In Which We Are The Only Shadow You Need Concern Yourself With

Tim Burton Was Dead Already

by DICK CHENEY

Dark Shadows
dir. Tim Burton
113 minutes

Dark Shadows cost $150 million dollars, which is about as hard to itemize and account for as the budget of the Pentagon. If that really is how much a film set basically in one, dark decrepit mansion cost to make, then Michelle Pfeiffer potentially received a career encompassing honorarium totalling $69 million, since there is nothing in this movie that suggests that even an ounce of care went into it.

Tim Burton obviously never got his hands on a Hollywood memo that originated in the late 1980s from the office of Robert Towne, Syd Field or Robert McKee. I can reconstruct it almost from memory.

Dear Everyone,

Guys. Writing to let you know that one level of irony is no longer enough.

For example: a baseball player is afflicted with a life-threatening disease, but each time he hits a home run he feels a little better. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the baseball player is a woman. $$$$$$

An alien wants to return to his ancestral home planet and enlists the help of children (small adults) to get there. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the alien resembles a Jewish grandmother. $$$$$$

Two levels of irony, guys. (Or three if it's a remake of an old Ronald Reagan movie.)

Carry on.

I'm not even sure the concept of a vampire out of place contains any irony at all by now, although the concept of Michelle Pfeiffer looking like this at the age of 72 is certainly akin to rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you've already paid.

you know what you have to do

Dark Shadows concerns Barnabas Collins, a lovesick eighteenth century gentleman who employs a witch (Eva Green) as a maid. Envious of the love he offers to another white girl, she enchants the woman to throw herself off a cliff. Barnabas follows in short order, but instead of dying, he just rolls around next to the corpse of the woman he loves. He's immortal, and upset about it for some reason.

Barnabas returns to the seventies and is extremely surprised by modern inventions like the television. Actually, this is the only new development he is alarmed by at all. In fact, it's almost more astonishing how little has changed since 1792. This itself might have been that elusive second level of irony, but this is Tim Burton we're talking about here. The only new thought he's had since Beetlejuice is, we should add the color purple to that.

But no, you say. Surely Johnny Depp couldn't be doing the exact same voice he used for all eleven Pirates of the Carribbean movies and The Tourist? He must have really thrown himself into the role offered by his close friend and goatee groomer! What wouldn't one dark lion do for another, unless the other dark lion was Grover Norquist?

Depp looks to be half asleep for most of Dark Shadows. It's clear he's only really trying when he's involved in a scene with Helena Bonham Carter, who is so much more beautiful than the other women in the cast that it makes absolutely no sense she's treated like an old woman who wants to replenish her body's vitality with undead platelets.

act bad everyone, act bad!

This is Burton's inner sexist at work — he gives people what he thinks they either want or don't want to see it here, because he lacks the human concept of empathy and he's colorblind as fuck. The fact that he would do this to someone he cares about in real life makes the betrayal even more disturbing.

Try to watch the original Dark Shadows on YouTube. It's hard to decide which of the two is worse, although at least the original was at the time presenting a somewhat novel concept. Dark Shadows appeared during the day like any other soap, although by virtue of the fact it was breaking the conventions of the genre, it managed to stand out and garner an audience. Today the concept itself is utterly normal; what would be genre-defying would be to have a movie not about a vampire living in modernity.

Sometimes you have to zig when others zag. Tim Burton left his first wife for Lisa Marie, and then later when he ditched Lisa Marie she auctioned off all his stuff. This was the only time he zigged, and I guess it didn't turn out too well, so he started to take the gothic thing to the extreme and acted like he made it up.

People would be like, "Tim, you know you didn't invent the whole gothic aesthetic, right?" and he would just sob and prepare a maudlin adaptation of The Bob Newhart Show before leaving it during preproduction. Have you ever seen Tim Burton's visual art? Just squint your eyes at a VHS copy of Edward Scissorhands, twist your penis slightly to the right and you'll get the fucking picture.

designing this room alone cost $40 million dollars

Perhaps the most predictable scene in Dark Shadows occurs when Barnabas manufactures some reason to get high with a bunch of young people. A scene where the main character gets high and the camera pans around the circle as in That 70s Show is now a familiar staple of every picture, I think this even happened in the Margaret Thatcher movie I refused to see because Meryl Streep makes me sad about my life. After he exchanges various insights with stoners on a beach, he murders them and drains their bodies of blood. In the theater, this "idea" did not even get a single laugh or chuckle from the audience. You can't murder someone if they're already dead.

OK see you guys later. And don't watch Veep. It's totally unrealistic.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States and a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about Game of Thrones. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

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