Sweeney Todd

“In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men, and only two. There’s the one staying put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one’s face. Look at me, Mrs. Lovett. Look at you.”

There are still parts of it that I can’t bring myself to watch. The sounds of the slitting throats are just a bit much for me, and I have to mute the TV and look away. But I time those moments with scientific precision because I also don’t want to miss the rest of what Tim Burton’s direction has woven around Stephen Sondheim’s music—so far removed from the anonymous penny dreadful, The String of Pearls, that first gave life to Sweeney Todd.

Looking at it as a whole, Sweeney Todd (2007) [has it really been 13 years?] is an artful, masterful piece of work, pulling together beautiful talents, both in front of and behind the camera, to create a dark, haunting musical. It fits into the horror genre, of course, because of its storyline—murder (and lots of it)…baking pies. However, the sometimes jarring, and often unsettling, juxtaposition of music, romance, love, gore, and death is one of the movie’s most astounding features, which, to me, sets it completely apart. I place Sweeney Todd in a class all its own—or, perhaps I should say, this incarnation of Sweeney Todd lore because, though there have been and will be many other interpretations, this is the only one to ring so cacophonously the gongs of artistry and malevolence. It is audacious, even brazen, but coated in a high-gloss lacquer of refinement. It demands to be seen. Only Perfume: The Story of a Murderer comes close to such a display of cultured savagery, what with its delicate imagery of eighteenth century France set against the homicidal, and eventually cannibalistic, search for the perfect scent—but even Perfume falls short of Sweeney Todd. There’s no music.

When I first saw Sweeney Todd, what struck me—what will always strike me, no matter how many times I watch it—is that, unlike so many installments in the horror genre, Sweeney Todd has nothing to do with monsters, specters, or an “other” of any kind. The problem in Sweeney Todd, which drives the plot and leads to the ultimate downfall of the major characters and the collateral damage of the “less honorable throats,” is human. Benjamin Barker is the Demon Barber in name only. Could we say he is possessed? Absolutely—but only by his own revenge, his own hatred, founded in reality but twisted over time into a diseased conscience, into “not one man, no, nor ten men, nor a hundred can assuage me.”

For years, I have been haunted by the image I’ve included at the top of this piece. The broken mirror. It gripped my soul’s attention. There is something about it that is so beautiful and yet equally horrid. Johnny Depp’s face, naturally angular, with those lines sharply accentuated by the pallor and the cold, blue, isolated darkness of the room. The waves of black hair blending indistinguishably with the mirror’s spiderwebbing fractures. Lips and one eye (with iris and pupil fused into a solid, black pit) clearly framed and teeming with desperate ferocity. The other eye obscured almost entirely by a splintering crack. To me, this 12-second moment captures the full essence and message of Sweeney Todd. In this mirror, Benjamin Barker is staring into the fierce, piercing eyes of his own soul, his own mind—skewed, beyond even his recognition, shattered and barely clinging together in a warped, twisted reflection of what is real. But, the crux of the matter is, we are looking into that mirror, too. The deft camerawork is making us peer directly over Sweeney Todd’s shoulder, so close that it seems, if he took one step to the right, we’d see our own warped reflections next to his. And that mirror has a question for us all.

Do you have your foot in another’s face?

The call to introspection in this scene is gut-wrenchingly strong—even more so because the person who is telling us this has, for all practical purposes, lost his own moral compass and yet ironically delivers this highly moralistic social commentary. The scene is also bitterly painful because it is evident that Benjamin Barker’s spiral into vengeful homicide, through which he ultimately destroys everything he loved and had wanted to save, was preventable. Someone could have helped. Someone should have helped long before it came to this.

And, in that, we find the true horror of Sweeney Todd. The horror of malaise. Of apathy. Of inaction. Of human indifference to injustice, justified by the callous idea: “It doesn’t affect me, so it’s not my problem.” Sweeney Todd is a clamorous, resounding, guttural scream against such attitudes.

The human race is one. Out of reverent respect, check your soles. Take off your shoes. Buy a new mirror, in which you can see yourself and others clearly. And, with tender care and righteous indignation, wipe off others’ faces—and make sure you never inflict another boot-print.

The work waits.

Link to scene: Sweeney Todd--"Epiphany," Broken Mirror section at 1:00-1:12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MermWqrxwSg