To my point, Beetlejuice adaptations have tried to recast the pair’s relationship.
BEETLE JUICE MOVIE
I think I now understand why, when I watched Beetlejuice for the first time at 13, the movie left me feeling oddly unsettled in a way I couldn’t fully articulate: What if Lydia hadn’t been saved at the very last second? I don’t want to get married to a creepy old horndog! Is that something I need to worry about? But while it might seem clever and satirical to the adult viewer, it’s alarming to show someone too young to know better. Rewatching as an adult, the less savory subtext is immediately clear. In an earlier, much darker movie script, it’s made explicit that he wants to sleep with her, and she seems to be into him for a while before he tries to assault her. He hits on and tries to marry Lydia, who’s a teenager (the Beetlejuice musical makes her 15). He assaults Barbara Maitland (national treasure Geena Davis) when he meets her! In fact, he’s gleefully lascivious every time he meets a woman, living or dead. The most regrettable move, though, is to make Beetlejuice an actual sexual predator, far past the point of simply indicating that he’s a bad guy. Amid all this hilarity about death, the teenage Lydia (Winona Ryder) begins to experience actual suicidal ideation, and it’s glossed over - easily resolved with a single encouraging conversation. Miss Argentina jokes about her “little accident” (slashed wrists), and caseworker Juno (the incredible Sylvia Sidney) blows cigarette smoke from a gash in her throat. Everyone else gets physically harmed or killed, but obviously for Otho, bad fashion is a fate worse than death.Īnd that’s not to mention the movie’s two most troubling aspects - one of which is the subtext that if you die by suicide, you become a civil servant working at an undead version of the DMV, potentially for eternity. To punish Otho, Beetlejuice dresses him in a powder-blue suit. Otho is upgraded to the secondary villain once he steals the “how to be dead” book from the house’s meek ghost couple, and conducts an amateur exorcism that nearly destroys them. There are few non-white characters, and the only queer-coded one, Otho, is a bitchy interior designer ( groundbreaking!). Keaton’s Beetlejuice absolutely makes the movie it’s unbelievable that he improvised so much of his role as the “supernatural bio-exorcist.” His ad-libs are the cherry on top of a wildly inventive plot - and a clever subversion of the classic ghost story. Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Catherine O’Hara, and Winona Ryder give it their all (alongside Jeffrey Jones, who’s now a registered sex offender, which. The cast, mercifully, is not one of those parts.
But it’s also true that parts of it have aged badly - and that some parts were always bad. I’m not trying to take that away from you, I promise. I acknowledge that it’s a classic ’80s comedy, one of Tim Burton’s breakout hits as a director, and a vehicle for Michael Keaton to just go full-on bonkers in the best way.
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