Jump in the Line: Beetlejuice as American Cringe

Cesare, from the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. An image that I imagine lives, rent-free, in Tim Burton’s brain.

(Unintentionally, this is the third “line” piece we’ve released in as many weeks. I’m using a substitute computer while my normal one is in the shop, so the quality might not be quite up to snuff.)

If you were a strange child or teenager in the nineties or aughts, you were essentially issued an affection for Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice. Ever since I mentioned it at the end of my piece on the concept of American Cringe, I’ve been turning it over an over in my head and trying to figure out what about the movie seemed so relevant to me that I inserted a mention of it.

This evening — I write this on Tuesday — Edgar and I rewatched it on streaming (we shelled out four dollars for it on Amazon. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism) and, earlier, I listened to the excellent Horror Vanguard episode on it. Much of my analysis dovetails with theirs, though there are some divergences.

It’s a stupid way to die.

If, like me, you haven’t seen it in a long time, allow me to refresh: the Maitlands (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) die in a freak accident involving a stray dog, and are stuck haunting their house in rural Connecticut. Since neither, apparently, had any sort of family, their home and all of their possessions are acquired by the Deetzes — father Charles (Jeffrey Jones), daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), and stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) — who make no sense as a family unit (none of them seem to like one another). The Maitlands go to incredible lengths to get them out, being unhelpfully chewed up and spat out by the bureaucracy of the underworld and then, at wit’s end, they hire the titular Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton,) who goes to incredible lengths to fulfill the deal that he feels he made with them and has to be chased away by the Maitlands, who have developed a fondness for Lydia in the meantime. Eventually, the Deetzes and Maitlands agree to share the house, with Lydia essentially having four parents: two living and two ghostly.

A lot of this movie dovetails with things we’ve talked about on this website: I could go into a discussion of the afterlife bureaucracy and its reflection of real-world social services, I could talk about how apparently ghost capitalism is a thing that exists there (also: hands off, Reaganite, ghosts are a leftist symbol), I could talk about the socially constructed nature of identity in the film (“I myself am the strange and unusual,”) the connection between property and selfhood, how blind the narrative is to its own material underpinnings, or simply how the situation of the Maitlands illustrates the way that quarantine (necessary though it is) leads to depression. I’m not even going to make this a piece a bout nostalgia for the 1980s and how frustrating it is, because it barely counts as presenting itself as taking place at a particular time.

Look, I didn’t think I had been gearing up to write about the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice, but I’m really seeing that a lot of what I’ve been talking about fit into this movie, and I really must admit that it’s a fun movie. I recommend rewatching it if you get the chance. It’s only an hour and a half long (if I’m nostalgic for anything, it’s for films that can tell a story in less than three hours.) However, I stand by what I said about the movie previously: it is part of that genre I mentioned and labeled American Cringe.

I see no real contradiction here.

In that piece, I defined American Cringe as:

American Cringe is a particular aesthetic sensibility that developed near the end of the Cold War and was dusted off again at the beginning of this century after receding into the background a bit. It is the sort of pro-American cultural product that, essentially, comes pre-parodied (which is possibly the best explanation for what the aesthetic of “cringe” is, in my opinion) and is clung to with a distressing earnestness, because it is paradoxically viewed as more authentic for how ridiculous it seems: clearly, one would only post this on the internet, or consume it with such vigor, if they really believed it.

Let’s consider: is Beetlejuice pro-American? Implicitly, yes. It takes the logic of America in that hinge period where we passed from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush as a metaphysical principle. The afterlife is not only just a vast bureaucracy that exists solely to perpetuate itself — there is no ghost government allocating funding, there is no Hadean civil society being served — it is a civil service staffed by suicides who have no time, funding, or capability to help anyone. The Maitlands are given a guidebook and told to figure out their existence as ghosts, with horrible consequences if they fail.

So, perhaps more Thatcherite than Reaganite, but I don’t honestly see much difference.

Also, it comes pre-parodied: to spoof this movie, you would essentially have to make a pornographic version (which I’m certain exists, but which I’m not going to look up.) Likewise, the affection that I — and all other former “strange children and teenagers” of the same era — have for it is definitely the aforementioned “distressing earnestness”. One cannot say that the plot of Beetlejuice is any less ridiculous than MS Paint artwork of Sonic the Hedgehog characters attending church. One can only say that they like it more.

