One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994).
In a scene from Ed Wood (1994), Tim Burton’s biopic of the maverick filmmaker, Ed (Johnny Depp) and his fiancée Dolores (Sarah Jessica Parker) sit in adjacent armchairs. Ed, playing Glen, is pitched forward with a faint slouch, arm delicately draped against the chair for the illusion of support. Dolores, as Glen’s girlfriend Barbara, is haloed by the lamplight reflected on the wall behind her, perfect posture pressing her upper body into every corner of the seat. “My mind’s in a muddle, like in a thick fog,” he says, having confessed to being a transvestite. “I thought I could stop wearing these things.” She arches her head back, eyes closed, outstretched hands casting shadows against the fabric. She emerges from her trance and turns her eyes to her lover. “I don’t fully understand, but maybe together we can work this out.” She stands and turns away from the camera, removing her white angora sweater. She extends it decisively toward him. “Music swells. Cut and print!” shouts Ed with a grin. Dolores squeals in delight (or is it relief?) and throws herself into his arms.
In Burton’s telling, Dolores took a great deal of convincing to shoot this pivotal scene from Ed’s first feature, Glen or Glenda (1953). Upon discovering that its plot was based partly on her creative and romantic partner’s own double life, her reaction was far less open-minded than Barbara’s, confusion and disbelief curdling almost instantaneously into disgust. During the shoot, she scolds Ed for directing in full femme attire, and he retorts that no one is bothered by it but her. “Ed, this isn’t the real world; you’ve surrounded yourself with a bunch of weirdos,” she responds. Dolores is just as revolted by the eccentric community that has rallied around Wood as she is by his own eccentricities, utterly convinced that the traits she cannot accept are the product of a corruptive influence.
Wood’s delirious and disjointed movies eschewed such causality in favor of narrative digression and dislocation, but Burton’s film is shaped by familiar, linear streams of psychology. The emotional progressions of Ed’s various relationships––collaborations with producer Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray) and a decaying Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), romances with Dolores, and later, Kathy (Patricia Arquette)––are tied both implicitly and explicitly to action and reaction, and expertly communicated by the film’s deep bench of talented performers. Though it presents a mismatch between form and subject, Ed Wood’s classical dramatic construction is in service of a full-throated paean to the collective joys of aberrance and creation. None of Burton’s peerless technical and emotional craft comes at Wood’s expense. The film is so completely enamored by the labors that go into constructing Wood’s Z-movie fantasies that the questionable verisimilitude of what ends up on-screen is beside the point. Wood and his flock believe implicitly that the process of creation is just as valuable as the finished product, and Burton’s film is entrenched within and enlivened by this same unshakeable belief. Dolores’s ill will eventually boils over during a wrap party, where she howls at the crew that they’re all wasting their lives making shit. Her outburst is one of several violent ruptures that Burton’s grindset fairytale folds into its dreamy textures of tragicomedy, which are thereby invested with even more poignance and urgency.
“I’m just scared it’s not going to get any better than this,” Ed says within the first ten minutes of the film, casting a pall over Depp’s plucky veneer. The gnawing uncertainty, the vulnerability and humiliation, the danger and discovery and delusion which served as precarious scaffolding for all of his creative energies are bound together in Barbara’s fictive gesture of acceptance. Throughout the film, Dolores’s sweater has been a signifier of Ed’s perpetual outsiderdom. Finally, she offers it to him, engendering a moment of pure celebration for the unconventional that can only really exist in the time before he yells “cut.” His name would eventually become the subject of reverence and ridicule, gaining a notoriety he could only dream of, but in this moment, the mysteries of his unclassifiable craft, and the dreams and disappointments of his uncontainable life, are satirized and saluted in the space of a single frame.