[COLUMN] Beetlejuice is Haunted by a Ghost Even It Cannot Name | by Darren Mooney

Beetlejuice remains one of Tim Burton’s most interesting and beloved films, the story of a demonic “bio-exorcist” named Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) hired by recently deceased couple Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) to dislodge the city-slicking New York yuppies who have purchased the Maitland family home in Winter River, Connecticut.

Beetlejuice has retained a lot of its charm in the three decades and change since its original release. Many of the film’s jokes still land, particularly its depiction of a bureaucratic afterlife staffed by civil servants who are clearly overworked dealing with huge volumes of clients who seem unaware that they have passed into the world beyond. Some of the film’s best gags are based around character design and make-up, with these ghosts carrying their mortal wounds on their spectral forms.

However, there’s also a heavy subtext woven into the film. On watching the film for the first time to prepare for the recent release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, literally the second question that critic Miles Surrey had about the 1988 classic was, “Is Beetlejuice actually about gentrification?” There’s a temptation to dismiss this observation as inherently ridiculous, to insist that a film as chaotic and anarchic as Beetlejuice is not “actually about” anything at all. However, Surrey is on to something.

Adam and Barbara live in a nice house in a small town in rural America. In the film’s opening moments, they are hassled by local real estate agent Jane Butterfield (Annie McEnroe), who tries to convince them to part with the property. After Adam and Barbara die in a car accident, Butterfield sells the house to the Deetz family: former real estate developer Charles (Jeffrey Jones), his talentless artist wife Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and their disaffected teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder).

Adam and Barbara are forced to watch as, with the guidance of interior designer Otho Fenlock (Glenn Shadix), Charles and Delia transform their traditional family home into something more tasteless and tacky. The film contrasts the surrealist and abstract conceptual art installed by the Deetz family with the more authentic and personal miniature model that Adam built in the couple’s attic. However, even that model is invaded by outside forces, as the demonic Betelgeuse takes up residence in it and begins to alter it to his tastes.

Beetlejuice does not exist in a vacuum. It was part of a wave of movies about ghosts and death that emerged in the late 1980s and into the 1990s: Frank Perry’s Hello Again, Sidney Poitier’s Ghost Dad, Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners, Steven Spielberg’s Always, Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams. The trend was so notable that both The Washington Post and The New York Times ran trend pieces on it over the summer of 1990, tied to the year’s highest-grossing film: Jerry Zucker’s Ghost.

Ghost was also about gentrification, opening on a sequence in which young upwardly mobile couple Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) and Molly Jensen (Demi Moore) literally remodel an old abandoned apartment. The symbolism isn’t subtle. This is a movie about Sam discovering that there is an afterlife, which opens on the lead characters smashing through a ceiling and realizing just how much vacant space there is over their heads in their fancy Manhattan loft. To quote Belinda Carlyle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth from 1987, “Oh baby, do you know what that’s worth?” That’s a lot of square footage, begging for renovation.

Appropriately enough, Ghost feels haunted. There is a shadow hanging over the film, never directly acknowledged. As writer Samuel Townsend muses, Sam and Molly are presented as “the poster couple for gentrification as they renovate a disbanded apartment in a burgeoning neighborhood still clambering from its shadowy history. From here, the echoes of downtown artists still register amidst the lingering AIDS crisis.” This connection is never made within the film, but it shades the story.

“A block from Sam and Molly’s fabulous loft is the former home of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art,” observes Colin Dickey. “During the AIDS pandemic of the ’80s, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman worked tirelessly to rescue and safeguard LGBTQ art—including, likely, the same detritus that Molly and Sam toss out to make way for her own sculpture. Indeed, clearing SoHo of its longtime gay population lurks in the background of Ghost like a ghost haunting Manhattan.”

AIDS was rarely acknowledged in mainstream contemporary cinema, but fear of the illness and the rising death toll permeated popular culture. Critic Julie Lew noted the inherent contradiction that, while AIDS was rarely directly invoked, there were a significant number of early 1990s movies about characters suffering with serious illness. Ghost competed for the Best Picture Oscar against Awakenings, which remains coincidentally notable as the rare work of popular fiction related to the Spanish Flu epidemic.

