The Aesthetics of Death in “Beetlejuice” (1988)

0:20 Erin: or@patreon.com subtextpodcast.

0:32 Wes: Adam and Barbara Maitland are dead, but their troubles have just begun. The farmhouse decor of their home is under threat from the pretentious modernism of Delia Deetz, and her plan to remake it in her own image could turn their post life purgatory into earthbound hell. Solving this problem leaves them with an impossible choice between figuring out how to navigate an intractable netherworld bureaucracy or seeking the help of a renegade demon whose perverse remedies are worse than what they're supposed to cure their way out of. This impasse involves teaming up with Delia's stepdaughter, Lydia, whose Goth style seems to lend itself to communicating with the dead. Today we discuss Beetlejuice and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities, rustic gothic and avant garde, has to say about the connections between love, mortality, and the many pitfalls of growing up. This is Wes Alwan.

1:25 Erin: And this is Erin Olonek, and you're listening to Subtext.

1:31 Wes: So, Erin, tell me about your goth phase in high school.

1:35 Erin: Ah, it was short.

1:38 Wes: So short as to be non existent and infinitesimal.

1:41 Erin: Almost couldn't detect it.

1:43 Wes: Yeah, you wore black. All black that one day.

1:45 Erin: And then I'm still in a goth phase. That's all I do is wear black. Now, I think I told you that I have a friend who calls me the Italian Widow. That is like, you know, like the idea of, like a person who is just always in mourning for the rest of their lives, always wearing black. But no, I'm afraid I was never a Goth.

2:00 Wes: I was never a Goth. I was never cool enough to be a Goth. Which tells you a lot.

2:05 Erin: Well, that was back when it was.

2:07 Wes: That would have been leveling up for me.

2:09 Erin: Oh, oh, I see. I see.

2:11 Wes: I do have. We'll just describe them as friends and. Or family to make sure we don't incriminate anyone, identify them. I did have relatives, more or less distant relatives, who were goths. And I did not quite understand the psychology of that or what it was trying to communicate.

2:28 Erin: I think it was trying to communicate that they're Goths. No, but they. Yeah. What is it trying to communicate? That they're sad and they're deeper than the rest of us, and they're closer to the sense of their own mortality. There you go.

2:41 Wes: Yeah, I thought.

2:42 Erin: Yeah.

2:42 Wes: And of course, Winona Ryder does it very well and charmingly in this movie. I'm not sure it's always so charming in real life, but I think that's right.

2:53 Erin: She makes it cool. She makes it cool.

2:55 Wes: She does. Yeah. I thought about. Okay, so what is the goth aesthetic trying to communicate? What's the point of it? And I think you just got at it. Some people who are kind of leaning into the concept of adolescent depression, because everyone's at least kind of depressed sometimes at that point and making an aesthetic of it. And then also I see it as a form of adolescent protest against adult hypocrisy. It lends itself well to that in the sense that adulthood involves a lot of denial and deception. So even denial of death, denial of sexuality, at least at the level of adults are asking, making ethical demands on adolescents regarding sexuality that they probably, at one time or another, have not lived up to themselves. So that's what I mean by hypocrisy. It's kind of an effective aesthetic for adolescent protest, leaning into, as you put it, acknowledging one's own mortality. Because whether you think of it as adults or society in general, part of the deception in that involves people behaving manically and narcissistically in ways that are meant to sort of fend off the concept of death, to make people feel like they're going to be immortal or have some other feeling that avoids death.

4:10 Erin: Yeah. You're making me realize that Adam and Barbara's, especially Barbara's attraction to Lydia as a kind of a daughter figure is a strange one, because Lydia is a sort of. She's anti Adam and Barbara. She's the opposite of what they would ordinarily represent if they weren't dead. But because they're dead, it unites them in a strange kind of way. Right. But in life, Adam and Barbara were quite. And in death, they're quite square. They would not be the type to have a goth. Or maybe they would be the type to have a goth daughter who sort of revenge against their aggressive normalcy or whatever it is that they are.

4:44 Wes: I was talking to my brother about this, and he used the word wholesome.

4:47 Erin: Yes. Yeah, they are aggressively wholesome.

