Off with her head: Alice's trip through Wonderland

by Victoria Oxberry

Victoria Oxberry is a photographer and student of culture. She studied Art and Visual Culture at the University of the West of England (UK), which involved both fine art practice and a variety of written studies.

Alice has wondered off with her cat Dinah. By a stream she sees a white rabbit run by wearing a waistcoat and looking at his pocket watch, panicking about being late. Intrigued, she decides to follow him down a rabbit hole...

If The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) can be called a road movie as is widely accepted in film theory (essays in The Road Movie Book and Lost Highways), then it may be possible that Alice in Wonderland (Geronim, 1951) be considered so. Although road movies initially make us think of America, cars and the open road, these are not actually the themes of the genre. As well as some kind of journey, 'several key ingredients [are]: escape, freedom, danger, risk...' (Eyerman, 1995:61) Both The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland have all of these. Alice also shares some aspects of films such as Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998) with their references to counter-culture and drug use, as well as Thelma and Louise (Scott, 1991).

Alice in Wonderland opens with Alice outdoors being taught history by her sister. She is bored with her lesson:

Alice: I'm sorry but how can one possibly pay attention to a book with no pictures in it?

Sister: My dear child, there are a great many books in this world without pictures.

Alice: In this world perhaps, but in my world the books would be nothing but pictures.

This moment is the catalyst for the journey and, to varying degrees, it is an almost universal theme throughout the road movie genre, to escape the confines of your life. These confines could be responsibilities, relationships, oppression, or in Alice's case, boredom, yet all these things can be inter-related. In Easy Rider, Billy and Wyatt ask their hippy hitchhiker where he is from; his reply, 'It doesn't matter what city 'cos all cities are alike. That's why I'm here. Away from the city.' In Thelma and Louise, before Louise shoots Thelma's would-be rapist, the journey started out as a weekend away to escape from their partners and jobs. In theory, being out on the road means you have no worries in that the expanse, the people you meet, the physical movement are all the antithesis of your life at home. In her essay 'Home and Away', Pamela Robertson writes that 'the concept of home as a structuring absence' (1997: 271) is required to define the freedom.

Drugs play a role in many road movies of the sixties, the era of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Fear and Loathing, journalist Raoul Duke and his lawyer Dr. Gonzo imbibe all manner of drugs from mescaline to LSD, accumulated especially for their excursion to Las Vegas. They proceed to hallucinate their way through their entire trip. In Easy Rider, Billy and Wyatt make a drug deal at the start and carry the proceeds across the country in the petrol tank of one their motorbikes. Along the way they smoke marijuana and when they hit New Orleans, they drop the acid that their hippy friend had given to them. The psychedelic music of the era that is played throughout the travel scenes enhances the notion of drug use. The presence of drugs in road movies creates a parallel to the physical journey, providing a psychological and/or metaphysical journey. In the book Lost Highways, Jack Sergeant and Stephanie Watson write,

'The drug culture of the sixties fed into the transgression of boundaries, both physical, social and personal, which road movies highlight. Drugs offer a collapse of the interior/exterior duality that defines the classic constructions of being, allowing and facilitating the expansion of the previously prescribed limits of the psyche, enabling the stoned mind to stretch across the landscape.'

Alice has wondered off with her cat Dinah. By a stream she sees a white rabbit run by wearing a waistcoat and looking at his pocket watch, panicking about being late. Intrigued, she decides to follow him down a rabbit hole. At this point, Alice has the same attitudes as both Thelma and Louise. Although, like Thelma, Alice expresses trepidation and guilt about her actions, 'You know Dinah, we really shouldn't be doing this...curiosity often leads to trouble'.. Like Louise, she makes no physical attempt to stop herself and is more than happy to force herself through the rabbit hole.

Although she has yet to ingest anything that could be construed as drugs, the start of Alice's journey already has a hallucinogenic feel, much like the start of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo's journey in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but without the paranoia. Alice floats down the rabbit hole which is decorated like a Victorian drawing room, passing framed pictures, ornate lamps and even sitting in a rocking chair.

