Surely, we all remember that at the beginning of Tim Burton’s 1990 classic, Edward Scissorhands, Winona Ryder’s character, Kim Boggs, was a grandmother. Telling the tale of how snow came to exist in their town, where once it did not. She is spinning this yarn to her granddaughter, in bed next to the fireplace as Grandma Kim sits in the chair and starts to regale her.
One thing that isn’t in her narrative is anything about ever creeping back into the “castle” to finally bang Edward and create a lovechild with him. One that would somehow place her in 2021 as not a grandma or dead person, but rather, an extension of Ryder’s other newly famed character, Joyce Byers, from Stranger Things. Middle-aged and maternal, while still maintaining the blonde locks that Kim had, albeit styled in a short coif.
Enter Timothée Chalamet (who likely broke Johnny Depp’s heart as he watched the commercial in a darkened room while drinking his umpteenth alcoholic beverage of the day). Playing not Edward, but “Edgar” Scissorhands, here we have a character that could have perhaps arisen out of a Dark sort of premise, in which it’s just one of the many different timelines that might have occurred if one slight change been made in the proverbial time-space continuum of the Edward Scissorhands universe (and, as it is also said in Russian Doll, “Life is like a box of timelines”). And who knows where the granddaughter “disappeared” to in this realm? Maybe she was a sacrificial tradeoff to get Edgar.
A change that would have generated this new timeline infers that Kim found an opportunity to sneak back into that lonely mansion and have her way with Edward. But if that were the case, we’re to assume that Edward did not have a Ken doll-like bump where his penis should be (for it’s easy to believe that the eccentric yet wholesome inventor who created him would leave that part out, too). And also that Kim obviously didn’t think the sex was adequate enough to make a life with Edward and run away with him. Even though unsatisfied with the consummation of their love, she decided to take the next best thing from him: his spawn. And then hopped into a time machine that put her in 2021 (so that Edgar’s “freakdom” would be more tolerated than Edward’s was in 90s-era America)–or simply moved to Beverly Hills where the plastic surgery game restored her to her youth and she was able to never age as the years went by.
Despite being in the twenty-first century, Edgar still uses an old school alarm clock, goes to a class that isn’t operating on remote learning and works at a salad joint where no mask has to be worn. It’s almost just as idyllic as 1990–until we see a true mark of “the future”: Edgar engaging in some VR so he can pretend to drive. The one thing that represents true freedom to most. Kim catches him “in the act” and intuits this is her chance to help Edgar feel like a “real boy.” So why not suddenly make it all about selling something “useful” to Gen Z’s future?: an electric car with the option to operate on a freeway without the steering wheel being held. Which means we must also overlook the “deleted scene” where Edgar got out of the passenger’s seat at the entrance to the freeway to switch places with his mother in order to enjoy the feature that can’t be relished on ordinary streets.
It’s difficult to imagine if Edward would be proud of the two versions presented by this narrative, appraised from the angle of seeing at it as a commercial vs. a “real life” scenario: 1) his son is not very resourceful, for Edward had to put up with all kinds of limiting bullshit and still managed and 2) his son is shilling the Scissorhands brand for a car company. Either way, it seems like the father-son dynamic between these two would be on par with a conversation between Picasso and Dalí: utterly awkward and incomprehensible. Maybe that’s why Kim prefers single motherhood. Wherever Edward may be (trapped in his own time or somehow dead), Kim seems content to raise their humanoid son on her own. With a gentler… hand.
Kim ends the story with, “And Edgar drove off into the sunset. But don’t worry, he still makes it home in time for dinner…occasionally.” It’s a far cry from how she began the tale of Edward, remarking, “So the man was left by himself, incomplete and all alone.” Because one supposes your goddamn kids always get better than what you did–even if that’s probably not going to be the case for Gen Z and beyond.