4:49 Wes: First of all, how do you remember the movie so well? And he's like, I've seen it a million times with my kids, so. And it's a word that I hadn't thought Written down. I was using the word kind of homely because I associate them at least, especially Barbara, with this idea of wanting to stay home and make a home and have this kind of homely rural aesthetic. Which is interesting in light of the fact that the major conflict in the movie in a way, is aesthetic. Right. Why do the Maitlands care about the Deetses moving in? Because Delia is going to transform the house into some kind of modernist avant garde monstrosity and they're going to be stuck living in that for 150 years, apparently.

5:31 Erin: I thought it was only 125. Okay, yeah, yeah, discount rate. That conflict really fascinated me. And the fact that the movie begins with the concept of a staycation, I think immediately puts Adam and Barbara into a position where they're going to die. There's something incriminating about, about people who want to have a staycation. Am I reading that wrong? Like they must be punished because they want to stay home. There's something really perverse about that, I think.

6:01 Wes: Yeah, I think they are being punished. And we get a lot of little hints about that. It's amazing how much is going on in this movie as far as these little hints and symbols, but in a way it forms the nugget of a kind of mild conflict between Adam and Barbara. They are very, very lovey dovey and wholesome and their relationship seems very romantic and loving and kind of new, despite the fact that they're married. Maybe it was a shotgun wedding.

6:29 Erin: Yet another pro marriage propaganda piece from Wes. Okay,

6:35 Wes: she wanted to stay home for the vacation and he obviously wanted to leave. That's something that comes out. And the critical moment where they go off the bridge, she's driving and she says there's no place like home. And she's about to say home, little wizard of Oz reference, but she doesn't get it out because Adam interrupts her to say, hey, avoid the dog or whatever, and then they go off the bridge. So, yeah, I think we're supposed to associate. Right. And then the punishment is to be stuck for 125 years at home. He even says right after they've died, she's cleaning the house and they're dead at this point and you got cabin fever. Meanwhile, he's less focused on being at home and you get the sense he wants to travel and he's into calypso music and other things like that. But he's also got his miniature model of the town. So anyway, yeah, it seems like there's an element of punishment in this and another kind of glimpse of that is Adam is rushing into the hardware store. And I guess it's their hardware store. It occurs to me now, I thought we didn't know what they did, but that's their hardware store. And he's getting a new brush for the Manchurian tongue oil that she has gotten him as a vacation, quote, unquote, vacation gift. And on the way in and out, he's ignoring an old man who kind of comes across as like a soothsayer figure. And I thought this act of oversight is somehow also a sin. It's a little bit unclear what it is or why the old man's asking him if he wants a haircut for his vacation, and then is going on about some other fellow who had long hair who had something to do with founding the town or something like that. But I thought, yeah, that's very interesting.

8:14 Erin: I hadn't picked up on the fact that Adam wanted to leave. He does say, are you sure you didn't want to go somewhere like. But I thought he's just as happy at home as she is, because their mutual presence for each other, the tongue oil for him to finish the furniture, his present to her, the wallpaper. They both seem happy to, like, be working on the house for him to be working on the model. Because he also, in addition to getting a brush for the tung oil, wants to buy something for the model. And I thought of the calypso music. I mean, I like what you're pointing out about this, that there's a hint of this for him. But the calypso music for me was evidence of the fact that they're both strangely anachronistic in a way. Their outfits are such that anybody could be wearing. You know, they're sort of anodyne, but they're also outfits that could be worn by people in the 50s. Calypso music I think of as a faddish 50s music trend. And they want to live in this town that seems kind of stuck in time, that they're maybe after the simple life or something like that. Right. They want to have this nice furniture or hardware store in this little town that is all about kind of small town living. You're right. He ignores that old man. He's probably used to. I got the impression that he's used to this old man kind of going on and on about things that maybe don't make a lot of sense. But that would be part and parcel of participating in the town life. The reason why you would go to a place like this or Want to live in a place called Winter River. I think it's Winter River. Or not Windy River. Winter.

9:37 Wes: Winter River. You should know it's in your home state. It's a fictional town in your home state.

9:43 Erin: Yet another Connecticut movie. I had remembered this taking place in Vermont because it was.

9:48 Wes: Well, it's shot in Vermont, the outside.

9:50 Erin: And it was shot of her eye. Yes. So I had forgotten that it was a Connecticut movie until watching this again. And I was like, everything comes back to connect. It is truly.

9:58 Wes: It's the crossroads of the world.

