Вики-статья учащегося 11 класса Кравец Тимофея

Автор

Кравец Тимофей

Проблемный вопрос

What is "Vincent" about?

Цели исследования

To find out whether Vincent and Tim Burton have anything in common

Результаты проведённого исследования

Pastiche is a melding of styles that encourages the reader to mark similarity between the text at hand and the original work. Burton's use of pastiche is perhaps simply the easy result of an immature, struggling artist, who finds imitation easier than finding his own voice.

Specifically, Vincent is a pastiche of styles lifted from the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, and a range of movies from B-horror films, German expressionist works and the films of Vincent Price.

The film is a humorous look at a suburban boy named Vincent who reads Edgar Allen Poe and identifies with horror film star Vincent Price. Vincent visualizes his nightmarish fantasies: his aunt dipped in wax, his beautiful wife buried alive, and his dog Abacrombie transformed into a horrible zombie. But at every turn he is reminded by his mother that, "You're not Vincent Price, you're Vincent Malloy. You're not tormented, you're just a young boy."

The film ends with a tongue-in-cheek citation of Poe's "The Raven": "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted . . . Nevermore!" Thus, in a humorous way, the boy Vincent shares with the protagonist of the poem--the student trying to forget his lost Lenore--what Poe himself described as the "human thirst for self torture . . the luxury of sorrow," as he melodramatically indulges his dark fantasies.

Vincent is for Burton the same sort of indulgence, a chance to represent himself on the screen as the tortured boy/outsider/artist. He characterizes Vincent as an artist by associating him with both the easel and the quill pen. Isolated and misunderstood in the grand tradition of the romantic artist, Vincent engages the darker side of life via the screen personae of Vincent Price, a figure associated with Poe through his roles in Roger Corman's Poe films of the 1960s.