Comic genius and trenchant social criticism have a lot in common, as both traditions do with pop art, and that is the quality of coming “off the wall” at any subject, the ability to let go of one’s rational faculties and inhabit a kind of madness. We once saw Vincent Price walking down Market Street in San Francisco, wearing a black silk cape and bright red platform shoes. Surprise!
If you don’t just carry on a conversation, linear in nature, but love to riff like a jazz musician, you’re probably capable of being off the wall. Improv is so much more interesting than sticking to the script. Eric Berne, the man who wrote the classic, Games People Play, wrote a later book, called What Do You Say After You Say Hello? These script-breakers, are all about refusing to play the usual games. That’s the spirit I’m talking about.
Nothing mean-spirited about it. If anything, it expresses a love of life, a vitality outside the norm. If you enjoy, for example, people watching, sitting at the mall or in stores, strolling the farmers market, visiting a place like El Mercado in L.A., and finding every face in the crowd beautiful, each in its own way, you’ve got it.
Life is its own cure. Everything we do is therapeutic in one sense. But creativity, making things, telling stories, getting into the beat and rhythm of a good rockin’ poem or song — these little actions can be the most clearly therapeutic of all. There’s a certain quality that all artists share.
I watched an interview recently, Tim Burton on Charlie Rose, and was struck by how much his childhood and mine had in common. Growing up, we were both enchanted by comic books, by horror movies, by dinosaurs, as many boys are. But around age ten, when a lot of kids find their childhood passions shutting down, or being turned off by bad teachers and dumb parents, he and I were both exploding into new dimensions.
I discovered, in a classroom housing the 5th & 6th grades in Blue Lake, California, a town of some 350 people, the cultures of Mexico and Hawaii, airports and sharks. Working on collaborative bas relief maps of the islands, learning to dance La Cucaracha, working with classmates on a huge color poster of sea life, visiting tide pools in nearby Trinidad, and discovering that I had an I.Q. of 168 — all gave me great expectations of myself.
At the same age, Burton, who had always been told he was strange, not only began to believe it, but saw what a liberating fact it could be. “If you’re strange, you don’t have to care what you look like, what you wear, what you say,” he smiles. “You can let your imagination run free.” And he did, indulging his fantasies in drawings and making Super 8 movies. At 15, he won his first contest, and saw his drawing for “Crunch Trash” on the sides of garbage trucks all over town.
I began watching his movies with my own boys, Max & Mitch, when they were very young, first renting and then getting our own copy of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, which went a long way in forming their characters, and mine. Together, we later enjoyed Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Batman. As they grew older, so did the movies take on greater complexity, from Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of Burton’s best.
In 2007, again working with Johnny Depp, he made Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and is now at work on Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. This month a huge exhibit of his work opened at the New York Museum of Modern Art, and the catalogue from that show is absolutely stunning. Burton is ranked today among the Pop Artists of mid-2oth Century onward, and in my imagination he and Andy Warhol are kindred spirits — about as off the wall as you can get.
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