10:00 Erin: Connect. I cut. It's both everything and nothing. Yes. But the whole reason why one would want to move to a place like that is so that you could have these colorful characters like this guy who goes on and on and on, and you'd sit and listen to him, I guess. I don't know. Maybe they're over it. Maybe they've been there for too many years and this guy's too annoying. But, yeah, yeah, I saw them as being both homebodies in however incriminating degree that would be.

10:25 Wes: Yeah, I took the are you sure you wouldn't rather be on vacation in Jamaica? As a hint. So that's why I call the conflict very subtle and mild. So at a certain point, just looking at the screenplay and where vacation is mentioned, Barbara says, so clever. We're spending our vacation at home. So you get a lot of places where Barbara, in a way, is the advocate for that. When the real estate agent comes to visit, she's trying to sell their house, which is really odd. Sell their house against her will. And the rationale is that they don't have children and the house should have a family in it. She comes over and says, I heard you were on vacation, the real estate agent. So I guess she was hoping to not find them there. And then Barbara says, that's right. A complete vacation. I think that's right, Adam. Two weeks later on, he's saying to Barbara, this is in the car. Two weeks at home. The perfect vacation, which I do not take at face value after they've died. Barbara says, perfect start for a vacation after they. They've died. But they don't realize it yet. They're just wet coming into the house anyway. So the other. The other piece of evidence I'll add here is that she's focused on cleaning the house, on updating the house. He's focused on that model, which is very suggestive of childhood and play. So what is it about that model? What is it supposed to represent? I think it puts him in more of this aesthetic position. And it's in contra to Charles position with regard to the town. Right. Charles of Dietz is going to come and exploit and try and buy all the land and make money off it. Adam's relationship to it via this model is aesthetic. He wants to represent it and enjoy the representation and maybe kind of have a fantasy. It's like a physical, tangible fantasy in a way. A model like that, but also evocative of an architectural model of the kind that Charles would have it. And in fact, later in the movie he'll use it in a presentation. Right. To sell a plan of taking over the town. They're both kind of childlike. I think that's kind of goes into the wholesomeness as well. Childlike, goofy. Geena Davis is very good at doing that. The kind of winningly goofy quality. But she's a bit more focused on the house and staying home. And he's a bit more focused on calypso music and travel and then this miniature town.

12:45 Erin: Yeah, they're just this side of stupid, I think. And I don't know what this side is, but. So maybe they aren't stupid. They're a little dumb. Right.

12:53 Wes: Well, the afterlife is complicated. Yeah. They can't make sense of the book.

12:56 Erin: Yeah. In fact, and this is something I think that gives credence to the connection you make between Charles and Adam. They both accuse the handbook of reading like stereo manual. Like it's too technical. They can't understand it. Lydia understands it quite readily. So 15 year old wits against theirs doesn't come out well for them. I mean, I really like what you're pointing out. It is making me look at it in a new way. I thought that the punishment element wasn't so much that they were staying at home. I mean, oddly, it's Barbara who focuses on the limitation of the space, I think more than Adam. She's the one who ends up with the sandworms first. I think it is. No, no, he goes first. That's right. He does step out first. But she's the one who's frustrated. Granted it's for an extremely ridicul. She's the one who's frustrated about the limitations and expresses this frustration because she can't get to the garage which has the vacuum so that she could vacuum her house. She's dead and she wants to vacuum. It's very disturbing. But she.

13:55 Wes: She wants to continue to nest and homemake.

13:58 Erin: Yes, yes, exactly. And so for me it seemed that the punishment was about sharing the house. That they were both happy with the house, but it was about having to share the house with another group of people, which then, for me, gave the model and gave whole setup and the names and the last name and all of that very, very biblical implications. And the Dietzes represent. Because Adam and Barbara seem so 50s, they seem so square and so whatever. And then this new aesthetic comes in which represents something more forward thinking, more forward moving than them. It's almost as though, even though only two months or something elapsed between their death and the dietz is moving in, it's as though the Dietzes, the entire family, are like their children. They're like the next generation. And Adam and Barbara are like their grandparents. And that seems to me to invoke this idea of an Adam and Eve scenario in which they're living in this Edenic state in which they're super happy with each other. Right. And then the question of what the twist moment or the crux moment is, is a bit murky because you could say it's, of course, them dying and going off the bridge. You could say it's the invasion of Betelgeuse into the scene, which would be the more typical. Right. He takes on the form of a snake. But the real point of transformation, or the sore point is the Dietzes coming in, which would be this idea of having to share one's Eden with other people. And when you're Adam and Eve, those other people are your own children, subsequent generations. Right. You now have to share. You can't have everything your own way or have it the way that you would like it, or leave everything perfect and expect a bunch of kids not to come in and mess it up and get their jammy fingers on your stuff. Yeah, so that's kind of how I was reading that. I don't know if that's. And then the model, there's a kind of a mise enabim quality to this, where part of it is like torture. Oh, they can't go past the house, but they have this model of the whole town inside their attic. And part of it is this sort of Adam being the master of all he surveys, the one given stewardship over the town. But it's just a model of a town. So it's almost a parody of the Adam and Eve Eden story.

