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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
Amanda Smith
When I rented the The Nightmare Before Christmas in preparation for editing Alan Bond's "Skeletons, Rag Dolls, and Ambiguous Swamp Creatures," I discovered that the emphases of those who assembled its DVD extras coincided with my prior associations with the film. As I anticipated, the "bonus materials" of the special edition DVD version focus on director Tim Burton's characteristically eccentric vision for the film and the technical intricacies of realizing his vision. Having already given Bond's paper a careful reading, however, when watching the film itself, I came to appreciate his illumination of a hitherto overlooked element of The Nightmare Before Christmas . As Bond astutely observes, the emotional depth with which Burton imbues the characters Jack and Sally, by extension, often challenges the narrow gender roles usually depicted in fairy tales.
Bond begins his essay by admitting that, at first glance, one might not expect The Nightmare Before Christmas to score many points with feminists in terms of its progressive potential. Indeed, the film seems to replicate the clichés of fairy tales' patriarchal history: the lead female character, Sally, appears to invoke the "Cinderella" stereotype of the oppressed domestic cooking and cleaning for a tyrannical master. Bond is quick to debunk such a facile (mis)interpretation of the film, however. Sally is not the passive female rescued by a fairy godmother and, ultimately, by a handsome prince. Instead, she takes her freedom into her own hands by boldly poisoning her captor, Dr. Finklestein. At the same time, Bond concedes, Sally is not quite a modern liberated woman. Despite the subversive subplot of her escape from Dr. Finklestein, her narrative purpose is primarily to support the male protagonist, Jack. She not only sews for him as she did for Dr. Finklestein; she also forsakes realizing her own goals and instead channels her energy into saving Jack from the consequences of his misguided attempt to establish Christmas in Halloweentown.
As Bond widens his analysis to include Jack and the other equally "ambiguous" characters of The Nightmare Before Christmas , one begins to imagine that the film viewer's unconscious mind must be quite uncertain how to process the contradictory gendered messages the film sends. In the final portion of his essay, Bond speculates that the sensitivity of children, in particular, will prove a double-edged sword in this regard: children will be more receptive to the film's subversions, yet they are less able to interrogate the stereotypes invoked by The Nightmare Before Christmas .
The single characteristic of Bond's essay that might be considered problematic is indicative of the magnitude of the broader implications of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Re-reading Bond's essay, it strikes me again that he attempts to enlist too many theoretical concepts from his research sources. Yet this "flaw" is also owing to the fact that the case material is too rich to be fully analyzed in a short essay; the progressive ¾ and regressive ¾ potential of modern fairy tales requires a much lengthier study.
When I returned to rent The Nightmare Before Christmas in preparation for writing this commentary, I also checked out a second DVD which I had noticed during my initial visit to the video store. Barbie: Fairytopia is an animated film in which Mattel's plastic waif "comes to life" as "Elina"; initially persecuted because she is the sole wingless fairy in Fairytopia, Elina is rewarded with a pair of wings after she successfully completes a perilous journey to save the kingdom from the villainous clutches of Laverna. Watching the fairy-tale stereotypes Bond described so well being mapped onto a computer-animated version of Barbie's already problematic feminine body, I was grateful to him for raising my awareness. If he does not undertake that lengthier study, perhaps I will!