A Disjointed,
Free-Writing, Interpretive Essay on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland from an Eclectic’s Perspective
Do your stretches first. Reach for the sky, then swan dive to the
floor, keeping your legs straight, and stretch those hammies until they burn.
Take a deep breath, reach for the sky, and exhaling, gently dive back down
again. Now let’s go down the rabbit
hole. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but
we’ll emerge stronger and more enlightened at the end of this contemplative
expedition.
“Mad people are always the best,” Alice’s
father tells her at a grueling garden party.
This is often true. After all, new ideas are frequently seen as
madness…Einstein was viewed by many as being as crazy as his hair. (Lady Gaga,
anyone? Her madness is worth millions.)
Those of us who are cultural anomalies find it seemingly impossible
sometimes to stand up for our hairdos, especially when they are different
everyday, depending on how we slept the night before.
Alice’s father represents her world of
bizarre dreams and ideas, as he reinforced her creativity and ingenuity. I mean, wouldn’t you be more likely to run
out to an ice cream truck playing “Poker Face” instead of “Do Your Ears Hang
Low”? The White Rabbit’s ears stuck
straight up, and he was more concerned about Maryanne bring him his gloves than
sitting down and having a creamsicle. Moreover, Alice’s father is not the
quintessential patriarch of the era in which the story is set.
In the wondiforous world of is
is isn’t, and isn’t is, her mother is naturally the head of the roost. She is the dominant household leader, and
tries her best to stuff her daughter in a Victorian Alice-in-a-box. To her mother’s dismay, Alice learned how to
wind her own crank, and her mother’s temper.
She nonchalantly “forgets” to put on her corset, and pops out her own
engagement party.
She burns all metaphorical bridges, and
attempts pyromaniacy with the metaphorical ramps to the Gazeebo on which her
arranged fiancé, Hamish, proposes to her in front of her friends and
family. Alice is brave, and refuses to
let Hamish’s feigned burning passion squash her creativity. In front of the entire party, she refuses the
proposal and runs away. Her mother
obviously remembered nothing from her lessons on Newton. For every engagement party, there is an equal
and opposite dive down the Rabbit hole into Wonderland, or Underland.
Down the Rabbit hole she goes, following
her own imaginative rabbit into a world that claims its own logic, equally
opposite her mother’s. Submersed in her
own projected reality, she loses the independent thinking she used to cultivate
it. In her own illogical world, she finds
she has no option than to give up everything about her considered unique, her
“muchness” as she calls it.
In her own unexplored dream, she has no
other option than to try to fit in suing the knowledge of pre-established roles
(just as her mother expected her to do at the garden party). Her creativity was completely stunted, being
overwhelmed by the world she herself created.
In Underland, she has to learn to follow her own path, completely
unaware that she had paved it herself.
She has to discover who she is, and learn to have the courage to fight
her own demons, assisted by her own angels.
At first, she is so insecure with who she
is and who she is not in Underland that she, and many others in her dream world
including the pessimistic caterpillar, Absalom, are not convinced that she is the Alice—the Alice destined to save
Underland. Such is the absurdity of fate
and providence. Development coincides
with being shaped into a predetermined mold, and new ideas are considered
madness, yet we are all expected to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune with naught but our predecessors’ knowledge and experience instead of
our own. I’ve been there, I’ve done that.
When will Homo sapiens learn that the most important lessons in life
are learned independently?
Alice is equipped to deal with the
obstacles of her own reality, but how is a goldfish supposed to know there’s
another world outside of his bowl? How
is he supposed to escape the little plastic castle unless he jumps into the
toilet and is flushed down the hole? Poor things only have a two-second memory,
so thanks to their own “lucky” line of evolution, they don’t have to worry
about it. Alice, on the other hand, has
to be flushed down into her own imagination to be saved from her own villains,
and to learn to distinguish between the two.
She had to learn the answers to the classic questions of the human
condition on her own.
Is
this the real me, or am I an imposter acting out a part on the world’s stage?
Should
I be trusted?
Will
I survive, and how?
Can
I suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?
How the hell am I supposed to
discern reality from my own imagination?
When I find myself asking these questions,
I say to myself, “You cannot know; the Truth will present itself”. I just have to choose between the blue pill
and the red, fall down the rabbit hole until I learn that I am The One, and no
matter how many came before me. Me,
myself, and I will decide how this dream will end. Only I can decide how deep it goes.
The opposite of fear is compassion. The
opposite of sympathy is empathy. The
opposite of reality is a dream. I
learned in psych that dreams are just a technique the brain uses to store the
information it wants to keep, filing it away in compartments on a spectrum of
short term and long term. If you’re
lucky, you can move the filing cabinet and find a hole that ends in John
Malcovich’s mind. I’m sure you’ve heard
that you can never die in a dream, or you will die in real life. A dream remembered is a dream interrupted,
because in the sleep of death, what possible dreams may come?
One’s safety depends on the safety of loved
ones. Why else, when fear takes hold, do
we try so hard to escape them? It’s important to remember that we must love
ourselves before we can love someone else.
Alice protects first and foremost the Mad Hatter, her alter ego, the
person she is deep down, flashing like a colorful and unpredictable neon
sign. She must learn its history by
recognizing the patterns of its light.
In order to save her own light from burning out, to save her own identity,
she must save the Mad Hatter. He is her
primary supporter. After all, you are your number one fan. The Mad Hater’s most vital quality is that he
not only needs her to persevere and
succeed, he wants her to.
Soon enough, he learns that Alice serves
the White Queen, the queen of purity, not the renowned Red Queen of Hearts, the
queen of blood and death. The Red Queen
represents Alice’s mother, the patriarch of her authoritarian high
society. The entirety of the Red Queen’s
subjects fears her because who in their right mind wouldn’t fear death? They fear madness and uniqueness. The White
Queen is set apart, holy in her sister’s tyranny. She is Goldylock’s porridge—not too hot, not
too cold, but juuuuuusttt right!
Alice’s quest is to save Underland from the
Red Queen, from the totalitarianism that opposes originality so harshly. She must restore the White Queen’s power,
which will restore values of constructive introspection, individual
sovereignty, and allow the madness required to create one’s own reality. To do this, she has to defeat the Red Queen’s
Jabberwocky with the White Queen’s magical sword, the mythical creature’s only
Kryptonite. In order to slay the
creature, she must learn not to instinctively flee the situation she perceives
as harmful, but learn why it is harmful.
In order to wake up from a dream, one must distinguish and separate it
from reality. Discernment is crucial.
When Alice screams, “Off with your Head!”,
and slices through the Jabberwocky’s neck with the White Queen’s sword of
discernment, she cuts off everything she hates: boundaries and rules fettering
the enhancement of her Self, and the perpetuating destruction of
creativity. She has won the battle
against conventional roles of her time, found the freedom to refuse Hamish’s
proposal, and start her own adventure.
As we all do in every REM cycle, Alice found solace in her own dream;
Her transformation is complete.
