Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands with Co-Star Winona Ryder as Kim in Tim Burton's 1990 film Edward Scissorhands. (Photo courtesy imdb.com)
Up until about three years ago, I thought it was normal for a 7-year-old to watch Edward Scissorhands every day for months with their 3-year-old sister (who wasn’t really interested). Along with my thoughts about every family watching Animal Planet at least five hours a day, this was debunked.
It wasn’t until last week when I was talking to a friend that I realized it wasn’t the non-cartoon aspect of the film that made it weird for me to be so obsessed with it–it was the dark nature. My friend told me the film made her cry when she tried to watch it at 8 years old. This was about the same time I was rewinding the tape to watch it for the second time in one day.
I obviously wasn’t a normal child.
There was always something about the film that drew me to it. Edward was the kind of person a kid wants to be around–kind, soft-spoken. Plus, he had scissors for hands and kids are by default attracted to things that could be dangerous (electrical outlets, hot stoves). He was also misunderstood and some of the good things he tried to do for people were taken the wrong way. As a kid, there were a lot of things I did that I thought would turn out good, but I got in trouble for. Why wouldn’t my mom enjoy the pictured I colored for her on the wall in the hallway?
When I bought the collector’s edition in high school, I noticed how great the acting was. Johnny Depp really embodied this character. Edward had never been around people–he spent his whole life with his toymaker father, waiting on hands that never came. Watching it at 17, ten years after the obsessive years, I realized how much he reminded me of Pinocchio (he was also created by a lonely man). He got his chance to be a “real boy” and he entered the manicured-lawn world of suburbia. They embraced him at first, as more of a party joke than a real person, but they turned on him when he needed them most. The script follows that Golden Age children’s literature idea of characters that are too pure for the world. They usually die because this world is too corrupt for them.
Maybe Edward escaped this fate because he got to experience something most of those Golden Age characters were too young to–love. His love for Kim (Winona Ryder) was a part of the film that was done perfectly. It wasn’t done too much or too little. It was also unrequited for most of the film because Edward was really too pure to realize what Kim was mature enough to know. They could never be together. The world wasn’t going to allow it and he’d get hurt (possibly murdered) in the process. Maybe that’s why I never really thought he was unhappy in the end until my friend brought it up last week. Their experience together let him spend the rest of his life knowing he was loved by someone at some time.
In life, we take that for granted.
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