Edward Scissorhands Essay

Chen Tian

Period 2

January 22, 2016

Edward Scissorhands Essay

        A huge old castle leads on the mountain top individually, down to the mountain is a colorful neighborhood as a “cookie cutter world”.  The scientist in the castle made a machinery human with scissors for hands before he died, the machinery human’s name is Edward.  The movie Edward Scissorhands is directed by Tim Burton.  It talks about after Edward fit into the neighborhood that Peg was living in, the “cookie cutter world” changed into a unique and non-normal world by their acceptance of Edward.  Throughout the movie, one of the universal themes developed by Edward Scissorhands is we cannot judge someone based off of their appearance, we must look inside, and people can be completely different from their appearance and heart; this theme is supported by the Elements of juxtapositions of costume and setting and the hedge work motif.

        In the movie, we can clearly see the comparison of settings and two major different kinds of costumes. The scary castle and the warm neighborhood, with colorful costumes against the black.  At the beginning of the movie, there is an independent castle and the “cookie cutter world” neighborhood.  It already shows the two places have different values of everything: value of clothes, houses, and personalities.  When Peg first sees the castle from her car mirror, the reflection of the castle was scary.  After Peg went into the castle, she saw a beautiful garden.  There were flowers, the bush sculptures, it made her felt very surprised and she said, “It’s beautiful.” The houses’ settings with the theme seems like there is no connection, but this shows exactly the theme. The appearance we saw of this old castle was scary, but inside the castle is totally different; it was bright inside.  The castle just seems like Edward himself, we can’t judge him based off of his appearance.  Thereafter, Peg saw Edward and brought him home.  As the way Peg is driving, there were many people that were wearing very colorful clothes and playing in the yard, except Edward was wearing steampunk.  After Edward came into Peg’s house, Peg took out her husband’s white shirt and black suit from the closet to put over Edward’s steampunk; she also putted some creams on Edward’s face to try to cover up his scars that he scratched by his Scissorhands.  The reason she did these was because Peg really wanted to help Edward with his outlook, to let him looks like a normal person so the neighbors would accept him, and she didn’t want her neighbors to judge Edward only depending on his scary appearance.  As the result, we can never know a person just by seeing his/her appearance.  This theme also shows when Edward was doing the hedge work.