This blog post explores how the film ‘Edward Scissorhands’ harmoniously incorporates folklore, heroic mythology, fantasy romance, and horror parody.
Introduction
‘Edward Scissorhands’ is an exceptionally rich film. It contains a considerable number of elements. Contrary to what we often remember, ‘Edward Scissorhands’ is not a simple fairy-tale-like love story. Just considering genres, three or more elements are interwoven. And examining its thematic consciousness reveals even more. Yet the film feels not at all fragmented. ‘Edward Scissorhands’ holds within it several genres and multiple thematic consciousnesses as a single, complete work.
In analyzing the film, I do not wish to disrupt this harmony of ‘Edward Scissorhands’. It may be an excessive ambition, but I want to discover as much as possible from ‘Edward Scissorhands’ while simultaneously preserving the harmony between these elements.
First, I aim to position ‘Edward Scissorhands’ within the category of ‘origin myths’ – a narrative genre existing since the dawn of human history. This will clarify the film’s overall narrative context, which we often overlook. Next, I will reexamine Edward Scissorhands as a transformed form of the ‘hero’. Examining this character, more peculiar than any other film protagonist, will be a core task in analyzing ‘Edward Scissorhands’. I will borrow the structure of the ‘hero’s journey’ as insightfully outlined by Joseph Campbell to define Edward Scissorhands’ character.
And I will address the entire film as a fantasy romance. We remember this film as a love story, a sad one at that, and that is a very accurate genre understanding of ‘Edward Scissorhands’. Nevertheless, I have placed this task last because the two analyses above must precede it to see the film more clearly as a fantasy melodrama.
Throughout these three processes, I will discover and weave in the film’s intricate details. Perhaps these interwoven elements will reveal the true essence of ‘Edward Scissorhands’ more effectively.
Edward Scissorhands as an Origin Myth
Origin myths are not difficult to create. In households with young children, countless origin myths emerge even today. Of course, they are produced more frequently the further back in time one goes, or in so-called primitive, uncivilized villages. However, given the presence of a special child, origin myths can be found even in modern cities.
The situation in which origin myths arise is mostly like this. A child asks their father, “Why do frogs croak when it rains?” The father never gives a scientific explanation about humidity; instead, he tells a story. “Once upon a time, there was a young frog who lived with his widowed mother,” he might say. That story, passed from mouth to mouth, becomes the ‘Tale of the Young Frog’ we know today.
Thus, origin myths answer questions about the origins of things through storytelling. These questions don’t seek scientific causality but rather some ‘meaning’. And as an answer, origin myths themselves produce not knowledge about the thing but its ‘meaning’.
Now, recall how ‘Edward Scissorhands’ begins and ends. An extremely frail grandmother tries to put her granddaughter to sleep. Snow is falling outside the window. The granddaughter, seemingly reluctant to sleep, keeps talking to her grandmother. She asks, “Grandma, why does it snow?” And the grandmother begins a story to answer her granddaughter’s question. That story is the tale of Edward Scissorhands.
We might easily overlook this scene. It’s easy to dismiss it as merely a setup to introduce the story of Edward Scissorhands. Yet, it’s no exaggeration to say the key point of the film ‘Edward Scissorhands’ lies precisely in this conversation between grandmother and granddaughter. Without this dialogue between them, ‘Edward Scissorhands’ would not have become such a beautiful story. If you find that hard to believe, imagine it. Imagine a film filled only with Edward Scissorhands’ story, without the grandmother’s narrative. Truly, it would be nothing.
Since modern times, people have been relentless in stripping away every mystery from their surroundings. And now, modern society finds itself in a state where ‘belief has been thoroughly cleaned out’. Whether it’s the emotion of love or tangible things like rocks or rain, modern people are ‘grasping’ everything without exception. We understand the world as objective objects existing independently of us. This could be the root of the loneliness modern people experience, and origin myths fill that void.