16:09 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. I think the model is evocative of creation and there's clear parallels between them and Adam and Eve. I mean, I think when you're getting at with the word borderline stupid, I forget how you put it, really? They are quite innocent and distracted. It's as if they haven't eaten of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. So that innocent quality is very strong in them and it's what gets them in trouble. Right. So it's a bit of a deviation from the story in Genesis where the devil tempts Eve. How does he tempt Eve? How would we explain that? Or how does Milton have him tempt Eve? The devil is quite a smooth talker in Milton. But in any case, in this scenario, it's their innocent naivete and distraction that gets them in trouble. And quite literally. Right. Distraction is what has them go off the bridge. Now you might think, I thought a little bit of Dante's lovers, Francesca and Paolo maybe. Although there is a reference to Dante's Inferno. That's the strip club that Beetlejuice ends up going into.

17:15 Erin: Oh, that's a generous term for it. Yeah.

17:17 Wes: Yeah. Whorehouse, I guess.

17:19 Erin: Maybe Juno says whorehouse.

17:21 Wes: Yeah.

17:22 Erin: We have to.

17:22 Wes: I don't think it's such a great parallel, but the one thing I associate with Dante's lovers is their kind of involvement with each other to the exclusion of the world. And maybe there's a bit of that. And Adam and Barbara, that is quite a good foil for the self involvement of someone like Delia. Right. For whom it's all about status. She's their lovers, that's their sin. And she is a narcissist where it's all just self directed love.

17:50 Erin: Yeah, I like that. I love Delia though. Who doesn't love Delia?

17:54 Wes: Yeah. But Katherine o' Hara is amazing. She's really. She's the highlight of the movie.

17:59 Erin: She really is the last name. I was thinking a little bit about the theme of theme parks in the movie and the idea that like Maitland could be the theme park for two. Just in the confines of the house, like the afterlife as a theme park in which it's just you and your beloved locked in one very large house. Yeah. There's a desire for children, obviously. I think more, maybe not more in Barbara. I mean, Barbara has that connection with Lydia right away. And Barbara seems to be nesting as though she already is pregnant or something. And obviously this is a sore spot, the fact that they don't have children. So they are trying.

18:38 Wes: Although it's never mentioned directly. We just get that one look on Barbara's face when the real estate agent mentions it and then you see the look on her face and that's it.

18:47 Erin: That's right. I love that this Movie just doesn't bother explaining anything. You know, we're just thrown in.

18:53 Wes: Yeah. There is one other. Let me correct that. There is one other scene where Adam talks about trying again to have children. So it becomes clear that it's not that they can't or that one of them wants them and one of them doesn't. It's just that it hasn't happened yet.

19:06 Erin: Yes. There could, though, be a fertility problem if they have to try. Yeah. I think there's a psychic element of this as well, because of their exclusionary. Yeah. Something inherent in what we've already been talking about.

19:18 Wes: Nothing can intrude upon their Eden on their little world. Yeah.

19:22 Erin: Right. And the representation of. I mean, you know, if this whole thing is just a fever dream that Barbara and Adam are having while they're trying to get pregnant. And, you know, we could say that if this was a dream, everything that happens after they go off the bridge. Bridge could be taken as a symbol for the invasion of a baby that ruins everything and traps them in the house and keeps them beholden to, you know, another. Another person's will and obsession and rebellion and. Right. And various other things. And their. Their efforts at scaring or spooking the. The child would be like scaring them straight or. Or trying to discipline them, which is actually kind of a funny thing, if at all. Wear a metaphor. But just one thing I wanted to point out, a moment that really, really stuck out to me this time was when Barbara illustrates to Adam that they are dead or gives credence to the theory that they might be dead, which is that they have no reflection. And there are all those horses on the mantle. This little horse, like toy horses, which. I don't know if you had any of these when you were a kid. I had horses like this, you know, and at first I got confused and I thought, oh, has another family already moved in? Because there are all these toy horses on the mantle, you know, so is. Oh, someone's kid has cluttered the mantle with these toys already. Beetlejuice is one of those mov. I don't know about you, but, like, it's been a long time since I sat down and just watched it again. And I had forgotten at which point the Dietz has come in. If there was an interim family or something. And then I realized, oh, it's theirs. So they. No one's come in yet. So this has to be their toy horses on the mantel. And then she picks one up and plays with it in order to illustrate

