Ed Wood (1994)

Rated R for implied sexuality off-screen, a fair amount of language, and drug use.  I'm sure that there's a version of this movie that would be suitable for TV with some changes.  I can see some people finding this movie offensive, but there's really not all that much that really ruffles feathers unless one choose to have feathers ruffled.  It's controversial in a dated way.

DIRECTOR:  Tim Burton

Okay, it's Tim Burton's best movie.  I think the man has a sweet spot and Ed Wood and the original "Frankenweenie" short are in that sweet spot.  I feel like a hypocrite telling Tim Burton, an objectively successful director, what he should or shouldn't embrace.  After all, I claim that people should do what they love.  Tim Burton is a guy who loves a specific version of macabre storytelling.  But as a guy who doesn't necessarily deep dive into spooky season 24/7, it's hard to stay on that train with Tim Burton all of the time.  But this!  This is about an era of filmmaking that Burton is clearly fascinated by and with a human element to ground the whole thing.  Sure, it's a skewed version of humanity and the entire thing is portrayed as a little off-kilter, but that doesn't mean that he's not telling a fundamentally human story and that's what makes this movie work.

I think Tim Burton forgets that we're not all a little weird.  He has this way of portraying "normal" people --his idea of "normal" are people who don't subscribe to the gothic influences of our culture --as the bad guys.  There's a lot of that in this movie, but I like that there's a bit of a pivot about what makes someone honorable.  Maybe this is something that I've seen in his Addams Family or Edward Scissorhands, but he's more about celebrating the misfit in this movie.  Now, I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room a lot with this blog about Ed Wood.  The elephant in the room is the treatment of cross-dressing in the movie.  Now, Ed is fundamentally a misfit.  He's this really passionate guy and comes across as heroic throughout the film.  Yeah, he does some dumb stuff, but we ultimately root for this little guy trying to make it in Hollywood, despite lacking almost any talent beyond oddball charm and stick-to-it-iveness.  He has weird hobbies.  His tastes are completely undeveloped.  But Ed is still a part of the Hollywood studio system.  (I'm sorry that I'm calling him "Ed", considering that he was a real person.  I'm talking about Ed, the character of the film who is a fictionalized version of a real person.) 

Now, I was to put Ed Wood in the cultural context of 1994.  When we think about Wood's creation Glen or Glenda?, part of it is the association that it is worthy of derision. We're laughing at the work that Ed Wood created and assocaiting the content of that movie with the lack of quality involved.  I talked a little bit about this in yesterday's Plan 9 from Outer Space blog.  I'm going to state unequivically that I don't know the reality of Ed Wood's story.  I don't know his politics or his sexual identity.  But Wood's story, from this movie, is sympathetic.  He's a guy who loves what he does.  He is considered a deviant by society, so he has to keep things close to the chest.  In 2023, we root for poor Ed.  Ed has to stay closeted and finds just this sense of liberation when he's able to direct Glen or Glenda.  What was something that he considered a deplorable secret becomes a thing of pride for him.  But I also know that 2023 is much more progressive than 1994.  Even I'll admit that I always viewed Glen or Glenda, as the video store nerd, as one of those movies to laugh at.  But from Wood's perspective in this movie, it's a celebration of what should have been considered a taboo.  It should have been this groundbreaking film for queer cinema and it's just something that we laugh at.

The biggest narrative / question running through my head was the question of if we're laughing with or laughing at Ed Wood.  Undoubtedly, Ed Wood is a comedy.  The delivery and the absurdity of a lot of the movie is, even if only fewing a small fragment of the movie, comedic.  It's meant to be that.  When I think 1994, I think Howard Stern, shockjock, political incorrectness.  It's a time when the word "gay" was thrown around casually as a word of derision, even from those benighted to the plight of others.  Ed Wood won awards.  It was a movie that was embraced by the community.  But it wasn't used in the same sentence as Boys Don't Cry.  I just googled "Queer cinema Ed Wood Tim Burton".  I get a lot more attention from Reddit threads than I do scholarly or even published works.  In 1994, I would have thought that Wood's cross-dressing was something we were meant to laugh at.  But that being said, I think that Burton was being a bit subversive with his charcterization of Ed.  And the way I can tell is Dolores.

Dolores is the unsympathetic love interest in the movie, at least for the first 60%.  While she's part of Ed's group of misfits at the beginning of the story, she's the character who seems like a bit of an outlier. While she seems enamored by Ed, she is part of Burton's fear of normies.  She wants a vanilla relationship.  From her perspective, she tolerates Ed's group of mediocre misfits because she's just starting off in Hollywood.  To make it big, after all, might mean starting at the bottom and crawling up.  But she seems moderately happy with her life of trying until Ed reveals his love of cross-dressing. She lightly tries to be supportive of this man who trusted her with his abhorrent secret.  But as others simply embrace Ed as a cross-dressing man, it's Dolores who spirals out of control when things get rough.  She finds it not only the straw that breaks the camel's back, but also something that brings her a deep sense of shame.  Dolores shares these opinions with characters that come across as caricatures of moral crusaders.  If you don't like them in this movie, it's probably because they're homophobic.

But then again, Ed's almost a cartoon with his love of women's clothing, in particular angora sweaters.  It very much reads like Scooby Doo and Scooby Snacks, or Obelisk and magic potions (deep cut, I know!).  A lot of it comes from the tone coupled with the performances.  Johnny Depp, as lovable as he makes Ed, hams up the part similar to his portrayal of Jack Sparrow.  It's what Burton wants.  It matches the vibe of the whole movie.  But if there's an angora sweater, Ed's personality just shifts.  It treats what might be something that is just personal to something uncontrollable.  I don't know.  I think that Burton is riding that fine line.  He wants people to laugh at the movie because he is making a comedy, but he also wants to maybe push open the door a little bit. I don't know.

But the heart of the movie is Martin Landau's Bela Lugosi.  Honestly, you could write off Ed as just a quirky dude who wanted to make movies.  The film really takes off when he bonds with this very sad elderly Bela Lugosi.  Martin Landau as Lugosi (he won the Academy Award for this part, right?) is perfect.  I mean, every line, every delivery is some of the best stuff in the world.  Every time that Lugosi swears and goes on a rant about Boris Karloff, I die.  It's so good .  But the emotional stuff is the fact that Wood goes from being a Lugosi fanboy to a genuine shoulder to cry on.  We've seen the biopic about the sadness of falling apart in Hollywood.  We know that drugs run rampant. It's weird to think about Bela Lugosi being addicted to drugs.  But there's a handful of scenes that, while I don't cry at movies, I got close.  Lugosi is booted from rehab because capitalism is a terrible thing and he wants to make one more movie.  Wood, in his most prescient moment, decides to film b-roll of Lugosi doing almost Kuleshov effect footage.  When he's making Plan 9, it's not just for him. It's for his friend Bela.  

If you get nothing else out of this, this is a beautiful story about a friendship that shouldn't exist.  It's emotional without being sappy.  Burton gives Lugosi just enough edge to remind you that this is not a tearjerker, but a celebration of a man's life.  It also really goes into the same places that Be Kind Rewind touch on, the value of unadulterated creation.  There's something very touching about the idea of not having to be good at something to pursue it.  And maybe Ed Wood might be the most realistic takeaway.  Instead of passion meaning talent, sometimes passion is just passion.  The movie never tells Ed that he should quit.  Wood never loses that delusion that he's the best director out there.  Most movies would put Wood in a Dark Night of the Soul where he's begged to come back.  Instead, it is just about his love for cinema and making movies with his friends.  Sure, we're meant to laugh at Ed.  But he's always the hero and that makes the movie lovely.