At the bottom of the rabbit hole, Alice finds that she is too big to go through the door and subsequently that it is locked. Here, she has her first encounter with 'drugs' in the form of the 'Drink Me' bottle and the 'Eat Me' cake that are pointed out to her by the doorknob. These make her shrink and grow respectively. Her own response to eating the cake is 'Goodness knows what this will do...' yet she goes ahead anyway without pause. In the book, 'The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road', a guidebook for girls going on road trips, Cameron Tuttle writes about discovering your 'inner badness' on your journey, learning how to throw caution to the wind,

'A road trip is the world you create where it's safe to explore your own boundaries and break all the rules you live by at home' (Tuttle, 1999: 56)

Alice is on her way to doing this, in her half-hearted expressions of apprehension, she is demonstrating that, increasingly, her heart is not in her words but in her actions.

'...road movies are cowled in lurking menace, spontaneous mayhem and dead-end fatalism, never more than a few road stops away from abject lawlessness...'
(M. Atkinson cited in Cohan, Rae Hark, 1997: 1)

On the road, it is a case of 'is anybody who they seem to be?' Locals can be friendly, hostile or downright eccentric. As Alice makes her way through a forest, we see two characters moving about in the shadows in a somewhat sinister fashion, before they emerge and confront Alice. The duo are Tweedledum and Tweedledee and are as harmless as they are peculiar. They would not be out of place in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, having a penchant for moving in harmony and finishing each other's sentences. Lynch's worlds are dark, strange and slightly paranormal, as well as being full of mysterious and oddball characters such as the dwarf in Lost Highway and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks..

Alice comes across the White Rabbit again outside his house. The Rabbit starts calling Alice, 'Mary-Ann' as if he knows her (although it is never explained why), and sends her into the house to find his gloves. Whilst searching, she finds some 'Eat Me' and 'Take One' biscuits and so she does, causing her to grow so that she is wearing the house. As the Rabbit is running around screaming 'Monster!', Alice notices his vegetable patch. Thinking eating something may help, she steals a carrot and eats it. As expected, it causes her to shrink and she chases after the White Rabbit who has again realised he is late. However, Alice has shrunk too much and is now tiny as she wanders into a bed of talking flowers. The flowers are nice to Alice, sitting her down and singing to her before asking what type of flower she is. When she replies that she is not a flower, they automatically decide that she must be a weed, and thus Alice is hurried along on her way, 'We don't want weeds in our bed.'

This is the first time Alice meets any real hostility on her journey and the encounter is like the one in Easy Rider when Wyatt, Billy and Hanson (a drunken lawyer they meet during an overnight stay in prison) are at a diner in Louisiana. Having parked their bikes outside, they go inside and sit down. At one table, a group of teenage girls lust over the free spirited nature of the trio. At another table, the Sheriff and his companions are talking about them (and making no attempt to do so discreetly), already branding them as troublemakers. One man thinks they must be gay, whilst the Sheriff is trying to think of something he can book them for.

Both groups of people demonstrate attitudes to outsiders. If these travellers are not one of them, then they must be a threat and should be run out of town or jailed. They are scared of the unknown and this fear turns into prejudice. The same thing happens to Alice again a little later on: When a bird cannot identify what Alice is, the bird starts screaming 'Serpent!' for in its mind, there is nothing else she can be.

As Alice is 'run out' of the flowerbed, she sees smoke letters floating across the tops of the plants. In a clearing sits the Caterpillar smoking his hookah. Like a pompous, bohemian academic, he talks in a very condescending manner to Alice and attempts to give her an elocution lesson. Telling him she is tired of being 'Only three inches tall', the Caterpillar offers Alice the mushroom on which she is sitting, to eat, one side of which to make her bigger, the other to make her smaller. This scene could be considered the most overtly drug oriented and is barely disguised as such, given that the Caterpillar is essentially smoking marijuana and offering Alice magic mushrooms.

