What We All Forgot About Beetlejuice
5 min read
It’s easy to be cynical about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and those who bought tickets to see it on opening weekend, to the tune of a dazzling $110 million. We’re in the age of intellectual property, after all, and a 36-years-later sequel to a beloved film doesn’t come across as an inspired project so much as the result of industry pressure.
That feels more true when comparing the new film with its predecessor. The director Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice—the tale of a lonely teen and her (un)dead friends taking on a trickster demon—employs a rich visual storytelling that’s no longer common in blockbusters, which rely on computer effects and rote humor. In 1988, it struck an immediate chord with its haunted-house scares and three-ring-circus energy, earning an impressive $75 million at the box office, critical acclaim, and a place in the cultural canon.
Despite the director’s return for the sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t break new visual or narrative ground. With its renewal of the “humans-meet-poltergeists” premise, the film embodies the platonic ideal of Burton: familiar players, cartoony horror, goth vibe, and surrealist humor. But it’s also self-aware, encouraging viewers to consider both the art and the artist behind it. The result is a movie that fulfills the apparent desire of Warner Bros. producers for an IP revival and also explores the gap between the filmmaker Burton was three decades ago and the one he is now.
Over his nearly 40-year career, Burton has become a house style as much as an individual creator. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice exemplifies that transformation by revisiting the first film’s charmingly twisted sights, replete with the practical effects fans expect from early-period Burton. The sequel recalls almost every memorable moment from Beetlejuice, with several gags reproduced verbatim; Harry Belafonte musical cues and the depiction of the afterlife as a big DMV office are immediately familiar. Only occasionally does it demonstrate its predecessor’s imagination: We get a delightfully wicked Claymation sequence, French New Wave parodies that allow the actors to ham it up, and glimpses of the sprawling economy beyond the grave. The movie ends up as both a full embrace of Burton’s trademark aesthetic and a rumination on what it is to be hemmed in by one’s own success.
A surprise smash upon release, Beetlejuice—Burton’s second feature film, following 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure—established everything the director’s name now conjures in the popular imagination. All of his signature visual tics are present, from humorously macabre costuming to German-expressionist, handcrafted production design. The broad appeal lies in how these eccentric parts coalesce into an endearing whole.
Beetlejuice remains popular in large part because of the director’s stylistic consistency. Burton’s aesthetic is so distinct that it’s become marketable, both cinematically and for a bevy of tie-in products. His artistically unified canon—hopping from Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands to Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, and beyond—has rendered each project an advertisement for the others. Should you like one because of Burton’s idiosyncrasies, you can expect to enjoy the others. (You may even want to buy a T-shirt at your local Hot Topic.) In other words, Burton’s brand is bigger than any single film, although Beetlejuice proved sellable in its own right, spawning a cartoon that sanded down the adult edges and a 2019 musical that briefly became part of a congressional scandal. In spite of Burton’s departures in the past decade from his creative hallmarks (which are more in step with his oeuvre than they appear), he’s still a singular force in Hollywood. There are few modern filmmakers with a flair so unique and merch-friendly that it’s taken on their own name: in his case, Burtonesque.
A deeply human theme ties together all of his zany grotesquerie: feeling isolated by your own individuality, longing for inclusion. Like Edward Scissorhands on his hilltop or Bruce Wayne in his manor, the Beetlejuice heroine Lydia Deetz (played by Winona Ryder) is an observer, holding herself at a remove with her photography and in denial about her discomfort with being excluded. She feels more kinship with the dead than with the living, especially once she learns that she can see ghosts. Supernatural complications aside, her struggle to fit in is resonant and recognizable.
The most satisfying parts of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice directly link back to, and further, this thread. Now an adult, Lydia (a returning Ryder) is haunted by her past and trapped in her goth-inflected outsider image, with a successful ghost-hunting show produced by a money-grubbing boyfriend (Justin Theroux) who exploits her fame and talents for wealth. Her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, the star of Wednesday, for which Burton directed several episodes), feels ostracized by her mother’s famously spooky history and art-brat upbringing; in a reverse of Beetlejuice’s teenage Lydia, Astrid desperately yearns for a normal life. The outcast’s acceptance has created another kind of loneliness, because it’s not a Burton film without some visceral melancholy.
When viewed from this angle, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice becomes a bookend with its predecessor. Beetlejuice forged the director’s cinematic calling card; the sequel steps back to examine the culture his body of work has formed, and where it has left him. Burton is no longer a Hollywood oddball; he’s an institution. This is perhaps an unexpected place for a filmmaker once fired by Disney for his morbid and whimsical style, but it’s one he occupies nonetheless. (Case in point: His 2010 reunion with Disney made more than $1 billion.) Each of his new works thus raises the question: Who is in the director’s chair this time? Burton the brand, who can coast on his aesthetic alone, or Burton the artist—a former outsider who’s still hopelessly interested in telling stories about them?
There is a contradiction here, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice compellingly embodies that tension, its breezy performances and deftly delivered jokes sitting alongside the fuzzy nostalgia. The sequel is, in many ways, exactly what it looks like: a revival of a decades-old movie with plenty of cultural stock to cash in on, happy to play the hits. But it is also an artist’s reflection on his journey from ghastly pariah to mall-goth staple. Burton could’ve settled by taking audiences on another roller coaster through the land of the dead. Instead, he chooses to consider the living too.
