Beetlejuice Is Not About Control
Childhood, Nostalgia, and my last Halloween at home
Those among us who have crossed state lines dressed as Beetlejuice know that change comes at you fast.
One day you’re putting on a black and white striped suit similar to the one Michael Keaton wore in the 1988 Geffen Company film Beetlejuice and applying corpse paint to your face, and the next thing you know, you’re waking up in Kentucky.
Let me go back to the beginning.
You remember being a weird little kid? I wasn’t weird on purpose — I did all the things other kids do: I rode bikes, I played tee ball, I made friends with the other kids on my block and we rode bikes and played tee ball. But being a shrimpy brown kid just makes you different in a way that’s usually more felt than spoken.
As often as I was riding bikes or playing tee ball, I was holed up in my house during long stretches of summer vacation when my mom and dad were both at work or on weekends when there was nothing else to do but go through the family collection of movies my dad had taped off of HBO during their free weekends with our Betamax. I remember having to fast forward ALL THE WAY through Space Camp to get to Goonies, and watching Ghostbusters so many times the tape started to wear out, which was HARD to do with a Beta tape, those things were no joke! VHS blows and we were all robbed, culturally, no big.
So in addition to normalizing dead media, my parent’s movie collection, coupled with my not knowing any better, led me to believe that the 1988 Tim Burton film Beetlejuice was like you know a normal movie to watch and enjoy.
You take so much at face value as a child, like, of course, this couple dies and then returns to their house and finds a book that teaches them how to BE DEAD and there are waiting rooms and appointments and haunting the new family who lives in your house is a weird pain in the ass you just have to deal with now. Like as a seven year old, I guess I was just like…yeah, that all sounds good. And that Beetle guy is funny as shit, too.
Rewatching that movie as an adult, I was AMAZED that this was a thing that got:
- Greenlit by the Geffen Company
- They built sets and prepared special effects
- They cast it with name actors
- They shot it and presumably screened dailies for the studio
- It got edited, tested and
- RELEASED AND DISTRIBUTED BY WARNER BROTHERS.
A movie with its own weird internal logic where the title character is the villain who promises a dead couple that he can murder the living before he himself is eaten by a sandworm… went through all the zillions of steps to be made into a film that wound up on a sad little also-ran piece of media in my parent’s TV cabinet. WHAT.
There is an entire industry set up to stoke, manufacture, and reward nostalgia. Like, “remember that thing you loved as a kid? Well it’s back and now you can feel like a kid again! Hooray!” What this industry attempts to ignore, if not outright exorcise into the well of the Dead Souls, is that childhood is largely a weird, scary, isolating and lonely time.
You take so much at face value as a kid and I think that leads people to think that entertaining children is easy. I mean, DISTRACTING kids is easy, but getting them to buy into a story is not. Tim Burton, from the first frame of the movie, is literally world-building. Alec Baldwin’s Adam Maitland constructs model buildings and roads and forests to recreate his whole town in his attic. As a shrimpy little brown kid, wandering around his dark, empty house in the summer, eating microwaved hot dogs and popping in movie after movie, I related to the weird feeling of isolation the Maitland’s felt; trapped in their own home, unable to leave. But of course, I was a kid, so this feeling was more felt than spoken.
When I was nine, I really wanted to be Beetlejuice for Halloween. Again with the cultural isolation — this was two years after the movie was in theatres. Would there even be kid’s costumes available? Did I think about that or care? Hell no, I was nine! But my mom dutifully scoured party stores, costume shops, JC Penny’s, everywhere and turned up nothing. On Halloween night, we were buying candy at Meyer’s and the familiar black and white stripes jumped out at us from the kid’s PJs rack. A long-forgotten Saturday morning cartoon merchandising tie-in. So that Halloween — my last one in Michigan — my dad painted my face white and gooped my hair up and I wore Beetlejuice pajamas when I went trick or treating with my cousins.
People are led to believe that entertaining children is easy. My mom knows that’s not true. That fall of 1990 was when my family moved from Warren, Michigan down to Conyers, Georgia. So the entire time that I was running through our Beta collection and asking her for impossible-to-find costumes like it was no big deal, she and my dad were hard at work, planning a cross-country move with two kids and a newborn. I can only imagine that she ran out to the store with me on Halloween to get the hell out of the house for a half hour. Making my dreams come true with a twelve dollar set of Beetlejuice pajamas probably felt like a fucking miracle. To me at the time, it felt inevitable. Like, of course we randomly found a Beetlejuice costume in my size. I mean, that happens, right?
No! Of course that’s not a thing that happens, that’s bananas. And it’s bananas for the same reason that it’s only recently occurred to me how absolutely crazy Beetlejuice is. It’s because of control.
When you’re a kid, you just don’t have control, ever. You don’t get to pick where you live or what movies are in the TV cabinet. You fall asleep in one place and wake up in another. It’s like living in a Tim Burton film. You don’t ever have control, and so you don’t crave it. You let go. You accept that okay, yeah, THIS is what happens to you when YOU die…and THAT is what happens when THEY die.
But I’m about the same age now that my parents were when we moved. Now Beetlejuice looks completely bonkers by my logic. I’m the father of a young child, I have a mortgage and skin conditions. I crave control, and that movie refuses to let you have it. It works by its own rules, at its own pace, and if it wants to pause for a minute and dance to a Harry Belafonte song, dammit, it’s going to do just that.
The reason the nostalgia industrial complex is so powerful is because it promises you both the warm childhood feelings AND the adult control. It takes a story with a complex moral message about establishing boundaries but also allowing others to share your space, even if they’re very different from you and even if they fill that space with terrifying sculptures…and flattens it into a catchphrase on a t-shirt. A way to signal “Hey, I like this thing,” without the trouble of engaging with that thing.
We were set to pull up stakes and head south on November 1st, so while I was about to become my own version of Lydia Deetz, reluctantly moved out of the city and into the country where my whole life would become One. Big. Dark. Room. But for one last night, I could be a freewheeling bio-exorcist. And then we all loaded into the van and I fell asleep with my bag of candy. I woke up heading south as the sun rose over Kentucky, still dressed in stripes and corpse paint. They were the same clothes as the night before, but here in this new place, they felt different and strange… in a way more felt than spoken.
