Alice in Wonderland · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Alice drinks from the little bottle and the room gets bigger.

That's how it plays, and it's the wrong description of what happens. She shrank. The room did nothing. But Burton stages it the other way round: Mia Wasikowska holds still, watchful, faintly put out, while Underland swells around her and Colleen Atwood's dress swells with it until she is standing inside a tent made of her own clothes. Everything moves except Alice.

Deleuze has a name for this arrangement, borrowed from musicals. He calls it the movement of world. Usually a character moves through a setting; sometimes the setting takes the movement over, the way a dancer goes still and the dance keeps going, carrying her. The character stops being the engine and becomes something the world is doing. Carroll invented that on the page. Sony Imageworks rebuilt it out of pixels and a green-screen stage, and it is the one thing in the 2010 film that is unarguably faithful to its source. The scale gags aren't jokes about size. They're jokes about agency.

Which matters, because everything else in the film is about agency and nothing else.

Deleuze splits cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts, and the action changes the situation; the cutting exists to keep that chain intact. In the time-image, action stops working. The character can only look, and we start to feel time itself instead of watching it get used up. Carroll's books sit closer to the second: Alice wanders, gets lectured at by a caterpillar, alters nothing, wakes up. Disney's 1951 version kept that shape and its iconography, the grinning cat and the playing-card court, both of which Burton's designers quote and reshuffle.

Linda Woolverton's screenplay does the opposite. It takes dream material and installs a sensory-motor circuit inside it. Deleuze calls the biggest form of that circuit the large form: a whole world under pressure, narrowing to one decisive act that transforms it. Underland is tyrannized. A prophecy states that on the Frabjous Day, Alice will put on armor, take the Vorpal Sword, and kill the Jabberwocky. She does. The situation changes.

Deleuze's word for the encompassing pressure that summons the act is the synsign — the milieu that calls forth its hero. In a Western it's the desert. Here it's a document. The prophecy is a scroll, and the world's future is already written on it; Alice's arc consists of catching up to a text that precedes her. That's worth stopping on, because it describes a great many films made after this one. The blockbuster encompasser is no longer a landscape. It's lore.

Inside that frame the film runs the classical duel Deleuze calls the binomial, force against force. Red court against white court, staged as clean chromatic opposition: decayed pastels and grays under Helena Bonham Carter, brightening toward Anne Hathaway's arch, floating parody of grace. Dariusz Wolski lights it high-key and storybook-clear, nothing like the shadowed Burton of the eighties. Color here isn't atmosphere, it's argument. Chris Lebenzon cuts the whole picaresque middle — Rabbit, Tweedles, Caterpillar, tea party, two courts — as a series of way stations converging on a battlefield, which is the oldest shape in narrative cinema, Griffith's convergence with a CGI monster at the end of it.

And that convergence is imported, specifically, from The Return of the King. When critics said the Jabberwocky climax betrayed Carroll, this is the debt they were feeling: post-Tolkien blockbusters resolve in a massed battle against one large creature, and Underland is fitted with that ending like a part ordered from a catalogue. The other lineages are just as legible. The Wizard of Oz supplies the drab frame giving way to a saturated otherworld organized as a homeward quest, right down to the Victorian betrothal Alice is fleeing. Beauty and the Beast supplies Woolverton's three-act empowerment architecture, which shapes this film more decisively than Burton's visual authorship does. Edward Scissorhands founded the Burton–Elfman–Depp method, the melancholy pale outsider plus a leitmotif that does the emotional work, and Elfman's "Alice's Theme," wordless choir over music-box delicacy, is the most Burtonian thing in the picture. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory handed over the mannered lead and the candy palette.

Depp's Hatter is where something genuinely new happens. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up, a feeling registered on a face that hasn't yet discharged into action; when the face flickers with micro-intensities rather than holding one expression, he calls it a potisign, an icon of power. The Hatter is that, with his eyes digitally enlarged and his complexion shifting as his mood swings between Scots menace and childlike hurt. The affect isn't only performed. It's rendered. This is one of the first tentpoles where the close-up is finished in post, and whatever you think of the result, it's a real event in the history of the face on screen.

So what did the film do to cinema? Deleuze thought the action-image collapsed after the war and never came back except as cliché. He didn't live to see the restoration industry. Released three months after Avatar, converted to 3D in post, grossing over a billion dollars and picking a public fight with exhibitors over release windows, Alice in Wonderland proved that a studio could take any pre-sold dream material, strip out its drift, and reinstall a working sensory-motor circuit at scale. Disney's entire live-action remake decade follows from it. The 2016 sequel's collapse suggests the audience was buying the novelty, not the story.

Here's the question the film leaves open, and it's a good one. What would it take to make a blockbuster out of material that refuses to act? Watch it again and notice where it comes alive: Rickman's Caterpillar, unhurried and unimpressed; the tea party going nowhere; that dress collapsing around a girl who has done nothing at all. The picture is best exactly where Alice is powerless. Then the prophecy arrives, hands her a sword, and the wonder ends.