Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: should I kill myself?
Dumbo is a 2019 American fantasy period adventure film directed by Tim Burton
Housekeeping:
We are but 2 weeks away from the release of Intermezzo, so I am announcing the second Famous and Beloved Book Club: “Sally September in October.” The book will ship on September 24, so I would like to post the first discussion on October 1. I’m announcing this now to give everyone ample time to pre-order the book, preferably through my Bookshop affiliate link so that I make money from your purchase, also.
I learned who The Dare is because I passed him on the street and was like, “what was that?”.1 This was a couple months before “Guess” came out, which gave me time to learn that 1) The Dare causes people to behave reprehensibly and moronically, as if they have never before smiled, and 2) The Dare’s music is pretty good. I’ve decided people don’t like him because he, with earnestness and authenticity, attempts to reinvent and embrace the Tumblr alt aesthetic of yore, which makes people feel old and out of touch. In 2010, being cool involved a very curated sense of flippancy and meanness that is now passé. People who know what LCD Soundsystem is but also wish they were still 19 hear The Dare say that he likes girls “who got so much hair on they ass it clogs the drain” and that makes them cringe: that’s not how they learned to be cool 15 years ago. His silliness and unabashed interpolation of coolness into something new are not common in a Pitchforkified music scene, and that he makes songs that sound like they could be in Target commercials but with vocally strained lyrics about being buried with perfume, I believe The Dare confuses onlookers with small minds. He released his debut album on Friday, and it is quite pleasant. It reminds me of Jet Set Radio Future.
Is Beetlejuice hot?
One of the greatest performances in any movie ever made is Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice. This character is a horny gross guy with a silly voice and no motivations or verisimilitude. The movie is 90 minutes of Michael Keaton screaming and doing impressions, often to or at Alec Baldwin. It is nothing but Michael Keaton wearing funny makeup, standing in a plastic model of a neighborhood, grabbing his dick and telling Alec Baldwin, “nice fucking model.”
My family showed me this movie when I was 4 or 5 years old, and it was very moving to me. I don’t remember what I gathered from its jokes about gay guys or valium at that time, but I remember having the time of my life watching Beetlejuice until the last 20 minutes or so of the film, when Beetlejuice attempts to forcibly wed child Winona Ryder and she is repulsed by him. I remember very distinctly thinking, I hate that they don’t just kiss, and that she doesn’t like marrying Beetlejuice. I would love it. When Beetlejuice uses Lydia’s voice to say “yes, I love that man of mine,” I understood in my burgeoning mind that I was physically attracted to men, specifically to Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice.
I rewatch Beetlejuice every few years, bracing for it to have aged badly, for my former fondness to be proven merely sexual and not based on the film’s quality. This never happens because Beetlejuice is one of the funniest pieces of media I have ever seen in my life. Every single time I see it, I encounter a joke I had forgotten and I laugh and I laugh. Alec Baldwin and Catherine O’Hara are two of our greatest comedic talents, and the movie is an onslaught of once-in-a-decade performances and memorable gimmicks that have delighted me for my entire life. Neither can it possibly be so rare that I am attracted to Beetlejuice, as I think that is one of the film’s central themes: Beetlejuice is a likable guy.
Beetlejuice is the only good movie Tim Burton has ever made.2 I respect the contributions made via Batman and Returns, but I enjoyed those movies immensely as a child and had crushes on Nicholson’s Joker and Keaton’s Batman, yet when I rewatch them as an adult I am not overjoyed but moderately unoffended. I have seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd more than 10 times, each, but they are truly, uniquely, horrific: sometimes, though, things are horrific in a way that makes you laugh. Edward Scissorhands is something I am open to considering “good,” but whenever I rewatch I find it increasingly difficult to endure Johnny Depp’s facial expression and plight of having “scissorhands.”