The problem is that the ending almost completely ruins the whole movie due to the reversal that is pulled. Yes, the ghosts and the living humans have come to an agreement that allows them to coexist, and Lydia seems happy (despite not appearing for the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, one could argue that she’s the main character.) However, it’s important to remember that Lydia, who described herself rather melodramatically as “the strange and unusual” earlier in the movie is shown to attend a catholic school (or a school with similar uniforms) and to be dedicating herself to study. One could argue that she found a place to fit in.

But all character decisions are the decisions of the artist: they are the things that the artist believes fit the character and the arc of the story. Within the context of the movie (as decided by Burton and screenwriters Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren,) the way to make Lydia happy was to make her a normal schoolgirl who happened to have a pair of ghosts as a live in aunt and uncle and who occasionally provide levitation and Harry Belafonte music. You know, as a reward for getting an A on a math test.

Meanwhile, the principle antagonist of the film is stuck in a waiting room, babbling nonsense to the other people (cue insensitive portrayal of a native person.) As Horror Vanguard notes, this is presented as a setback for him more than anything else. The mood is less “I am vanquished” than a sort of Sisyphean “ah, shit, well, here we go again.”

One thing that bugs me about the movie is how it makes ineffective bureaucracy into a cosmological principle, and also the implications of ghost capitalism. In my thinking, Bureaucracy exists not to solve people’s problems but to absorb blame the way that kevlar absorbs the impact from a gunshot. The blame belongs to everyone in the organization, and so such a small portion of it is attached to each person that, essentially no one is responsible. In the movie, this is represented not just by the waiting room, but by the character of Juno, who is the caseworker assigned to the whole business, and who does basically nothing but tell them to read the manual, solve their own problems, and not to talk to Betelgeuse.

So of course they talk to Betelgeuse. It’s one of the rules of screenwriting: if you’re told not to do something, you must eventually do it. Betelgeuse positions himself as a “freelance Bio-Exorcist”, promising to get rid of any pesky humans. However, the question presents itself: how does one ghost hire another ghost to perform a service?

The house is amazing. I understand a dispute over this house, which is apparently in eastern Vermont.

The movie — which is essentially a property dispute — only occasionally talks about and never once shows money or any kind of transaction. People are hired to perform a service, but you never see the hiring process, you only see the service being performed. There is the implication of payment, of something being exchanged for something else, but the logic of this transaction — which must be clear to people from every culture in every time period — is left unexplored. We can forgive the writers for not thinking about this, but now I’m thinking about it and it’s a heady and confusing thing to think about.

I mean, I know the answer is “the whole thing is steeped in Capitalist Realism,” but what’s the Watsonian answer? Or, I don’t know, the Burtonian one?

There isn’t enough in the text to answer this.

Let’s leave this aside for now.

Not sure what I think about the character designs here. Anyway, Syfy has a write-up about it from a few years back if you want anything on this in particular..

I’m reminded by Wikipedia that there were additional adaptations of this made: an animated series that ran from 1989-1991, and a 2016 musical. I never saw the musical, and the animated series ended when I was 5, though I think reruns of it ended up on Cartoon Network. I honestly don’t recall ever watching it.

I find it notable that the animated show removes the Maitlands altogether, and makes it more about the adventures of Lydia and Betelgeuse (now with much less of a rapist vibe, more of a standard gross-out cartoon character portrayal) in the underworld.

Image from Deadline. I think this got made because there was a well-received Addams Family musical a few years back.

The stage musical starts with the funeral of Lydia’s mother (after all, she has a step-mother, what happened to her mother is never really addressed), and makes Betelgeuse into a mastermind, planning to use her trauma to escape the underworld and enter the world of the living. Meanwhile, Charles Deetz, her father, is portrayed as a real estate agent, who wants to replace the sleepy New England town with a gated community, and — honestly — I didn’t get much further than the first couple of paragraphs. I’m sure it’s a fine musical, but I’m not really feeling like recapping the whole thing.

Something is notable in the reactions to the film and the choices made in the adaptations: the most interesting contrast isn’t the Deetzes vs. the Maitlands — it’s Lydia and Beetlejuice, the girl that wants to die and the ghost (or chaos demon or whatever) that wants to live. I’m curious as to why Lydia is such a compelling character.

Not pictured: wax-coated paper container and chopsticks

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of Winona Ryder, but the character is overblown and gothy in a way that is best summarize by the fact that we see her eating takeout Chinese food with her parents while wearing a full mourning veil. While the movie itself does qualify as “American Cringe” (maybe with the “American” toned down, but definitely present,) I think that Lydia represents something crucial.

