‘Scissorhands’ is a movie that harmoniously combines an origin story, a modified hero myth, a fantasy melody, and a horror parody, criticizing the small-minded life of modern society and bringing beauty to the world through a sad love story.
Introduction
The Scissorhands is a very rich movie. There are so many elements in it. Contrary to what we often remember, it’s not just a fairytale love story. It’s a mixture of at least three different genres. And if you look at the thematic consciousness, you’ll find even more. But the movie is not divided in the slightest. Scissorhands contains several genres and multiple thematic consciousnesses in one complete work.
In the process of analyzing the film, I don’t want to break this harmony. It may be overly greedy, but I want to discover as much as possible from “Scissorhands” and at the same time maintain the harmony between them.
First and foremost, I would like to position the Scissors Hand as a type of “origin story,” a genre of narrative that has existed since the beginning of human history. This will clarify the narrative context of the entire movie, which we can easily overlook. Next, we will reconsider Scissorhands as a deformed form of ‘hero’. Examining this character, who is perhaps more unusual than any other film protagonist, will be a key task in analyzing The Scissorhands. I will borrow from Joseph Campbell’s insights into the structure of the ‘hero myth’ to articulate the character of Scissorhands.
And I will treat the entire movie as a fantasy melo. We remember the movie as a love story, a sad love story, and that’s a pretty accurate genre understanding of The Scissorhands. Nevertheless, we put this task at the end of the list, because it is only after the first two analyses that we can see the film more clearly as a fantasy melo.
In between the above three processes, I will find and incorporate other details of the movie. Perhaps it is these in-betweens that reveal the true nature of Scissorhands more effectively.
Edward Scissorhands as an origin story
Origin stories are not difficult. There are tons of origin stories that happen in homes with young children even today. Of course, the more ancient or so-called primitive villages you go to, the more frequently they are produced. However, given a particular child situation, you can find origin stories even in modern cities.
The situation in which an origin story occurs usually goes something like this A child asks his father, “Why do frogs croak when it rains?” The father never gives a scientific explanation about the effects of moisture, but tells a story. “Once upon a time, there lived a frog with a single mother.” From there, the story was passed down from mouth to mouth, becoming the ‘frog story’ as we know it today.
In this way, origin stories answer the question of how things came to be by telling stories. The question is not about scientific cause and effect, but about meaning. And in response, the origin story produces meaning, not knowledge about the object in question.
Now, recall how Scissorhands begins and ends. An extremely elderly woman is trying to put her granddaughter to bed. It’s snowing outside the window. The granddaughter keeps telling her that she doesn’t want to sleep. She asks, “Grandma, why is it snowing?” And the grandmother starts a story to answer her question. That’s the story of the scissors hand.
We can easily let this situation slide. It’s easy to dismiss it as just a setup for the story of the scissor hand, but it’s actually the conversation between the grandmother and granddaughter that is the key point of the movie. Without this conversation between the grandmother and granddaughter, the movie would not be the beautiful story it is. If you don’t believe me, imagine this. Imagine a movie without the grandmother’s story, just the story of the scissors hand. It would be nothing, really.
Since the modern era, people have been busy stripping all mystery from their surroundings, and now the modern world is in a state of “faith-cleaning”. Whether it’s the emotion of love or tangible objects like rocks or rain, modern people have “grasped” everything. We understand the world in terms of objective objects that exist independently of us. This may be at the root of the loneliness we experience today, which origin stories fill.
In response to her granddaughter’s question about the origin of snow, the grandmother tells a sad love story, connecting the snow that falls from the sky to the lives of people living on the ground. And through such meaning-making, she teaches that things and people do not exist in isolation. She awakens her granddaughter to feelings that she could never feel if she were to look at the facts with a strictly rational mind. It’s a gift of a richer world. In the end, Scissorhands is a movie about how the snow that falls from the sky is not just ice crystals.
Scissorhands, a deformed ‘hero’
Joseph Campbell’s deep interest in mythology led him to read extensively, searching for commonalities in myths scattered around the world. One of his most remarkable works is The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this book, he identifies the common structure of heroic tales, a common theme in mythology.
The hero myth, from which many modern coming-of-age stories have learned their structure, has three main sequences. Separation→Initiation→Return. Separation is when the protagonist, lacking something, inevitably and accidentally leaves his or her world. Initiation is the stage where they learn important things about the adventure or experience that started it all, often through hardship. Finally, the return is the return to the world they previously inhabited based on what they learned the hard way.
I looked at Scissorhands along the lines of these heroic tales, but with a twist. In the grand scheme of things, Scissorhands goes through the process of separation → initiation → return. In that sense, he is exactly like the traditional heroes. However, while Scissorhand’s adventures are similar to those of other heroes, they are quite different.
Usually, heroes live among people, that’s the nature of their daily lives before an adventure, and then when the time comes, they leave those people. Of course, the hero meets people during the adventure, but they are only passersby, and the hero always struggles with loneliness. When the adventure is over, the hero returns to his people. He returns to the same world, but the important thing is that the hero has changed, and he lives in this world in a completely different way than before.