I am not charmed by Pee-Wee Herman or Mars Attacks! because I was born in 1997, and unless you have attempted to watch Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, Big Eyes, and Dumbo—all of them, in vain—you are not allowed to have an opinion about the great American auteur Timothy Burton. After accepting his check for the live action Dumbo film, which is comparable only to Saving Mr. Banks in terms of weepy cash grabs about Disney intellectual property that star Colin Farrell as a one-armed or Australian addict, Mr. Burton has made a Beetlejuice sequel that blurs Catherine O’Hara’s face like Kris Jenner’s and makes Lydia Deetz’s daughter wear Vejas and be woke. Tonally, this is what Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is like:
You must understand that my love of Beetlejuice primed me not to expect too much of its sequel, to stupidly scoff at the inevitability that it could live up to Beetlejuice’s might, but to love it. The trailers and character poster of Justin Theroux that says “Justin Theroux is Rory” made me laugh derisively and earnestly, and I was very hopeful and enthused about the movie. You must also understand that the reason it made me so angry is not that it is a complete disaster like Dumbo, but that it was salvageable, and no one salvaged it.
If a movie is confusingly bad—miscalculated, overwrought, out of touch—my brother and I will often look at each other and say, “they should have asked me.” “I don’t know why no one called, I was available.” This is, obviously, in jest. But, sometimes, rarely, if something makes me angry enough, I start to really wonder: how do I get someone to call me?
Is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice too woke?
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice begins not with Beetlejuice, nor the aesthetic and narrative pacing that makes Beetlejuice funny. Instead, there are 50 new plot lines and characters we have to learn too much about: Winona Ryder was married then divorced and that husband—an environmentalist protester—also died, she has a daughter who hates her and is in boarding school, her dad and Catherine O’Hara’s husband, played by a since-disgraced actor, is also dead—which we must know all the details about through CGI meant to look like claymation—and Beetlejuice, the character known for not making any sense and grabbing his dick, has an ex-wife who is out to get him. Winona Ryder is also dating Justin Theroux, who is a male manipulator named Rory.
The exposition about why Jeffrey Jones is not in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice made me want to rip my hair out, because the explanation as to why the original film’s main characters played by movie stars Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are not in it takes one line, delivered by Winona Ryder: “we found a loophole, and they moved on.” That’s funny. What isn’t funny: minutes upon minutes of Winona Ryder’s daughter played by Jenna Ortega meeting a guy played by a nobody in long, boring scenes of teenage romance shot like Gilmore Girls. Eventually, that guy is sucked into hell by Beetlejuice who says, “see ya, fucker.” Now that is pleasant.
After all this trouble, all these characters—Monica Bellushi, Willem Dafoe, Danny Devito, for one second—never amount to anything, as they just fizzle into the background of the film’s successful third act. Those final 30 or so minutes include little but Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton running around hand-in-hand, Catherine O’Hara being told she’s dead and shrugging, and Keaton saying nonsense and swearing in a range of funny voices. There are glimpses of this throughout, when they could clearly only schedule Keaton by himself, where he is left on a soundstage to do vaudevillian acts that would charm anyone with eyes and ears. If the film were merely re-edited around those segments, starting on a less plotty foot, it wouldn’t be so sluggish and strange. If they called me while making Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I could have told them that.
In belabored press, Josh Horowitz asked Winona Ryder if she had any ideas for what a sequel to Beetlejuice might look like, in all the years leading up to it. She reveals she “always wanted Lydia to end up with Beetlejuice.”
She says this as though it is ridiculous, but it is not. You are not supposed to admit that the coupling of Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton as weird Halloween characters is appealing to you, but if it weren’t, Beetlejuice would not be so popular. This is because the characters of Beetlejuice and Lydia are not that far off from the ways Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder behave in real life; the former is a loud, suave, unconventionally handsome prick, and the latter is a little weirdo. Seeing them interact is charming and satisfying. If Michael Keaton likes her, could he like me?
You are also not supposed to admit that Alec Baldwin is someone you like seeing because he killed someone and is angry. You are not supposed to pay Alec Baldwin to be in a movie. But if you did offer Alec Baldwin lots of money to appear in Beetlejuice 2, would he protest? If you did see Alec Baldwin in Beetlejuice 2, acting like Jack Donaghy and having killed someone, would you protest?
Is Tim Burton talented?
