There's a fantastic critique of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland over at k-punk. He rightfully claims that the movie smuggles a Narnia-via-Harry-Potter messianism into Lewis Carroll's "beyond good and evil schizofiction." Carroll properly belongs in the company of Dickens' Great Expectations and Kafka's The Trial, in which the nonsensical, the grotesque, and the excess of signifiers form a world that is wholly one's own and yet in which one has no place. This uneasy navigation of Wonderland (or Miss Havisham's house or the court system) is a far cry from Burton's confident embrace of destiny. K-punk doesn't even address the film's conclusion, in which it appears that the real benefit to thinking impossible things is it's utility in the global capitalist market!
Read the article and watch the clip of the tea party from the 1965 BBC version of Alice in Wonderland.
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