The liberating moral of "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"
This fun movie misses a deeper point about what being haunted really means.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice wasn’t a bad movie. But it was thisclose to being great.
Like many people, I wondered if Tim Burton would revisit this 80s classic. The insanity of it all, the stark contrasts between the worlds of the living and the dead, Michael Keaton’s wonderfully manic performance as “the ghost with the most”… there’d be so much to play with in a sequel. I saw the new movie on opening weekend in Hollywood, at the movie palace once known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Today it’s the TCL Chinese Theatre: the largest IMAX auditorium in the world.
Seeing a movie in L.A. with friends who work in entertainment is a mixed blessing. I appreciate their insights on filmmaking, but… did you enjoy it? And I would’ve simply stuck with my answer of Yes, it was a hoot, and I want to see it again, except their deeper critiques got under my skin. I couldn’t ignore it: yes, something was missing from this film.
Just before meeting my friends for the movie, I’d taken the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Burbank. That studio made this film. Props on the tour included the original costumes worn by Keaton, Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin in 1988. Every company depicts itself in idealistic, lofty terms, but this one actually was. Warner’s early projects dealt with issues of poverty, antisemitism, organized crime and wrongful convictions. The company’s motto: Educate, Entertain, Enlighten.
⚠️(MAJOR STORYLINE SPOILERS IMMINENT. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.)⚠️
Some of its latest hits also had a strong theme. The Lego Movie took a hard left turn from screwball comedy to family tearjerker. The Matrix saga made us rethink reality and who controls our view of it. Even Barbie called out the crushing perfectionism that creates unreasonable expectations. So when I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, my friends’ critiques of this Warner Bros. release blended with my historical tour and, over time, showed me what this film was missing.
In the movie, 3 generations of the Deetz family return to their idyllic old house: Lydia (Winona Ryder), her mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and Lydia’s young adult daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). They, along with Lydia’s partner Rory (Justin Theroux), are there to bury Lydia’s father/Delia’s husband Charles after he died rather gruesomely.
Rory is way too new-age and cringey for a headstrong cynic like Astrid, especially since the girl is still processing her father’s death. Despite sharing versions of the same trauma, Lydia and Astrid could hardly be more distant. For one thing, Lydia can see lots of ghosts, but not Astrid’s late father. No wonder Lydia’s number appears on Astrid’s phone as “Alleged Mom”.
And Delia is even more of a pretentious snob than we remember, having become an esoteric performance artist. Her plan is to turn the house into a high-concept art project about death. Clearly, ticket sales ease the grieving process.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Beetlejuice has set himself up as a businessman. A freak accident causes his dead ex-wife Delores to escape her confinement, vowing revenge on him. Delores (Monica Bellucci) is a “soul sucker”, feeding on departed spirits in a quest for immortality. That’s how Beetlejuice died: his wife killed him. Thankfully she didn’t take his soul: a fate which even the dead cannot survive.
Beetlejuice appears to Lydia through unsettling glimpses and flashes in her waking life, even getting his promotional flyer into the real world. We immediately hate Rory when he, thinking he’s helping Lydia confront a delusion, says you-know-who’s name three times. (Watch what happens in the video below.)
The plot thickens when Astrid falls for a local boy, Jeremy. He hangs out in his treehouse or his attic bedroom, ignored by neglectful parents, bonding with Astrid over their quirkiness and isolation. On Halloween night, Astrid and Jeremy kiss for the first time… and levitate off the ground. That’s when Astrid realizes: Jeremy is a ghost. All that spooky stuff she thought was a hoax is real.
Meanwhile, Lydia learns that Jeremy didn’t just die. He killed his parents. Astrid didn’t notice, but they were ghosts too. Lydia races to Jeremy’s house but arrives too late: he’s already taken Astrid to the other side, tricking her into giving up her soul so that he can come back to life.
To make matters worse, one of Delia’s idiotic performance art projects really bites: a faux-ritual performed with supposedly-defanged snakes. She, the ultimate Karen, pushes past the line in the waiting room of the dead, confident that she can be revived if she could just speak with the manager.
This forces Lydia to ask Beetlejuice for help. He agrees to help save Astrid, and she agrees to help stop Delores. The catch? He would get what he wanted from the first film: Lydia must marry him. Sure enough, everything shifts when Astrid and Lydia find Astrid’s father in the underworld. That’s why Lydia could not see his ghost: there was no ghost to see. He’d moved on. They were looking for someone who wasn’t there anymore, and that left them vulnerable to someone who seemed as real as they are.
That’s when the movie’s deeper theme began to emerge.
The somewhat schmaltzy revelation about Astrid’s father also revealed something big. The story starts to resolve itself when everyone gets real about what’s happened to them: specifically, what they’ve lost. Every character’s story arc is about their inability to accept loss. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about the dangers of not moving on.
Think about it: Lydia can’t move on from her grief at the loss of her husband. Rory exploits that to trap her in an unhealthy relationship. Astrid can’t move on from her father’s death, estranging her from her mother and making her vulnerable to Jeremy. Delores, the villainous MacGuffin of the movie, can’t let go of her unattainable desire for immortality.
Beetlejuice can’t move on from his infatuation with Lydia, which always lands him in trouble, and his mistakes nullify his marriage deal. You’d think he’d know better, considering he was poisoned by someone who couldn’t take no for an answer. Delia can’t move on from her own crass commercialism and her unwillingness to let her husband go: at least, not without getting some attention (and maybe money) in the process.
And Jeremy threatens others by being both unwilling to rest in peace, and willing to keep killing in hopes of escaping judgment. He turns out to be one of the movie’s most important characters, representing just how seductive unresolved loss can be. It makes us see what we want to see, camouflaging its power and danger until it’s too late. When we won’t let go of things beyond our control, that’s when things beyond our control won’t let go of us. There’s a word for that:
Haunted.
This movie turned out to be a warning about letting the past haunt you.
I wanted a moment where Lydia, Astrid, Delores and Beetlejuice confront one another. Getting eaten by a giant sandworm (good fan service, but meh) was a lazy deus ex machina climax. No, I wanted Beetlejuice to look at Delores and saying something like, “Babe… you’re dead to me.” He needed to let her know that if you gain immortality, you still lose everything, because the people and things you loved won’t be there. Maybe Lego and Barbie spoiled me, but more films should leave us entertained and enlightened. Uplifted, even.
…and having said all of this, I’m still looking forward to watching it again.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is shallow and screwy and silly in such a fun way. It wasn’t particularly scary — more spooky and macabre — and the whole film only has about 2 or 3 jump-scares. The acting is very funny, including from Danny DeVito and Willem Dafoe. I also like how the movie compensated for Charles (Jeffrey Jones) being rather impossible to cast in the sequel. (Jones became a registered sex offender after pleading guilty to charges back in 2003.) The music in the movie made me smile, using both “Soul Train” and “MacArthur Park” in ways that I found delightful. And it does great fan service, with the original theme song and the model of the town in the Deetz’s attic as perfect throwbacks.
Everyone gets haunted sometimes. Sometimes the ghosts win, stealing our spirit and masquerading as us. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is delightful, but it neglected to help us exorcise our ghosts and see them clearly. Grief and loss take time, but time isn’t enough. Perspective saves our souls: shedding painful tears, speaking our truth candidly, or acknowledging that we’ll never get back what’s gone.
…or maybe we just need to let ourselves laugh at it all. That can go a long way, too.
Those were great points I hadn’t considered—everybody having to let go of something. I just saw the movie tonight and enjoyed it myself. I wasn’t sure how a sequel like that would fair all these years later, but it did pretty good.