Overly indulgent franchising, Marvel-brained audience investment in multi-text intellectual property, is relatively novel. But reviving old movies into moderately successful sequels is not. The idea of a Beetlejuice sequel is a little annoying, but it does not offend me as it must others. There are cute ideas; if the original is largely “about” the afterlife as an outdated bureaucratic experience, the sequel adds more clever elements of bureaucracy, like idiot cops. For its deluge of formal, narrative, and aesthetic flaws, it also relies on nostalgic citations less than films of its ilk; apart from an attempt at recreating the “Banana Boat” scene with “MacArthur Park,” almost all the set pieces are based on newly funny premises, like Beetlejuice speaking in Spanish with subtitles (I laughed at this). The real issue with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is difficult to name or describe, because the right pieces are all in play. It doesn’t seem like the studio intervened in ways that significantly worsened the movie, as the wokeness is less reactionary than a device pulled from the Narrative Devices drawer. The actors are all funny—even Rory is inspired—and the jokes aren’t embarrassing. I simply do not think Tim Burton knows how to assemble a motion picture.
There is a widespread opinion that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is bad because it is a sequel. If its problem were studio-approved-sequalization, it would have nothing but citations of Beetlejuice with no originality. It would be easy to understand. There is also a widespread opinion that Halloween Adults, Hot Topic types, are responsible for over-saturation of culture with Tim Burton that has weakened an otherwise legitimate legacy of his unique aesthetic, of Danny Elfman’s unique approach to scores. Neither are true. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is confusing and its bad parts have little to do with Beetlejuice, at all. You are tired of seeing the aesthetic of Tim Burton because it is tiring. You are tired of hearing the same wailing, wiggly refrain from Elfman, because it is tiring.
I didn’t expect Dumbo to be good, but it was shockingly bad. It wasn’t bad like the live-action Beauty and the Beast, which was made cheaply and with the overcomplicated mechanics of Marvel movies, or bad because Dumbo looks like the live-action Lion King characters.3 It was bad because it was visually and narratively confusing, and because it was ugly to look at. It was bad because Tim Burton and Danny Elfman had enough of a creative outlook, enough of a unique perspective, to make one real, distinct movie. Everything after that has been a sequel in its own right, attempting to juice the same sense of unabashed originality from the same 5 ideas, over and over and over again, but without the character of Beetlejuice. Without Beetlejuice, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman have nothing. They are nothing.
I had forgotten about the period when I went insane over Dumbo. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reminded me. It reminded me of this lifelong torture I have endured, the crazy-making affair of knowing Beetlejuice is so good, but that it is not the film Tim Burton is celebrated for. Of being subjected to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, which sounds like shit and includes lyrics like, “making Christmas, making Christmas, making Christmas” and being expected to like that, to appreciate it. I hate these people. I hate these black and white stripes that started on Beetlejuice’s suit but were only appropriated time and again for movies that just kept getting worse. It’s been 35 years of this—pretending Tim Burton and his collaborators are talents—and I have had enough. What is it, exactly, we are all doing?
I have never wanted to work creatively in entertainment. But I understand it, what makes movies fun and how they can be made. Who is going to save these perfectly serviceable blockbusters from formal disarray? If I know I would be able to do this task, to make Warner Bros. money, why shouldn’t I be employed by them? I would prefer Beetlejuice Beetlejuice not exist at all, defiling one of Hollywood’s greatest tour de forces with the 35 years it carries of Tim Burton’s cultural identity. If it must exist, however, can’t I be paid to make sure it is not so fucking weird? Couldn’t there be someone there, on set and in the editing suite, reminding everyone else, “Beetlejuice was about how Michael Keaton is very attractive, and not about Tim Burton’s ability to logically put shots and scenes next to one another”? If we must critically engage with this film, can’t someone calibrate the reactions? Remind us that it is bad not because it is a sequel, but because Tim Burton sucks? Couldn’t that someone be me?
Life is difficult enough. I should not be made to face the vacuousness of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice nor Tim Burton’s 3-decades-proven lack of talent. I seek laughter. I seek Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is Dumbo.
He was wearing a Paul Frank t-shirt.
I haven’t seen Ed Wood.
I hope that Barry Jenkins has been able to build a very nice real estate portfolio.
Oops liked your post twice, which shows my age and why I liked the scene with the song MacArther Park. I know all the words having been forced to listen to all ten minutes of that horrific song on the radio in my car waiting for a good song. What a fun movie.
"justin theroux as rory" character poster is better than the film itself