Yesterday, a holiday siren! Today, a Christmas snow princess. In director Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, Winona Ryder plays Kim, a pretty and popular suburban teenager whose idyllic if boring life is upended by the discovery of Edward Scissorhands, a creature created by a mad scientiest who never got to finish the job, leaving him with scissors for hands. It’s best not to think too hard about the particulars — not because the film is flawed but because the film is so clearly a fable; a story of magic and romance and sadness, populated with archetypes and character types rather than people, in a setting that could be almost anywhere in America at any time during the second half of the 20th Century.
Edward has endeared himself to the community and Kim has fallen for him, to the dismay of her jock boyfriend Jim. On the night of her parents’ Christmas party, Edward shows his love to Kim the only way he knows how.
Like so many of the best movie costumes, the significance of Kim’s white dress is clear and obvious at first glance. She is a living snow angel; a walking symbol of the purity of love; virginal, bridal, as clean and perfect as falling snow. This costume doesn’t represent the typical teenagewear of 1990 — or any other period, really. Taking her inspiration from Burton’s aesthetic, costume designer Colleen Atwood devised a dress that was more allegory than garment; a mish-mash of romantic styles pulling from bridal gowns and renaissance portraits and mid-century high school dances. And like all great movie costumes, it serves more than one purpose. Because white can represent purity and snow and angels…
But it also makes the perfect shocking backdrop to a slash of blood. Edward accidentally cuts Kim, which sets her boyfriend off and the threat of violence escalates until one of them is dead.
Kim smears her dead boyfriend’s blood on her dress to convince the townspeople that both young men died, using her perfect white dress to save the man she loves from further persecution. Quite often in films, a character is put in white just so it can be destroyed on film because nothing will do a better job of instantly creating a visual metaphor for a character’s journey than a degraded white dress. And just in case the importance of this moment and this dress isn’t quite secured in the audience’s mind yet…
The film ends on the reveal that Edward spends the rest of Kim’s life immortalizing her in that dress; his forever snow angel.
Tomorrow: A wavering wife!
[Photo/Still Credit: 20th Century Studios]
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Christmas Movie Dress Advent Calendar Day 14: Rosemary Clooney in WHITE CHRISTMAS
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Christmas Movie Dress Advent Calendar Day 13: Alicia Vikander in THE GREEN KNIGHT
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Christmas Movie Dress Advent Calendar Day 12: Zooey Deschanel in ELF
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