20:57 Wes: that she's Makes it kind of gallop in front of the mirror.

21:00 Erin: Exactly. And they could have done this in any other way, possible way to illustrate this. Tim Burton could have easily done any number of setups to illustrate this, but he makes Barbara do something. He makes her play with a toy. And the fact that there are toys on the mantel and that they are miniatures and the.

21:17 Wes: And the. And the model.

21:18 Erin: And the model's like a toy.

21:19 Wes: Right.

21:20 Erin: So I just mean to point out that they both have this toy thing. They both have this little kid thing. Like, they're not mature enough to be having kids. Almost from a psychological perspective, they have to go through some sort of maturation process in order to get on the other side of whatever it is that's preventable them from having kids so that they can be proper parents. So I just wanted to point out that it doesn't seem to be only Adam who has this kind of hang up, which makes me think of the expression or the phrase, because I've been thinking about it a lot right now for other reasons. Playing house and the idea of children being in a big house or playing with a dollhouse or something where they play roles. And this obsession with furniture and with cleaning. It could be, on the one hand, a sort of nesting impulse, as I think we're suggesting for Barbara, and on the other hand, just a form of play, a form of the idea of performing adulthood rather than really being adult. Which leads me back to wanting to talk about what maturation means. Who can be said to be mature? Like the idea of death as a portal to another reality that people on Earth haven't matured to or don't have access to, and how that's kind of performing as a symbol in the film. And maybe what Lydia's goth element shows about her maturity versus everybody else in the film. Like, it's as though familiarity with death or even the desire to be dead or being already dead is actually the gateway to being an adult human. An adult living human.

22:47 Wes: Right.

22:48 Erin: I don't know. I'm just. I'm interested in that philosophy. I don't know what we could call it.

22:53 Wes: Let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this episode, GiveWell. Have you ever wondered where your donation could have the Most impact? In 2007, a group of donors had that exact question. But when they sought out information from charities to help them answer this question, they instead received cute pictures or unhelpful stories. Their experience led them to create GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best giving opportunities they've found. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they found. Over 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high impact giving. You can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. You can make tax deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities. And GiveWell doesn't take a cut. If you've never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter Subtext Literature and Film Podcast at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from us here at Subtext to get your donation matched again. That's givewell.org to donate or find out more. Yeah, so in psychoanalytic theory, the idea is that maturation is a form of mourning. You mourn all the things that you lose, so you mourn. It's loss of Eden, loss of idealizations, of your parents realizing that they're flawed. And the flaw can just be very non specific. The flaw is just that they're human, that they have their own subjectivities and thoughts and feelings, that not all of their attention is on you. You find out about adult sexuality, which can be very disturbing. And I think in part it's disturbing because it means that the formative influence, the thing that made you, is not so pure. It's not just love. And you're not just purely a spiritual being. It's sex and you're a material being. When I was a kid, even after I'd had sex education, I knew what sex was and I knew that technically that's where babies came from. But I also thought that without love it was not possible.

25:30 Erin: That's sweet.

25:31 Wes: I thought babies came from love. Basically. It was quite disturbing and depressing to find out that that was not the case, that anyone could make a baby whether there was love or not, and that the forces that form us are not all loving forces. And then there's adult hypocrisy, right? So you're trying to foster attitudes towards sexuality, especially in adolescence, that are trying to put the brakes on that. But misrepresenting sexuality in the process of doing that and misrepresenting Oneself as an adult. And then the adolescent finds out about that hypocrisy. And, you know, it's part of why teenagers are so pissed off. They've found out that adults are full of crap, basically, and they're right. So. And then they put on. So the goth. You know, I think the gothis stuff is a good rebellion again, because all of these things, I think, can be summed up in terms of a denial of death. A denial. There's the inability to mourn, which correlates to the inability to mature, but also the element of deception about. At least at this phase, about sex and death and aggression. The way that there's a kind of a veneer put over that in social life. So there's no better way to protest that. Well, there are various ways to protest it. One could dress provocatively, for instance. That might be the perverse route. But anyway, what Lydia is doing, I think is spot on as a. As a protest. And she's got horrible parents.

