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This article appeared in the Wilderness issue of Trinity News , the magazine of Trinity Wall Street.

By Clair McPherson

I have long been convinced that there is a certain kind of modern artist who, while rejecting conventional Christianity (or Judeo-Christianity) in all its forms, while self-identifying as an atheist, skeptic or agnostic, produces profound Christian art. The most recent filmmaker to fit this shadow-Christian pattern is Tim Burton. Specifically, Burton has more than any other recent artist dealt with that spiritual territory we might call the Desert World. His films reflect the same territory as that explored by the fourth-century Desert Fathers.

By Desert World, I mean not so much the literal sandy wastelands, as the margins of human experience. The unfamiliar territory where the uncanny is mixed with the ordinary, where the dead interact with the living, where body intersects spirit. In the remote and uncultivated regions of Egypt and the Middle East, the Desert Fathers found that border area. And though they were assaulted by demons, they were also able to carry on a much more audible conversation with God.

That is Burton’s territory as well. His films are never overtly about God or any other “religious” category. But Burton’s films most definitely explore the Desert. And because of his considerable cinematic skills, they do this very effectively indeed.

Consider an early film, Beetlejuice. The title character, an antihero for the millennium, presides hilariously over the desert zone between the living and the dead. His clients/victims are a recently deceased, clueless young couple vulnerable to this most unlikely guide to the Land of the Dead. Burton squeezes this situation for all its comic worth, as, for example, we meet numerous dead people whose after-lives parody their earthly ones.

But Beetlejuice is more than a farce. The desert is a place that grants insight. And that is precisely what the protagonists, and the audience, receive over the course of the movie. From the nexus between worlds, they discover that the world of the Dead has its own logic and familiarity, while that of the living is, in its own rather less innocent way, at least as uncanny and decidedly more dreadful. The grasping New Yorkers who take over the deceased couple’s house in the country are more lethal and more freakish than the assortment of crazies they discover among the Dead. It all sounds, and at first viewing looks, very odd indeed — but it all adds up.

That kind of unexpected awareness is to be found throughout Burton’s canon. In Batman , Burton chose an archetypal pop-culture hero. He explores the consciousness and the conflicts within his ambiguous hero, centering his exposition on two questions. One, what sort of man dresses up like this for his life’s work? Two, how close to the double of the criminal soul must the crime-fighter approach to be truly effective? That is Desert territory: Antony was there, as we know from Athanasius’ account of his Temptations.

Finally, the work I consider Burton’s best, Edward Scissorhands , sensitively explores the Desert from start to finish. The title character is not quite human: he is a synthetic youth, a Pinocchio for the 21st-century. His creator/father/mentor has outfitted him with the titular scissors-for-hands, a rich symbol — Freudian, Jungian, and Christian all at the same time.

But like Pinocchio, Edward wants to be a “real boy,” at least a real sixteen-year-old one, at least until the real Homo sapiens turn out to be insufficient in their own humanity. All their physical parts are there, but they are not all there spiritually, much to Edward’s surprise and sadness.

The genius of the film is the subtle way Burton leads us to the same realization. This time, it is ordinary, cookie-cutter suburbanites who prove surreal and subtly less-than-human. Burton thus makes us ask the fundamental question of what constitutes our humanity, the very question raised in Christianity by the Incarnation.

These or any Burton film (Big Fish , Pee Wee’s Big Adventure , Mars Attacks , The Nightmare Before Christmas , Corpse Bride) will open windows to the Desert World. It is a strange and disturbing place in many ways; people who come to Burton for the first time are often bewildered, like people who first read the Sayings of the Desert Dwellers. There are dangers there, and doorways to heaven. As the Desert Dwellers knew, Christ wrestled in the desert with Satan. And Adam once walked there with God.

The Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson is a retreat leader, spiritual director, workshop leader, author, and parish priest. He has taught spirituality, history, and theology at colleges and seminaries for 30 years.

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