Not only are you the exact brand of person who Neon Genesis Evangelion is about, you are also the exact brand of person who would completely and confidently miss the point of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
sometimes you come across an essay that says everything you've always wanted to say about a thing but could never quite work out how to fit together all in one place. this is one of my those. like a lot of film-loving millennials who went through an emo phase, Tim Burton holds a very special and deeply complicated place in my heart. the bizarre gothic aesthetics of his worlds brimming over with eccentric freaks captured my imagination as a deeply closeted trans teen who didn't feel normal anywhere [she] went. yes i wanted to be Lydia from Beetlejuice, no i never sat down and questioned what that might say about me personally! some of my earliest childhood memories are of playing with a plastic action figure of Catwoman from Batman Returns. that's not really related to anything, i just wanted to mention accidentally stabbing myself in the hand with one of her ears so hard it drew blood when i was a toddler. so obviously as an aspiring writer with dreams of maybe one day directing movies, Tim Burton felt like the perfect role model for the kind of creator i wanted to be back in 2002.
but as the years went on and Burton revealed himself to be maybe the biggest sellout of his generation, i stopped really thinking about his films and kind of felt embarrassed for having liked them as much as i once did. i think people who grew up with his stuff had this feeling that, like, Edward Scissorhands or whatever was their own personal secret, this little missive from Burton to you that no one else understood, that only you were smart enough to get. but then time happened and suddenly you realized that actually most people liked his stuff, you just didn't get out much. it's sort of like how when you're a teen in 2004 Neon Genesis Evangelion is this niche special interest no one's ever heard of that people would make fun of you for liking if their eyes didn't glaze over halfway through the title, and then you grow up and learn that Eva is the eighth most financially successful anime franchise on planet earth and you're like what
narratively Burton's films are about as socially conservative as you can get while still retaining a veneer of liberal plausible deniability. a couple years ago Maggie Mae Fish did a video dissecting Burton's work that helped clarify a lot of this stuff for me, and ever since then i've been waiting for someone else to pick up that ball and really barrel down into the psychology of the man. don't get me wrong, psychoanalytic media criticism can be dangerous and should only be deployed with excessive caution (and please for the love of god Do Not Quote Freud Jung or Lacan), but Burton's own brand is so surface-level personal and his work far too juiced up with extremely telling themes not to merit at least a little bit of psychoanalysis. i've often idly considered doing it myself, in that "this would make a really good video essay" kind of way when something isn't really in your wheelhouse but maybe would be a fun challenge if you could motivate yourself to care enough, knowing you never will.
enter Tim Burton's World of Sadboys, an essay which does all of this and more. i'm not sure i actually have a whole lot to say about this one, besides that it's everything i hoped it would be from the thumbnail. host Delaney Jordan very succinctly conjures the eternal specter hanging over the Burton oeuvre: that he's one of the vanishingly few directors this century who has had carte blanche to make just about anything he wanted, yet he's consistently chosen to make films about lonely white boys who are sad they can't wear their The Cure t-shirt into the office, and who are honestly quite sick of being unfairly associated with those freaks in the goth scene. the sad truth about Burton that we all had/have to come to terms with is that he's just another boring rich conservative suburbanite, except he wears black and doesn't pay anyone to touch his hair.
this essay does a couple of really smart things structurally. we kick things off with a legendary Orson Welles quote tearing down the scoundrel Woody Allen (read by the hosts of Oddity Roadshow and Critical Bits, the only actual play podcasts i still listen to), a choice that works even if you don't really know anything about Welles or Allen or Burton, and only works better the more you know about them. of course the thumbnail and section titles invoke Evangelion, but you don't really know how this could be relevant until later on when Burton is explicitly framed as a Shinji Ikari type. making that specific historical connection to Welles, within this specific overarching intertextual connection to Evangelion, is just so smart. it's such a galaxy brain framework for an essay and it's why i decided to write up this review.
it works because it gets out of the way. Jordan wastes almost no time hedging bets, making apologies, clarifying asterisks-- i spent most of my time nodding along, delighted for once to be the choir she's preaching to. sometimes i think essayists can let The Point They Want To Make eclipse the simple joy of deconstructing someone else's art. if there's any crime i've committed most as a video essayist myself, it's probably that one. what i appreciate here is, again, Jordan gets it. she gets that it's fun to rubberneck a career like Burton's. he's an easy target that you don't have to feel bad about being kind of mean to, and his work is popular enough that you don't need to waste any time doing recaps. somewhere in the middle i was disappointed to realize she wasn't structurally devoting time to Every Single Film, but by the end i was glad of it. the compulsion to Say Absolutely Everything You Can Possibly Think To Say is strong in the video essayist's heart, and let's be real most of the time that makes for pretty fucking boring essays. maybe it's weird to talk about pacing and flow in the context of a video essay, but here we are. this one just scratches an itch for me with its front to back competence. you can always tell when an essay has been brewing in someone's head for a long time, likely practiced in chunks at parties and social gatherings for years and years until the day of its final refined delivery, and oh how sweet it is when that's an experience you share.
i guess i'll end this on a serious note.
nostalgia has engulfed Hollywood. nothing new can be made because nothing new is a sure bet, so all the big developments in creative tools these days are about composting the culture that already exists. deepfakes, chat-gpt, algorithmic image generation, things of this nature. given this moment in history, i think it's more important than ever that we as adults seriously interrogate the media we're nostalgic for. Disney's place at the center of all this can't be ignored, because it's spent the better part of a century embedding its products into american childhood and thus today has an army of devotees who will defend their frankly kind of mid fairy tale cartoons to the death. Tim Burton, on a much smaller scale, has done precisely the same thing: equating his art with himself, equating loving his art with being on Tim Burton's side rather than simply, you know, enjoying a movie that you saw on tv once. and god, oh dear god, please for heaven's sake let us not even Begin to conversate on the matter of Harry Potter. we live in a moment when the average human person has been so thoroughly dispossessed of any material influence on or connection with the systems and bodies that actually drive civilization, that fiction is the only thing that feels like it belongs to us anymore. it quite demonstrably doesn't, of course, but that's the illusion Disney et al deliberately peddle in order to maintain public acceptance of their monopoly.
given all this, i'll never fail to appreciate an essay that cuts right through the blinders of nostalgia and isn't afraid to dig deep into the core of the issue. i think it's good to be a hater sometimes actually. i think it's good when a critic refuses to humor our culture's simpering deference to corporate robber barons of intellectual property and their endless stable of lazy sellout toadies like Tim Burton. idk man, there's a reason these ghouls want you to love them unconditionally and i really don't think it has anything to do with filling your life with selfless wonder and joy de vivre
anyway it's a good essay with some good laughs, go watch it