27:01 Erin: Well, so, yeah, I mean, I.

27:04 Wes: Are you gonna defend them?

27:05 Erin: I'm gonna defend them.

27:06 Wes: Defending the Deetses.

27:09 Erin: She fits in with them, though. This is one of the kind of interesting things about the movie for me, and maybe this will be our bridge to talking about the Dietzes, is that. But you know, Tim Burton, because he casts these fantastic character actors and because he has these great wild production values, this whole movie is like Revenge of the Character Actor, you know, I mean, it's named after somebody who's barely in the movie and who's playing this super character actor type of role. So the Maitlands being so boring, where they would normally be the centerpiece of a movie, they're kind of. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like them. They're sweet, you know, they're fine. But they're not like this colorful cast of character actors of which Lydia is a member. You know, she is dramatic and artistic and performative. There's a great deal of performativity in the goth aesthetic and in the value system of that family, you know, so Delia may not be her mother, but the father is obviously attracted to women like Delia, including possibly Lydia's own mother. And the two of them are both artistic and dramatic in their own types of ways. I mean, Charles Dietz is sort of crowded out of his own family a bit because he's slightly more normal than they are. Though it's implied that he has had some kind of breakdown that's caused him to want to go to Winter River.

28:29 Wes: But.

28:29 Erin: Yeah, no, I'm Just like purely the perspective of film casting and these types of colorful side roles versus maybe the more all American prototypical anodyne type of leading men and leading women roles. The Maitlands, I think get crowded out. And the deets for me specifically Delia and Lydia just come across and their coterie of hysterical people end up coming across as more likable than they should be. I mean, Delia more likable than she should be because she's just so funny and great and entertaining and performative. And Beetlejuice is like that too. Like, you know, you shouldn't like him, but you do like he's. Just because he's so funny and entertaining and that. Yeah. So it's like Revenge of the character actor is the best way I can put it. Reveals something hollow about the role of leading man and leading woman and shows that the fringes, the side characters are actually kind of where all the fun is at.

29:20 Wes: Yeah. I think Barbara and Adam are right. We start with them as the protagonists and if we didn't know better, we would think that they're going to be the protagonists through the whole film. And in a way they are. But Lydia really takes over as the protagonist. I guess the three of them together are the film's protagonists and then various antagonists, including Beetlejuice. But. But to also to some extent the parents. Right. Delia is gonna and does transform the house and Charles is out to take advantage of the buy up the town, so. And Lydia needs better parents. But I think I. I guess maybe to get into the deetses a bit more, we could talk about their arrival and this. What I've. I said the primary conflict in the movie is aesthetic. The Homie, or what would you call it? There's a name for the aesthetic of Barbara and Adam. Country something or.

30:11 Erin: Yeah, Country. There's. The house is kind of. It's a Victorian. It's. Otho, when he's going around, says, lord, save me from L.L. bean or something. He says something about L.L. bean is really funny. Yeah. Country living homespun.

30:26 Wes: Yeah.

30:27 Erin: It's not. Not quite cottage core, but almost. Yeah.

30:30 Wes: When they arrive, Otho is kind of acting like he's an exorcist. Right. What they have to exorcise style.

30:38 Erin: Right.

30:38 Wes: Bad taste and bad interior design which they find scary. And it's the only thing that's scary to them. Right. The ghosts end up not being able to scare them and. And in fact, Delia will say at one point the only thing that scares her is being embarrassed in front of the few hip people who will set foot in the house.

30:58 Erin: That's right.

30:59 Wes: So that puts her in the domain of being interested more in status. So she says, art is my life and if I can't sculpt, I'll go crazy and all that stuff. But it's very corrupted by her interest in getting attention and status in a way. Like Adam, who in his model is focused on the aesthetic and the artistic. She sort of corresponds there. But again, his is very innocent and childlike and hers is very status oriented. And then Charles is quite like Barbara in wanting to. It's a corrupted form. Again, I think there are parallels here. Right. Because he wants to stay home too. Delia wanted to stay in the city. She's horrified by this move. But he's had a breakdown and he wants to be the homebody and to live in this. He doesn't want the house transformed. So you get these.

