Surrealism

DIRK DEPPEY: Flaming Carrot is a very calculatedly surreal character. I'm kind of curious when you got into surrealism and some of its many offshoots. I noticed your interest in some of the wilder, more surreal aspects of art, I see a lot of influences here. If nothing else, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs has a way of often showing up.

BOB BURDEN: I've been friends with Doug Smith [a.k.a. the Rev. Ivan Stang] since the early days, when we used to hang out at the Dallas cons. The Dallas cons were great, they were my favorite conventions for years. Larry Langford used to put those things on, and Paul McSpadden, back there in the mid-'80s. I always looked forward to Dallas that was one of my favorite conventions.

But anyways, getting back to surrealism. Just for tossing it around, surrealism is -- hmm, what is surrealism? I guess you if want to analyze the word and say when things become super-real, or more than real. Sometimes there is ... a moment in time when suddenly you're focused and everything is vivid. The mind is sharp and focused. Entirely in the present. Totally in the world around you.

Perhaps something intense triggers it, like when there's a death in the family, or when you just found out your lover is going to break up with you. You're standing in the back yard and you're looking at a leaf and you see every vein on it. You see every detail, hear every noise, time just slows down and every second drips like molasses. Things becomes slow motion and every sense in your body is absorbing the moment, you're not on autopilot anymore.

That is actually a true form of surrealism. Now then, you can create the same feeling with a painting, a movie, a poem, a comic-book story. You are creating it artificially. But it is similar. Just like a petit-mal seizure is kind of similar to an orgasm.

DEPPEY: I was going to ask if you were more a fan of surrealism just as a philosophy in the André Breton sense, or as a way of seeing things in general, without applying a lot of theory to it. Are you trying to apply surrealism as it was in the art movement, or is it just generally something you're making up as you go?

BURDEN: I'm making it up as I go. I'm not a surrealist tactician. I might be a field marshal of surrealism. [Deppey chuckles.] Anyways, I have an instinct for it. Now I can't carry it a tune in a bucket, and there's about 150 other things I could list that I can't do well. But, you know, I just always had a knack for surrealism, I could spot it, I can see it happening in front of me when no one else sees it. Just like some people have a knack for irony or puns. I never particularly liked puns anyways. But surrealism, it's like being alive, really alive, even just for a second or two. Like riding on a roller or a moment in time when you read a real good story and you're all alone, you don't have anybody to share it with, and you don't need to. Like I say, you really see something great, maybe this magnificent sunset, and geez, you wish you could share that with your girlfriend, but she's hung-over and she's back in the hotel room. She'll be irritable, and you don't want to call her up and say come on, let's see this sunset because going to say, "What the fuck are you talking about? I don't want to see no goddamn sunset."

Remember that moment in The Deer Hunter when he sees the deer, him and the deer are all alone, and he can't shoot the deer. You know, it's kind of when you come out of the autopilot, out of the Pavlovian dog that you are.

So much of our life we are on auto-pilot! We don't realize it. I remember a time when I was drawing, I was painting away, and every now and then I'd run into the bathroom to rinse the brush. I like to keep the brush wet and washed if I not going to use it for a while. So I'd go and rinse it out good, to preserve the brush, the fine Kolinsky brush. Because you let the ink dry on it, the thing is fucked. It doesn't have that fine point it used to have. Well anyways, one day the power is off in the house. They were doing something down the street, and they'd shut the power off the whole block. So every time I run into the bathroom, I'd flip the light switch on. I said, "What a waste of energy, why am I doing this? I know that the electricity isn't going to work, and, plus, it's daylight, why am I flipping it on anyways?"

DEPPEY: Just watching your inner robot at work.

BURDEN: Yeah. And we have this robot quality to us, and without that we couldn't walk a tightrope, we couldn't complete a sentence, but there are times when you almost have to sit back and take a look, and surrealism is a way of getting there. It's a private piece of time independent of all, it's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even.

DEPPEY: Marcel Duchamp, yeah. The Large Glass.

BURDEN: Surrealism is like a drug, kind of a state of being, kind of stepping off the moving sidewalk and standing still while everyone else is going by. And it's fun. Now for some people, it's kind of scary, they wake up one morning and the whole world, the sky has turned green and the sun is bouncing around and in the sky, it's floating around there, it's not staying in the same place -- and everything else is the same. Some people come out and they're going to see that and they're going to start crying, other people are going to come out and say, "Hey, that's pretty cool," and some people are going to come out and say, "What's wrong, we got to get into a rocket ship and save the sun and the sky." You see what I'm saying? It takes all kinds, but it affects each and every one of them, and it takes them off the moving sidewalk of life. It doesn't have to be something especially weird. And it doesn't have to be particularly artsy. The opening sequence to Saving Private Ryan has a very surreal quality to it, augmented by the photography of course. There was a certain -- I mean, veterans walked into that and were at V-Day and shit and they came walking out there, and said they were freaked out by it.