Back out in the forest, Alice hears a disembodied voice reciting poetry (Lewis Carroll's The Jabberwocky) when a wide toothy grin appears, eyes follow and finally the rest of the curious creature manifests itself, the Cheshire Cat. A character with sociopathic traits, he is mischievous, but not malicious. He leads his life his own charming way and subsequently enthrals others.

Alice: ...I just wanted to ask you which way I ought to go.

Cat: Well that depends on where you want to get to.

Alice: Oh, it really doesn't matter as long as I...

Cat: Then it doesn't really mater which way you go! Oh, by the way, if you'd really like to know, he went that way.

Alice: Who did?

Cat: The White Rabbit.

The White Rabbit is the key to Alice's journey as he is really her reason for moving forward and is why she wants to know the way. If it really didn't matter where she was going, she would not have needed to ask the Cheshire Cat for directions and he knows this. It could be said that the Rabbit is the antithesis of what Alice is actually seeking. He is highly strung, a slave to his job and is very proper. The irony lies in that Alice is chasing the living embodiment of that from which she is trying to run from.

Alice's next stop is the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, where the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse are celebrating their unbirthdays. The party scene of the film, the drug of choice is tea though it is clear that the Mad Hatter is living up to his name's implication of mercury poisoning.

It would also seem that both he and the March Hare are suffering from Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. A short attention span is thought to be a symptom of prolonged amphetamine use. The Dormouse however, has the demeanour of a drunk. Upon the realisation that it is Alice's unbirthday too, she is pulled into the chaos of musical chairs and tea drinking.

The White Rabbit passes through, still panicking that he is late. The Mad Hatter takes the Rabbit's watch and makes a most bizarre attempt to fix it with jam and tea, before claiming the problem is that the watch is running two days slow. At this point, Alice decides the nonsense is too much for her. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare are quite irrational in what can, at times be a quite threatening manner.

Alice: ...I've had enough nonsense. I'm going home...if I ever get home... Oh dear, it's getting dreadfully dark. And nothing looks familiar. (Alice in Wonderland)

Despite her encounter with the flowers, it is not until the aftermath of the tea party, that Alice starts to realise that her journey is not living up to the expectations she had, much like the context of Wyatt's line in Easy Rider when he realises everything is wrong 'We blew it.' To her delight, Alice is set on a path by some birds who draw her a sign with their pencil beaks. Her delight however is short lived when a dog with a broom for a face (and tail) comes from the other direction, sweeping the path away. Without any idea of what to do, Alice breaks down in tears and sobs:

'Good advice. If I listened earlier I wouldn't be here! But that's just the trouble with me. I give myself very good advice but I very seldom follow it...Well I went along my way and never stopped to reason.' (Alice in Wonderland)

The guilt that Alice never fully experienced at the beginning of the film has caught up with her now that things have started going wrong. This is the reverse of what happens in Thelma and Louise. In Scott's film, the guilt is there at the beginning but fades as the women find their calling as outlaws. Just before the end of the film when the police are chasing them, Thelma tells Louise, 'Whatever happens, I'm glad I came with you.' In both cases though, the freedom of the road turns out not to be freedom at all. As Alice sits crying, the Cheshire Cat appears again, and in response to Alice's plea that she can't find her way, the Cat introduces the law of the land, 'That's because you have no way. All ways are the Queen's ways.' The Queen is the representation of authority in Alice, the equivalent to the Sheriff that characters in other road movies are trying to avoid. When put into the context of a kingdom, or in this case 'Queendom', the people Alice meets out in the forest (and thus not directly within the Queen's realm) are almost outlaws. They live by their own means, though still under the Queen's ruling, much like the rancher in Easy Rider on whose farm Billy and Wyatt fix their motorcycles at the beginning of the film and eat and talk with. Alice, on the other hand, asks how to find the Queen, thinking that she will help her to get home in the same way that Dorothy seeks the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz. The Cheshire Cat creates a short cut for Alice into the Queen's empire.