31:51 Erin: It's Green Acres. Yeah, parallels.

31:54 Wes: Yeah, there you go. But it's interesting. Yeah. Because the interest as they're going. As Otho and Delia are going around the house and marking up the walls for how they're gonna repaint them. Otho does come across as an exorcist. And you get the sense that the interest in. Let's call it fashion. I don't know if there's a better word. It's nominally artistic, but it's corrupted really by. It's really about fashion. And that almost comes across as a form of superstition. So that you can look at a room and feel scared. Like it. Like I'm almost scared of it. Almost like it's bad luck or almost like it's bad juju to. To be in the wrong environment. And the aesthetic that they favor is quite pretentious. Modernism or something like that.

32:36 Erin: And terrifying. The inside of the house is really. Yeah, it's really scary. It's the scariest part of the movie for me. But I like what they do to the outside of the house. I mean, some elements of it. It's interesting because the outside with the doubling, it's almost like they've put a shell of another of the same house around the house. You know, they have like the. The eaves. Some of them have, in the same color, another representational eve kind of over it. I mean. Yes, homonyms. Again, E, A V eaves. That idea of, like the fact that the house is almost like self representational or something is very indicative of, I think, of the type of self referential, knowing sophistication that is Maybe permeating their circles in New York, but it's also connected to the model. Maybe, you know, if the house is kind of representing itself or even a little bit of a parody of itself, the model is that way too. You know, I made note as well of the dog at the beginning. I mean, speaking of wizard of Oz references that you noted in what Barbara had said, that dog is kind of toto, like, it's like an evil toto. There's a dog that's just. Did you catch this? There's a statue of a dog that one of the townspeople is leaning against as the dog that will later kill them crosses the street. So there's this doubling going on. And the fact that Adam and Barbara become miniatures in the model at certain points. Not that they have miniatures, but that they shrink down and become model size. I'm still trying to figure out what's going on in terms of that element of the film and how that might form a sort of coherent statement. Maybe it doesn't, because certain things in the film don't quite line up. But thinking about that and about the fact that then later or at the end of the film, Delia will end up representing the things that happened to her, the things that happened to the family when Beetlejuice was haunting them. And that's what, sort of like she can get success in her art with the Beetlejuice hauntings being represented, that something about what she was doing before wasn't working. The sculptures are bad. Dick Cavett seems to think they're bad. They kind of fit with the production values of the film, but they seem to be bad according to the people in the film. And then when she represents the Beetlejuice stuff that's good, that gets her a lot of money and attention now she's successful. The house, meanwhile, has gone back to normal on the inside. Anyway. I'm getting ahead of myself, but what I'm trying to say is that something about representation for Delia makes the difference for the success of her art career. So she does become a good artist at the end because she starts to represent the events of the film, oddly enough. And I just. I just think it's so clever that the film is so. It's kind of doing this very self aware, self representational thing in the film itself. And that is what is the redemption arc for Adelia's art career, is that she ends up coming up with sculptures that look like what the people who made the film probably came up with in their production design for the film. And what I'M trying to say is in a film in which like representations and miniatures of are important. And that has to do so much probably with the production design and the. Everything that they were doing to make the film in the first place. There's just something that is like very postmodern, very winky, very self aware, self referential about the whole film. In other words, like it's aesthetically to a certain extent, the film is very much on Delia's side in the way that it thinks about art and about itself.

36:20 Wes: So I was thinking in a way there are three kind of aesthetic modes in the film. One is Delia's pretentious modernism. The other is the homely or wholesome aesthetic of Adam and Barbara, which Delia hates. And then there's the gothic aesthetic, which is in line with Lydia and the aesthetic of, you know, Tim Burton's aesthetic, the aesthetic of the film. From what I read, Goth kind of comes a bit somewhat out of punk, which you can kind of get, except punk is more about. About, hey, let's represent aggression and goth is let's represent death. And then goth gets, I guess, a little bit into the Victorian, you know, it's kind of a mixture of death stuff and then, you know, 19th century Victorian stuff, lace. And you know, I see goth as an adolescent rebellion in general. It's a rebellion against pretension. I said hypocrisy before, but it's a rebellion against the kind of pretentiousness that Delia represents. But I think you're right, there is a bit of overlap with some of the avant garde. Right stuff that Delia is doing. So you can see why Lydia is Delia's daughter in a way. You could sort of see the gothiness as an offshoot of Delia's aesthetic.