But what about Scissorhands? Scissorhands lived alone in the first place, away from people. He doesn’t have the opportunity to meet people, he doesn’t feel lonely, and he just lives in the castle every day. And the world he encounters separated from the existing world is a world where many people live. He has adventures in the midst of many people. Eventually, he ‘returns’ to his old castle, but his life is definitely not the same as it was before.
The scissor-handed structure of the heroic tale is certainly an anomaly in the heroic mythos, but it is a good representation of a part of our lives. We’ve all had the experience of being alone and not feeling lonely when we were younger, but then falling in love and realizing how lonely it is.
Let’s take a break from the hero mythology for a moment and look at Scissorhands. He has scissor hands. Having scissor hands implies more than just that he is good at gardening and beauty. Since his hands were once left unfinished, his scissor hands represent a lack of completion. And since he is unable to touch himself and his loved ones, his scissor hands are a curse. Of course, scissors are also Scissorhands’ natural talent, as seen in his gardening and hairdressing.
In the movie, the villagers constantly offer to introduce him to a doctor who can fix his hands. Scissors, his deficiency and curse, his gift and blessing, is perhaps the key to his adventure. The question of how to solve this problem he was born with. Just like in a road movie, you don’t get what you want in the end. There’s a different ending, and it’s about making eyes through scissors, about communicating with loved ones and the world through scissors.
Fantasy Melo, Scissorhands
The most important characteristic of a melo is that it transforms a social issue into a love story on a personal level. It is defined as “a movie that makes the viewer feel pathos for the protagonist who is surrounded by forces much more powerful than himself.” In other words, it makes the viewer feel a certain way by showing a situation where the forces of society, institutions, and traditions that go beyond the personal level are imposed on something very personal.
Another characteristic of the genre is its “desire to express everything,” which is also known as melodrama. It refers to the excesses that inevitably occur in the process of transposition, the process by which oppression hidden beneath reality is expressed. And melo, as its name suggests, is centered on the use of music. It relies on music more than any other tool to express emotion.
The movie “Scissorhands” can be considered a traditional melodrama that has all of the above characteristics. First, “Scissorhands” features a particular kind of social oppression and empowerment. Let’s take a look at the village where the people live. Painted in technicolor, it’s like a model house, representing some real people. There are similarly sized houses with small lawns, and there are “housewives in crisis” who spend their days in the village, doing their hair and drinking. And then there are the men who are financially savvy and leave for work at the same time.
The situation of this town, which seems to represent middle-class people in the United States, is mixed with the genre of fantasy and does not lose its realism. The life they represent is a daily routine of living day by day without any particular love or passion. The women spend their time filing their nails, talking on the phone or gathering with their neighbors to chat, while the men stay home to eat or watch television, and occasionally get together for a barbecue.
Scissorhands becomes mere gossip in such a village, and real communication is often blocked. His “pure” affection for Kim is also undermined by such middle-class, small-town routines. The closer Scissors Son and Kim’s love is to ‘innocence’, the more prone it is to failure, and the more dramatically it critically exposes the middle-class archetypes of the villagers.
Excess is another characteristic of Mello, and it is well represented in Scissorhands. In order to translate the social to the personal, it is necessary to incorporate such symbols throughout the movie. In addition to the above-mentioned lifestyle of the villagers, the clothes they wear, the furniture they use, the way they speak, and the conversations that take place around the kitchen table are overflowing with such things. Melo tries to make these symbols as clear as possible, and they appear as an ‘excess’ that speaks volumes.
In terms of the use of music, The Scissorhands is a textbook example of melodrama. From the beginning to the end, the music effectively reveals the emotions of the characters according to the situation without losing the mysterious atmosphere.
A parody of fantasy horror
Although it doesn’t play a big part in the movie, the director seems to have wanted to convey another message by parodying fantasy horror. The film opens with a dark gray and blue color scheme, signaling the beginning of a horror movie. The chaotic machinery and grotesque shapes will immediately remind viewers of Frankenstein if they are familiar with the movie.
The parody becomes even more obvious when you consider that the main character is an android. Frankenstein depicts man’s fear of scientific and technological advancement. However, in the same situation, Scissorhands doesn’t use an android as an object of fear, but rather gives the villainous role to a very ordinary person. Rather, the machine, Scissorhands, has a warm body temperature and shows a truly human side.
Not content with exposing social contradictions through Mello’s grammar, he uses fantasy to shift the emotion of fear into a disgust with everyday life. This middle-class, small-town life is so solid that it can neutralize even the horrors of the machine, and in fact, it seems to show that it is so terrifying.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we’ve examined “Scissorhands” from four different perspectives. We’ve looked at the significance of the whole story as an origin tale, and we’ve identified the character of Scissorhands as a deformed hero. We’ve defined The Hand of Scissors as a fantasy melodrama by comparing the film to the conventions of melodrama, and we’ve identified elements of the film that parody fantasy horror. The film shows how meanings and memories are created about objects, while criticizing the modern small-town life that hinders the creation of such meanings.
In the end, the story that the girl heard about the origin of snow on a winter night was a very sad love story. It was a love story between a mechanical man and a woman that could not be fulfilled because of the small-mindedness of the people, but he was bringing beauty to the world through his cursed hands, the scissors. I wonder how the girl will see the world now.
