IN HONOR OF THE IMPENDING RELEASE OF “BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE”
Pee-Wee Herman is a weird, geeky man-child wearing a suit that doesn’t quite fit. He’s vulnerable, good-natured, intelligent, and crazy as a loon.
When his cherished red bicycle is stolen, he treats the matter like a life-or-death crisis, because he lives in his own, hermetically-sealed world.
When Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure hit theaters in 1985, I was only a kid, and didn’t question Pee-Wee’s M.O. The directing career of Tim Burton was off to an unassuming start, yet his work was already shaping my dreams, and warping them.
Burton’s films are visually striking, thematically rich, and filled with flashes of creative inspiration that carry the viewer along. The stories are ephemeral, but the heroes, the villains, and the individual moments stick in the brain.
Look at Burton’s second movie, the crazy horror/comedy Beetlejuice. It has a fuzzy plot, but grabs the viewer with its visual style and appealing, indelible characters.
Our heroes, Adam and Barbara Maitland, are square and standoffish, but love each other, and are lovable.
One morning, as they’re driving through their picuresque Connecticut town, they swerve off a bridge, drown, and come back as ghosts, forced to haunt their own house.
Whenever they try to leave, they’re sent to the planet Saturn, where they’re chased through a desert by something that looks like a sandworm from Dune, reimagined as folk art.
Happily, they like it at home.
Then, tragically, the Deetzes move in. Lydia, the youngest member of the family, is decent, but her parents are so amazingly obnoxious that the Maitlands hire a poltergeist called Betelgeuse (pronounced “Beetlejuice”) to clean house.
He has his own agenda, which complicates matters.
Beetlejuice overflows with trippy ideas, brought to life through special effects that can only be described as charming. The horrors are funny, ingenious, ridiculous…anything but scary. Beetlejuice is surprisingly dark, but not mean-spirited or gory.
In fact, it has a genuine heart, especially when the focus rests on Lydia. She’s alienated and sad, with an artistic talent (photography), and those features mark her as one of the first prototypical Tim Burton characters.
During the film’s darkest sequence, she writes multiple drafts of a suicide note, to make it as melodramatic as she can. While the scene is funny, it doesn’t come across as a mockery of suicide or depression. Burton’s movies balance creepiness and sweetness, hopelessness and funniness, darkness and light.
The Maitlands save Lydia from her thoughts of suicide.
Thank God she has someone.
Mild spoilers to come.
Tim Burton never gets on a soapbox. If his movies have messages (beyond his usual mantra, “be true to yourself”) they’re often low-key, and easy to overlook.
In Beetlejuice, Lydia sheds her malaise when the Maitlands become her surrogate parents. In the end, she’s happy. She’s even shown with friends her own age.
Depression is worsened by isolation...
So get the hell out of the house.
So says Beetlejuice, if Beetlejuice has a message.
(More to follow on Mr. Burton)