37:37 Erin: Definitely. I think Lydia is unpretentious for the most part in her expression of goth aesthetic. Yet goth is also something I associate with a kind of pretension. I mean, it's a kind of a backwards pretension, but it is sort of, you know, it's very much a statement. And of course, the clothes that Lydia wears are extremely attention getting. So that's a big part of it too. Like the, you know, she is, I think with her clothes and perhaps because she's somewhat of a non entity and the family is saying, look at me, pay attention to me. Justice. Delia is doing that as well. Well, it's more forgivable in a child than in a narcissistic adult.

38:16 Wes: But yeah, I mean, part of the problem with protest and Rebellion at an aesthetic level is that from the inside, it might feel like, look at me, I'm an individual and my look is a protest against the system. But of course, then a bunch of other people are doing it, and it's a form of conformity. And one could also read it as pretentious. Anything can kind of get sucked into. But I think you're right. Lydia does not have that quality. Yeah.

38:42 Erin: And I like what you point out, too, about the connection with the Victorian in the clothes, because she is like a child of both the Deetses and the Maitlands. You know, if we can associate this. I mean, it's a Victorian house. And because the Maitlands are dead, they have this Gothic strain in them, if you will. You know, it's a Victorian haunted house. And so for that reason, Lydia fits right in. But not with the performativity and the statement making that comes from the Dietzes, it seems, but the modernism on the inside of the house anyway, the style, the art direction of the inside of the house, it's certainly different from the afterlife design in that it's maybe more austere in a way. It's not as cluttered. You know, the afterlife is extremely cluttered. But I see there being a parallel there with the extremes of color, you know, the vibrancy. It's almost as though the Dietzas bring a little bit of the afterlife into the house rather than the Maitlands bringing that. When Delia's work starts to reflect the look of Betelgeuse, it does seem like it's kind of a natural outgrowth of the abstract, but still sort of like remotely scary types of sculptures that she does, which are. They're almost like Louise Bourgeois sculptures. I don't know if you're familiar with her work. She's a fantastic modernist sculptor who has things like huge spiders that might encompass, you know, almost like the size of a gazebo, where they have a tiny body and these really big long, spindly legs coming out of the relatively small body, so that they're sort of mostly these sort of like spiny looking spider fingers, usually very large scale, very interesting kind of scary sculptures. And so Delia already kind of seems in the neighborhood of the macabre, of the creepy, crawly things associated with death and with the afterlife. And so it does seem like a kind of a natural progression for her art to take that direction if we're to take her seriously as an artist, which I kind of do, because her art is the art of the film. It's the art of the production, yeah.

40:52 Wes: One of her sculptures looks like an insect, and she almost gets killed by it early in the film because she gets trapped by it against the wall of the house as the movers are very clumsily trying to put everything together. And it becomes a. Towards the end of the movie, when Lydia is in danger of being married to Betelgeuse, that same sculpture, I think, becomes a. It's turned in. Betelgeuse turns it into a seat, and the insect, like legs kind of wrap around her to trap her there. So, yeah, I think that's very interesting, what you point out, which is this intersection between Delia's aesthetic and then the maybe Tim Burton aesthetic of death. I was actually thinking about calling this episode the Aesthetics of Death. That's great, but I didn't know. I was still uncertain about that. But maybe that's what it will be.

41:46 Erin: The insertion of Betelgeuse into the model and the little goth element that he brings to the model. Almost as though the model has, like, a little goth section, little area. You know, the cemetery is in a different style from the rest. You know, that happens at the same time, I mean, because the Dietz has come in. But it's more or less concurrent with the arrival of the Dietzes and with their changing of the aesthetic of the inside of the house. So we could already see, or we could already postulate that Delia and Betelgeuse are parallel to each other in some way, that what they bring to the house is similar. I mean, it's the whole deetsus. But Delia is the one that really changes the inside of the house, as we're saying. And Betelgeuse makes substantive or rather significant, significant changes to the model.

42:29 Wes: Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, that's a good place to start in part two of our recording on Beetlejuice.

42:35 Erin: Don't say it too many times. It's too late for us.

42:40 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you,

42:45 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersoubtextpodcast.com if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.