Okay, bear with me here: archetypal criticism isn’t necessarily my bag, but it can be a useful hat to put on every now and then.

To an extent, I feel that Lydia is built on the same foundation as Shakespeare’s Ophelia (from Hamlet) and Nabokov’s Dolores Haze (I’ve been listening to the excellent and highly recommended Lolita podcast by Jamie Loftus, and perhaps I’m just primed for the connection.) However, she is a young woman enamored with her own self-destruction that is made to play a role by forces outside of her control — unlike the others, though, Lydia is given an escape. She doesn’t drown like Ophelia or die in childbirth like Dolores, and that’s part of why the ending sits wrong: not that we want her to die, but because the people writing the story didn’t know what to do with a version of this character that lives through the end. Frankly, given the nature of the world presented, death wouldn’t have removed the character from the equation, and that’s what tends to happen to this girl: she its taken off the playing board and the point is moot. I say this because it feels like she has agency and a will in the story, but after a point this drops off and there’s not really much in the way of explanation.

As a bit of justification, Nabokov, invokes both Edgar Allen Poe (“Annabell Lee”) and Lewis Carrol (whom he refers to as “the first Humbert Humbert”) in relation to his narrative. Notably, Burton invokes Poe in Beetlejuice directly (Lydia is referred to as “Edgar Allen Poe’s daughter”) and went on to make two films based on Alice in Wonderland. I would be surprised if there were not similar ideas echoing through Burton’s work and Nabokov’s.

That being said, I feel that Burton lacks a degree of the empathy that Nabokov brings to his treatment. While Lydia survives the story, her identity is warped by it. And I stress, she is not warped by the events of the story, but by the authorial viewpoint of the story.

Previously mentioned here. I’m actually thinking about rereading it sometime soon.

One of my patented extended asides: I would be fascinated to see the character of Lydia Deetz given the same treatment as the characters of Scooby Doo received in Edgar Canteros’s Meddling Kids or various characters did in Joe Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails. While this would necessitate a distance being placed between the subject of this hypothetical treatment and Lydia (to avoid copyright infringement,) I think that there’s a lot going on with her character, and it would be fascinating to see how her life has unfolded from the vantage point of 1998 or 2008. How does one go about the business of going to college and holding down a regular job and forming normal human relationships after such an experience? I feel like the Burtonian answer would be to compartmentalize and just go about life.

Which is an unsatisfying conclusion, suggested by the end of the film, and that’s part of why I feel uncomfortable with the ending as presented: her father has come to this town to (presumably) develop it into a bedroom community for greater New York (if we take the musical’s read at face value. The movie is very unclear about what he does,) and his daughter has her gothy square edges sanded down to fit into a round hole. Sure, there are friendly ghosts living in the house, but they’re the most anodyne, norm core ghosts that anyone’s ever conceived of, apparently content to see the town get turned into a suburb.

And that’s really the message here. Frankly, if I think about it hard enough, that’s the message of so much of Burton’s work: the suburbs win.

I’m jut imagining a scene, set months after the apparent ending of the movie, where Charles Deetz walks Delia and Lydia through the just-completed first home of the suburb that he’s building, the seed crystal for the town’s destruction. After walking wordlessly through the home, recent high-school-graduate Lydia turns back and — in a mirror to the end of 1984 — decides that she loves the suburbs, and all of that time spent thinking of herself as “the strange and unusual” was just a phase. The Maitlands, as normal as they are, fade from view, and the Deetzes decide that they must have been mistaken about the ghosts in their home.

They pack up the model town and the Harry Belafonte records, and start getting Lydia ready for college.

But it’s inevitable that — and this would be outside of the Burtonian text altogether, — a year or so later, as she’s settling into her Sophomore dorm at college, she starts hearing voices. Or, rather, a voice, and there are no friendly ghosts to protect her.

Because chaos doesn’t go away that easily. Nor the strange, nor the unusual.

We only think that the suburbs can win, because they represent a system in which “winning” and “losing” mean anything. Ignore the bureaucracy, ignore the inconsistent idea of “ghost capitalism” altogether. Somewhere, in a desert called “Saturn” that is not the Saturn we know, a sandworm swims like a fish through dust, and a shapeshifting chaos demon babbles like a madman as he again starts his climb back towards daylight.

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