January 24

Andy and I went to South Orange to the movies and the one we wanted to see was sold out, so we came home, talked to Joel on the phone, and watched Edward Scissorshands from 1990. Very charming, touching, all that. Edward and his naivety and snip snip evergreen art and hair cutting and dog grooming is the real normal, and the appalling tropical fruit colored ticky tacky suburban community is the freak show. Those houses and those people were exactly what I had a horror of finding if we moved to the suburbs-- identical houses, bored housewives, false good cheer. Johnny Depp is an absolute heart throb in this, an artist, a lover, a suffering outsider who tries to do good. His character is punk in style, the hair, the leather and studs, but the stance and general look is the same as Slovenly Peter of the old Der Struwwelpeter (1845) cautionary tales for kids. A related (?) images in the book is of a horrible man with enormous scissors cutting off a boy's fingers-- anyhow, these have got to have played into the imagery, in my mind, if not in Tim Burton's.