Although AIDS was first identified in the United States in 1981, it became part of the national conversation following the death of movie star Rock Hudson. The disease spread particularly aggressively through the artistic community, with journalist Suzanne Moore acknowledging “a generation of artists, activists and athletes wiped out by AIDS.” However, because of the nature of the illness and the stigma associated with it, it was rarely discussed.

AIDS profoundly affected American culture in a way that many observers acknowledged in real time. “Life in this country will never be the same again,” Max Navarre told Vanity Fair in March 1987. “And who else is here to record that but artists?” In February 1995, famous night-club proprietor Rudolph reflected that “AIDS was the ghost that passed through New York night life.” In December 1990, The Los Angeles Times ran through the various theatre, opera and ballet companies that suffered deaths due to the illness.

Writer Fran Lebowitz has ruminated, at length, on the cultural consequences of this loss. In September 1987, Lebowitz grimly observed that if the influence of queer artists were removed from American culture “you would be pretty much left with Let's Make a Deal.” In this context, it’s perhaps notable that Beetlejuice casts variety show fixtures Dick Cavett and Robert Goulet as Delia’s New York friends. However, as Lebowitz has since pointed out, the cultural toll couldn’t simply be measured in the loss of individual creators and artists. There was also an immeasurable loss among the people who engage with such art.

“The knowing audience also died and no longer exists in a real way,” Lebowitz would later argue. “So all the judgment left at the same time that all this creativity left. And it allowed people who would be fifth-rate artists to come to the front of the line. It decimated not just artists but knowledge. Knowledge of a culture.” She has expounded on this point multiple times, perhaps most recently in her documentaries Public Speaking and Pretend It’s a City, with fellow New York institution Martin Scorsese.

AIDS is never overtly mentioned in Beetlejuice. Indeed, the Maitlands are presented as a very square couple. The only heavily queer-coded character in the film is Otho, described by Joshua Anderson as “one of the early messy queer characters.” Still, it’s difficult not to think of the tasteless Delia Deetz and her rich clients as precisely the sorts of “fifth-rate artists” that Lebowitz railed against. Charles likely paid for his new Connecticut home with money he made gentrifying AIDS era New York.

Even if it’s only fleetingly visible in the text itself, there is an undeniable queerness to Beetlejuice. As Jason Adams argued, Burton’s films are “queer down to their very marrow.” Even critiquing the heteronormativity of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Dana Han-Klein acknowledged “the countless emo/goth-inspired queer legions” who love the original movie. Interviewing Alex Brightman, star of the Broadway musical, journalist Ramin Setoodeh pondered, “Has [Betelgeuse] always been bisexual — or maybe pansexual?”

Burton’s movies are often textual and subtextually about outsiders. The nature of this “otherness” evolves over the course of Burton’s filmography. In Batman Returns, Burton’s outsider characters are fairly overtly tied to kink and sexuality. In Ed Wood, that outsider status manifests in the eponymous director’s (Johnny Depp) transvestitism and is reflected in the sexual orientation of his colleagues like John "Bunny" Breckinridge (Bill Murray). As Sam Scott notes, Ed Wood is where “the queer subtext of these themes becomes text.”

This context extends beyond the narrative Beetlejuice itself. Not only were these anxieties stirring in the popular consciousness, they directly affected key creative personnel who worked on the film. Beetlejuice was produced by David Geffen, a notoriously private individual who is also a major fundraiser in the battle against HIV and AIDS. The film was co-written by Burton’s regular collaborator Michael McDowell, who would be diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and die from complications related to the illness in 1999.

It is entirely possible – perhaps even likely – that this subtext was unintentional and unintended. After all, mainstream crowd-pleasing blockbusters weren’t directly engaging with the AIDS crisis in 1988. These ideas were probably percolating in the background of the creative team, an expression of the general mood pervading the creative community at that moment in time. Like so many of the ghost stories of its era, Beetlejuice is haunted by a dark specter that even it cannot name.