Vincent

Shakespeare could never. While other kids read books like Go, Jane, Go! Vincent’s favourite author is Edgar Allen Poe. One night, while reading a gruesome tale, he read a passage that made him turn pale. Such horrible news he could not survive for his beautiful wife had been buried alive! He dug out her grave to make sure she was dead, unaware that her grave was his mother’s flower bed. His mother sent Vincent off to his room. He knew he’d been banished to the tower of doom. Vincent tried to talk, but he just couldn’t speak. The years of isolation had made him quite weak. So he took out some paper and scrawled with a pen: “I am possessed by this house, and can never leave it again.”. His mother said: “You’re not possessed, and you’re not almost dead. These games that you play are all in your head. You’re not Vincent Price, you’re Vincent Malloy. You’re not tormented or insane, you’re just a young boy.". The room started to swell, to shiver and creak. His horrid insanity had reached its peak. He saw Abercrombie, his zombie slave. And heard his wife call from beyond the grave. She spoke from her coffin and made ghoulish demands. While, through cracking walls, reached skeleton hands. Every horror in his life that had crept through his dreams, swept his mad laughter to terrified screams! To escape the madness, he reached for the door. But fell limp and lifeless down on the floor. His voice was soft and very slow. As he quoted The Raven from Edgar Allen Poe: “and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted? Nevermore…" (Adapted from "Vincent" by Tim Burton) A poem that is worthy of Edgar Allen Poe's tears. An iconography that through anybody's hearts bleeds. Enough with the rhymes. Tim Burton's postmodern fantasy is dark and enchanting. "Vincent" is a sad yet inspiring tornado of styles lifted from the writings of Edgar Allen Poe to the German Expressionism. It is solemn, infamous, aureus, magnificent... There are no words worthy enough to describe such beauty and dread, therefore the direct reference to Burton's text. And, besides the orphic and gloomy stop-motion photography and the daunting poem, this fictional story transcends itself. It achieves an ineffably genius metalinguistic metaphor, revealing what many people go through while completely absorbed and imprisoned by art, once art can be a positive product of illness and misery, or rather an escape from those. The protagonist is a young boy named Vincent Malloy, who appears to have disruptive personality and morbid dangerous tendencies. Vincent, therefore, pretends to be like the horror film star Vincent Price, who in real life narrates the film, marking the referred metalanguage. The boy is also unhealthily obsessed with the sorrowful world of Edgar Allan Poe, detaching himself from reality when reading them. This leads to 'schizophrenic-like' episodes, temporary delusions, living nightmares, in witch he believes that he is a tortured artist, deprived of the woman he loves, mirroring certain parts of Poe’s stories. By the end of the short film we find a terrified Vincent Malloy drowned by his own delusional inner world. And, finally, the boy, quoting “The Raven”, falls to the floor in frailty, believing himself to be dead. Thus, in a humorous way, Vincent shares with the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, what the author himself described as the "human thirst for self torture... the luxury of sorrow," as the young boy melodramatically indulges his dark morbid fantasies. Now, more technically speaking, it is really relevant to add the fact that the movie is in Black and White. Not only as a reference to the horror german classics as "Nosferatu" and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", the use of the black and white picture also reinforces the binary juxtapositions throughout the film. This antithesis is formed by the melodramatic torments of Vincent, with dark or low scenes, in opposition to the reality of his childhood, with light or high key scenes. Lastly, it is imperative to remember that Vincent is for Burton the same sort of indulgence, a chance to represent himself on the screen as the tortured poet, an outsider. 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 artistic world, the delirious boy engages the darker side of life via the screen personae of Vincent Price, the man who voiceovers the whole poem in the movie.