When her granddaughter asks about the origin of snow, the grandmother connects the snow falling from the sky to the lives of people on earth by telling a sad love story. Through this act of giving meaning, she teaches that things and people do not exist in isolation. She awakens emotions in her granddaughter that could never be felt by strictly analyzing facts with cold logic. She gifts her a richer world. The film ‘Edward Scissorhands’ ultimately culminates in the story that the snow falling from the sky is not merely ice crystals.
The transformed ‘hero’, Edward Scissorhands
Joseph Campbell, driven by his deep fascination with mythology, immersed himself in the immense task of finding common threads among myths scattered across the globe. Among the outstanding masterpieces born from this endeavor is ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’. In this book, he reveals the common structure of the hero’s journey, a theme frequently explored in mythology.
The hero myth, from which many modern coming-of-age stories have borrowed their structure, largely follows three sequences: Separation → Initiation → Return. Separation involves the protagonist, lacking something, inevitably leaving their existing world through a chance encounter. Initiation is the stage where, through the adventure or experience thus begun, they endure various hardships and learn important lessons. Finally, Return is the homecoming to their former world, based on what they have learned through such hardship.
I viewed Edward Scissorhands within this framework of heroic narratives, though its form was significantly altered. Broadly speaking, Edward Scissorhands follows the sequence of Separation → Initiation → Return step by step. In that sense, it aligns precisely with traditional heroes. However, while the form of the adventure is the same as other heroes’, the content is quite different.
Typically, heroes live among people. That is the essence of their everyday life before the adventure. When the time for adventure comes, the hero leaves those people behind. Of course, they meet many people during the adventure, but these are merely passing acquaintances, and the hero constantly wrestles with loneliness. When the adventure ends, the hero returns to the people. They return to the existing world, but the crucial point is that the hero has changed, and they live in this world they’ve returned to in a completely different way than before.
But what about Edward Scissorhands? Edward Scissorhands lived alone, separated from people from the start. He lived routinely within the castle, without opportunities to meet people or even feel loneliness. And the world he encountered, separated from the existing one, was a world filled with many people. He adventures amidst many people. And ultimately, he ‘returns’ to his former castle, but the solitary life he returns to is clearly different from before.
The structure of Edward Scissorhands’ hero’s journey is certainly highly exceptional within the framework of the ‘hero myth,’ yet it captures a part of our own lives well. It resonates with experiences like those of childhood, when we lived carefree and didn’t feel lonely even alone, only to discover loneliness after experiencing first love.
Let’s step away from the structure of the hero myth for a moment and look at Edward Scissorhands. His hands are scissors. His scissor hands imply far more than mere excellence in gardening and hairdressing. First, because his hands are incomplete and unfinished, they represent a lack, a deficiency. And because he cannot touch himself or the one he loves, his scissor hands are a curse. Of course, as seen in his gardening and hairdressing, the scissors are also Edward Scissorhands’ innate talent.
In the film, the villagers constantly offer to introduce him to a doctor who can fix his hands. And Edward Scissorhands seems pleased by this prospect. These scissors, simultaneously his deficiency and curse, his talent and blessing, might just have been the core of Edward Scissorhands’ adventure. The question of how to solve this problem he was born with. As in a road movie, the intended goal is ultimately not achieved. A different ending unfolds. That is precisely the act of creating eyes through scissors, the act of communicating with the person he loves and the world through scissors.
Fantasy Melodrama, ‘Edward Scissorhands’
The most important characteristic of a melodrama is that it transforms social issues into a personal dimension, a love story. It is also defined as “a film that evokes pathos for a protagonist surrounded by forces far more powerful than themselves.” That is, by showing situations where the coercive power of society, institutions, tradition, and other forces beyond the personal dimension is imposed on the intensely personal, it elicits a specific feeling in the audience.