Alice hears singing as she finds her way out of the maze she found herself in. She emerges to see three playing cards painting white roses red. The Queen is the Queen of Hearts, thus red is extremely important to her. The cards had accidentally planted white roses, 'The queen she likes them red, if she saw white instead, she'd raise her voice and each would quickly lose his head.' (Alice in Wonderland) Although sung in a light-hearted manner, the implicit danger is there and Alice has joined in this criminal activity.

The cards realise the Queen is coming and Alice suddenly sees the White Rabbit wearing a playing card tabard and blowing his trumpet, signalling her majesty's arrival. The fact that the Rabbit is under service to the Queen adds to his character as the oppressed.

When the Queen realises that her beloved roses have only been painted red, the three cards are taken off to lose their heads whilst Alice is left kneeling before the royals. Avoiding any retribution, the Queen of Hearts appears to live up to her name and takes a liking to Alice.

In fact, the Queen and King are the archetypal role-reversed married couple. She is large and domineering, he is small and meek.

Inevitably Alice does succumb to the Queen's wrath after the Cheshire Cat gets her into trouble during a croquet game (fixed so the Queen will win). The King manages to convince his wife to let Alice have a trial and thus she finds herself in court. This is where many road movie protagonists should have ended up though many do have a spell in prison, such as in Easy Rider.

Witnesses at her trial include the three participants of the tea party. As expected, they celebrate the Queen's unbirthday but her present of a new crown turns out to be the Cheshire Cat. This scares the Dormouse who runs amok and causes pandemonium. The Queen is humiliated by being covered in jam and hit with a mallet, both of which finish up in Alice's hands. This time, there is no reasoning with the Queen and her rage builds. Alice, like many others in road movies, decides to stand up to the law as she realises she still has some of the mushroom with her. She grows, but unfortunately, Alice is in the middle of her tirade against the Queen when she shrinks again. This causes the Queen to reach boiling point and she screams 'Off with her head!'

Alice manages to flee the court and a chase ensues, retracing Alice's steps through Wonderland, past the people she has met on her journey, until she meets the Caterpillar. He blows smoke from his hookah, creating a tunnel for Alice to run up, still being trailed by the Queen and her subjects.

The culmination of the chase is very similar to the one in Thelma and Louise. They are being pursued as they try reach Mexico, however, a chasm lies ahead of them and an army of police cars behind. In Alice's scenario, the Queen is behind her and the still locked door (from the beginning) in front. If she could get outside, she would be 'across the border' into safety. However, in Thelma and Louise's case, when they face death or capture, they pledge their solidarity to each other and the spirit of the road, and choose death. Alice, though, is told by the door that she is already outside. Looking through the keyhole, she sees herself asleep and starts shouting her name to wake herself up. Her voice blends with that of her sister calling her, and she finds herself back in the 'normal world'.

This suggests then, that Alice's trip through Wonderland was just a dream, but when put in the context of drug culture, it could also be interpreted as a hallucination. There is a further connection with drug use in reference to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the song, 'White Rabbit' by Jefferson Airplane (for full lyrics see Appendix I) . The lyrics are based on elements from Alice in Wonderland. Knowing the nature of Jefferson Airplane's music (like the psychedelic music of Easy Rider) means that there is no denying the reference to drugs in their lyrics. In the film, Dr. Gonzo's drug intake reaches its peak whilst he is in the bath listening to 'White Rabbit' and asks Duke to throw the player in the bath with him when it reaches the climax of 'Feed Your Head'.

Whether adhering to or subverting the conventions of the genre, I believe this shows that Alice in Wonderland can be defined as a road movie. It begins with an escape from boredom and moves on to include interaction with a variety of characters, prejudice, drugs, and a confrontation with the law with leads to the climactic chase at the end of the film and another escape.

Though many road movie protagonists do not return home (whether by choice, death or jail), some do, including Alice. In his book 'America', Jean Baudrillard writes about the return from the journey back to the world you had left, where nothing had changed but you have. He offers some advice that it may be wise for Alice to listen to for once,

'You are best advised, then, to land discreetly, to come back politely into this world keeping anything you may have to say - along with the few sights still gleaming in your memory - strictly to yourself.' (1998: 73)

Appendix 1

"White Rabbit" - Jefferson Airplane

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small,
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall.
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall,
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call.
Call Alice
When she was just small.
When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low.
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head."

Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane 1967

In the The Matrix, (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) we discover that the world around us is not real but a simulated world created by machines and fed into our minds. There is a group of rebel humans living in the real world are attempting to save Zion, the last human city, from these machines. To do this, they move between the real world and the Matrix (as well as having the ability to manipulate it) where they find Keanu Reeves' character Neo and his alter ego Thomas Anderson and try to enlist his help. Before they can do this, they must introduce him to the idea of the Matrix. This is done with references Alice in Wonderland:

Morpheus: I imagine right now you're feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole?

Morpheus: You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes...

Neo is on the verge of a strange new world, just like Alice is at this point. In the first reference, Morpheus is referring to how confusing and out of control things must seem to Neo, in fact, in the conversation Neo says 'I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life'. The second reference, I believe, is not just a literal comparison of the rabbit hole and Wonderland with the real world but that when Morpheus says 'how deep the rabbit hole goes' it is also a metaphor for the conspiracy of the situation.

To go full circle, there is then a reference to The Wizard of Oz. After Neo has taken the red pill, it is explained to him that it means the group can trace him in the Matrix, Neo asks 'What does that mean?' to which Cypher chips in, 'It means buckle your seatbelt Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye bye.' The original line 'I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.' in The Wizard of Oz is the point at which Dorothy finds she too is in a new world. Variations on this line have appeared in many films where the characters have found themselves somewhere strange or unexpected, it is a cultural term of reference which the idea of 'the rabbit hole' may be becoming.

References and Bibliography

Books

BAUDRILLARD, J. America Verso, 1998

COHAN, S. and I. Rae Hark The Road Movie Book Routledge 1997 pp. 1-14

DANIEL, A. 'Easy Rider and the Counter-Culture' in Lost Highways An Illustrated History of the Road, Sergeant and Watson, Creation Books, 1999 pp. 67-80

_______ 'Our Idea of Fun: Thelma and Louise On Trial' in Lost Highways An Illustrated History of the Road, Sergeant and Watson, Creation Books, 1999 pp. 169-180

DICKINSON, K 'The Depiction of Travelling Children' in Lost Highways An Illustrated History of the Road, Sergeant and Watson, Creation Books, 1999 pp. 193-205

EYERMAN. R and O. Löfgren 'Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility' Theory, Culture and Society (SAGE London) vol. 12 (1995) pp. 53-79

KLINGER, B. 'The Road to Dystopia, Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider' in The Road Movie Book, Cohan and Rae Hark, Routledge 1997 pp. 179-203

ROBERTSON, P. 'Home and Away, Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz' in The Road Movie Book, Cohan and Rae Hark, Routledge 1997 pp. 271-286

SARGEANT, J and S. Watson Lost Highways An Illustrated History of the Road, Creation Books, 1999 pp. 5-18

TUTTLE, C. The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road Chronicle Books, 1999

WILLIS. S 'Race on the Road, Crossover Dreams' in The Road Movie Book, Cohan and Rae Hark, Routledge 1997 pp. 287-306

Films

Alice in Wonderland 1951. animated film. dir. Clyde Geronim et al. Walt Disney Pictures

Easy Rider 1969 film. dir. Dennis Hopper, Columbia Pictures

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 1998 film. dir. Terry Gilliam, Universal

Matrix, The 1999, film. dir. Larry and Andy Wachowski, Silver Pictures, Warner Bros

Thelma and Louise 1991 film. dir. Ridley Scott, MGM, Pathe

Twin Peaks 1990 television series dir. David Lynch, Lynch Entertainment, Worldvision

Wizard of Oz, The 1939 film. dir. Victor Fleming, MGM

Internet

Jefferson Airplane lyrics for White Rabbit [http://www.math.ufl.edu/~jaz/lyrics/whiterabbit]