It’s hard for me to remember life before Tim Burton. My
aunt, only nine years older than me, made sure that I was raised with all the
campy classics, so it’s pretty impossible for me to pin down when exactly I
first saw “Beetlejuice.”
“Beetlejuice” is easily the campiest ghost movie I can think
of besides good old “Ghost.” But unlike “Ghost,” it’s pretty self-aware and
there isn’t a shred of romanticism or real seriousness to be found. On the
other end of the spectrum of wide-ranging ghost stories is Beloved. How am I going to thread a dumb 80’s black comedy with one
of the most moving novels I’ve ever read? With a prayer. Here we go.
I never really thought much about ghost stories before
reading Beloved. I’ve always been
more into vampires, though I can’t imagine why. But now I can’t stop thinking
about ghosts, and what it means that humanity’s imagination has always been
grappling with the idea of them. What does it mean about our attitude towards
death, that we can’t help but feel that lost loved ones are still haunting us?
What does it mean about the importance of the past? Will we always want it to
be exorcised or might we fiercely cling to our ghosts? With Sethe, two extremes
are demonstrated. Her past is what she exorcises, though not in any real or
permanent sense. Her traumatic memories are always lingering and resting just
below the surface because she hasn’t dealt with them. However, when she accepts
Beloved as the resurrection of her dead baby, she clasps greedily onto her.
I think this is because she sees Beloved as a chance to
really get rid of the past once and for all, if she could just explain what she
did, if she could just be absolved of the murder. If Beloved could just understand, the two of them could look
towards the future.
But Sethe’s got it backwards, I think. Beloved, in the end,
is what has to be exorcised because she becomes so all-consuming and
destructive. But Sethe’s past is a part of her. It is the ghost that will always
be with her, so she might as well let it make itself at home.
One of the many things this book has taught me is that we
have to find enough self-awareness to understand the difference between a
healthy relationship and a crutch, a distraction. Beloved is very much a
distraction for Sethe because Beloved doesn’t allow her to move forward, even
though she thinks that’s all that she’s doing. The actual vital and healthy
thing for Sethe to do is to really look at her forgotten memories, to make
sense of them. She has to visit with these ghosts, not that of her vengeful
baby who only seeks to drain her.
“Beetlejuice,” surprisingly enough, takes my broad idea of
demons vs. benign ghosts in a way more straightforward sense. There’s the
deceased couple, the Maitlands—squares but romantics, young but somewhat stuffy
and old-fashioned. To Lydia, the Goth teenage girl now living in their idyllic
country home, they represent a past that should be respected instead of
forgotten. And the rest of the world has largely forgotten the Maitlands. Their
very house is now unrecognizable, thanks to Lydia’s yuppie parents. In the face
of obscurity and void, the couple fights by the skin of their teeth to stay
relevant, to stay present, to stay alive.
In the article I read, “Beetlejuice: A Ghostly, Gothed-Out 80s Fairy Tale
for the Ages,” Bridget McGovern made me really think about the film through
Lydia’s perspective, which I never really had done before. The dead couple is
Lydia’s necessary ghosts, who remind her about the value of life and simple
happiness. I think we all know what her demon’s name is.
The main antagonist, Betelgeuse, enters the scene as the
quick solution to the central conflict: the Maitlands don’t know how to scare
their new roomies out of their house. But Betelgeuse quickly proves himself to
be unstable and dangerous, and only by Lydia’s bravery and unselfishness is he successfully
exorcised. In the end, the ghosts learn to live with Lydia and her family in
harmony.
According to McGovern, “In the end, defeating Betelgeuse
brings everyone together happily under one roof,” which, of course, isn’t quite
what happens at the end of Beloved. However,
all the crazy events leading toward the end have paved the way for future
happiness and familial peace, because the devouring demon has been exorcised
and the benign ghosts are here to stay—and I think that Paul D and Sethe are
finally at a place where they can explore their shared history together, and
finally build a real future.
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