Another characteristic is that it expresses romance as a genre driven by the ‘desire to express everything’. This refers to the excess that inevitably arises during the process of displacement, where the repression hidden beneath reality is expressed. And as its name suggests, the use of music is central to romance. It relies heavily on music above all other tools for expressing emotion.
The film ‘Edward Scissorhands’ can be considered a traditional melodrama embodying all these characteristics. First, ‘Edward Scissorhands’ features specific social oppression and force. Consider the town where people live. Painted in Technicolor, this town resembles a model home, seemingly symbolizing certain real people. There are houses of similar size, each with a small lawn, and ‘desperate housewives’ who spend their days in the village preoccupied with beauty treatments and socializing. There are also men who are financially savvy and whose commutes to and from work occur at the same time.
The situation in this village, seemingly representing the American middle class, blends with the fantasy genre without losing its sense of reality. The life they represent is one lived day by day without special love or passion. They spend time getting their nails done, chatting on the phone or gathering to gossip with the neighborhood women, while the men eat or watch TV when at home. Occasionally, they gather for a barbecue party.
Edward Scissorhands is merely simple gossip in such a town, often blocked from true communication. His ‘pure’ affection for Kim is also utterly crushed by this middle-class, small-town existence. The love between Edward Scissorhands and Kim is all the more likely to fail precisely because it approaches ‘purity,’ and in doing so, it critically exposes the quintessential middle-class nature of the villagers all the more dramatically.
Another characteristic of melodrama, ‘excess,’ is well-expressed in ‘Edward Scissorhands.’ To express the social as a problem on the personal level, such symbols must be embedded throughout the film. Not only the aforementioned lifestyle patterns of the villagers, but also the clothes they wear, the furniture they use, their speaking styles, and the conversations at the dinner table express these themes to the point of excess. Melodrama seeks to make such symbols as clear as possible, and this results in an ‘excess’ where these elements speak volumes.
When focusing on the use of music, ‘Edward Scissorhands’ is so masterful in its musical score that it could be considered a textbook example of melodrama. The music stands out, effectively conveying the characters’ emotions according to the situation while maintaining a mysterious atmosphere from beginning to end.
A Parody of Fantasy Horror
Though it doesn’t occupy a significant portion of the film, the director seems to have intended to convey another message by parodying fantasy horror. The film’s opening, blending dark grays and blues, signals the start of a horror movie. The frantically spinning machinery and grotesque forms immediately evoke ‘Frankenstein’ for audiences familiar with the genre.
The parody’s nature becomes even clearer when viewed through the lens of the artificial being as the protagonist. ‘Frankenstein’ depicts humanity’s fear of technological advancement. However, in the same situation, ‘Edward Scissorhands’ does not make the artificial being the object of fear; instead, it casts ordinary people as the villains. Rather, the machine, Edward Scissorhands, possesses a warm body temperature and displays genuinely human qualities.
It does not settle for revealing social contradictions through the grammar of melodrama; instead, it uses fantasy to shift the emotion of fear into disgust toward everyday life. This middle-class, petty bourgeois existence appears solid enough to nullify even the fear of machines, suggesting that it is, in fact, that terrifying.
Conclusion
We have examined ‘Edward Scissorhands’ from four perspectives thus far. We explored the meaning of ‘Edward Scissorhands’ as an origin myth and identified the character of Edward Scissorhands as a transformed hero. By comparing the film to the conventions of melodrama, we defined ‘Edward Scissorhands’ as a fantasy melodrama. We also identified parody elements of fantasy horror within the film. The film demonstrates how meaning and memories are created around objects, while simultaneously critiquing the modern, petty bourgeois life that obstructs such meaning-making.
Ultimately, the story the girl heard on that winter night about the origin of snow was a deeply sad love story. It was the tale of a mechanical being whose love, clashing with petty-minded people, could never be fulfilled. Yet, through his cursed hands—scissors—he bestowed beauty upon the world. Now, one wonders how the girl will see the world from here on.
