Burton, the director of the film, is satirising suburbia. He’s playing of the fact the housewives are shown, or known to be perfect, and by using Edward he’s using the humour and exaggeration, showing a bit what the suburban town is like, criticising the suburban life and what we think about it all. Finally signifying that what we see on the film means something else to what we actually see.
