Playback / Edward Scissorhands
Edward Scissorhands · 1990
The Pastel Suburb
Peg works her Avon round through a street of identical pastel houses.
Watch for
- The houses: mint, lemon, pink, lavender — identical in shape, differing only in colour.
- How costume matches architecture; the women are dressed in the same palette as their homes.
- The final wide, where the dark mansion on the hill enters the same frame as the pastel street.
A worked reading · COCA
CContention
Burton designs an entire suburb as a single production-design statement so that conformity is something the audience sees rather than something a character explains.
OObservation
Peg drives a street of houses identical in silhouette and differing only in pastel colour. The residents' clothing and interiors repeat the same palette. The sequence closes on a wide in which the street and the gothic mansion above it share one frame.
CConnotation
Sameness rendered as decoration reads as pleasant on the surface and airless underneath, and the mansion's intrusion into the frame marks it as the only thing in the world that is allowed to be different.
AAudience
We understand the community's intolerance before we have met anyone in it, and we are primed to read Edward as the suburb will read him.
Your turn
- What do the houses have in common? What is the only thing that distinguishes them?
- Describe the costume choices. How do they relate to the set?
- In the final shot, what is the effect of putting the pastel street and the mansion in one frame?
For teachers
Designed to be played back to back with The Mansion from the same film — two palettes, one argument. Between them they cover setting and mise en scène without needing a second text.