DEPPEY: I think if I had to pinpoint the most surreal thing I've ever seen it would have to be a PBS special I saw as an early teenager on Japanese Noh theater, which is sort of the grotesque version of Kabuki. The special opened up with what seemed like this eight-minute shot of a woman who was bare from the middle of her breasts on up. It was a very tight angle, close-up shot of that, with her head tilted way back, looking over her shoulder at the camera with this utterly maniacal gleam in her eyes -- like she was about to devour a kitten or something. After about a minute of this, a little patch of saliva began slowly sliding out of the side of her mouth, slowly running down her chin, slowly running down her neck. Everything else was absolutely still...

BURDEN: You were hypnotized.

DEPPEY: Absolutely. [Burden laughs.] It was just, you know, up until that point one of the strangest things I'd ever seen. And yet, it was composed of such simple and obvious things. It wasn't like her head was popping off and cuckoo birds were flying out or anything else. It was a very still, static, composed shot of a familiar thing in completely unfamiliar circumstances.

BURDEN: That sounds pretty cool. Hey, here's one! When I was a kid, we were walking out of the supermarket one day, me and my Uncle Bob and my brother and my cousins -- and we hear this scream. We turn around and this lady that was walking out behind us -- as she went through the sliding glass doors, a head of lettuce fell out of her grocery bag. And it landed right in the middle, between the doors, [laughs], and we kids were standing there, and this automatic door started closes on the lettuce, again and again and again, chop?chop?chop, it literally almost chopped the damn head of lettuce in half. And now we kids stood there horrified because that head of lettuce was about the same shape and size as our heads [laughs], just standing there, in horror, watching --

DEPPEY: Watching the door slowly take this lettuce apart.

BURDEN: Everything was very normal, and then something surreal like that happens. I remember another time when this lady up the street, her Volkswagen fell out of gear, she went in the house, and the Volkswagen just rolled down the driveway, and out into the street and came rolling across the lawn of this yard and banged into a tree and like the doors popped open, one of the doors popped open. And we kids were sitting there and this was so far out we didn't know what the fuck happened, and we were looking at it like next thing you know, clowns are going to come out of it or something. [Laughs.] It was some kind of amazing entertainment for us.

DEPPEY: I suspect for surrealism to really work it has to be surrounded by normality. I suspect if you wind up with something where everything is surreal, you're not talking about surrealism anymore, you're talking about dada.

BURDEN: One of the rules of science fiction or fantasy is, it has to be a normal person in a strange land, where he's the only person who's normal and everyone else is really weird, that would be like Flash Gordon. Or one strange thing in a totally normal world, like E.T. I'd say that E.T. was successful, not because he was on planet earth, but because he was right in the middle of the American family.

DEPPEY: It's kind of like analyzing comedy. If you have to explain a joke, it's not funny anymore.

BURDEN: Well, you can analyze humor. I think one of the elements of humor is surprise. You know, left turn when you expect a right. That's what tickles people, it makes them laugh, and it's a release of something. The other element that is a very common element to comedy is the comedy is funny when somebody doesn't get it. Archie Bunker is funny because he doesn't get it, he doesn't understand things. There's a certain humor to that. That can be woven into other things, drama and tragedy and stuff like that.

And humor, is almost like a spice, for a serious story.

DEPPEY: I forget who it was who defined humor as tragedy plus time.

BURDEN: Yeah [laughs]. Yeah, or tragedy plus timing.

DEPPEY: So surrealism and humor are related but different.

BURDEN: Like time and memory, love and passion, Mac and PC.

DEPPEY: Any regrets that you've dabbled with it? Unleashed the demon?

BURDEN: Yeah. Well, I'm type cast as a humorist so never get any serious work. And the comic companies never want to do humor, well, can not conceive of a humor book, so I never get any work at all.

DEPPEY: Do you want to do more serious work?

BURDEN: I did a couple of serious stories in the Mysterymen comic series but probably should have written them under another name. Once you do funny stuff it's hard to cross over. If they're making Death of a Salesman, are they going to tap Woody Allen? Or Don Knotts? I would but it would never occur to them.

DEPPEY: Maybe Dom Deluise?

BURDEN: Maybe Gilbert Gottfried as Hamlet? [Laughs.]

DEPPEY: With Paul Lynde and Rip Taylor as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern!

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #268.]

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