The Aesthetics of Death in “Beetlejuice” (1988) (Part 2)

Wes and Erin continue their discussion of “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. Thanks to our sponsor GiveWell, an organization that would provide rigorous, transparent research about the best opportunities for charitable giving. 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, pick “Podcast,” and enter “SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast” at checkout. 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But maybe this is a good segue into talking about Betelgeuse himself and what it is he's doing in the film. Because in a way it feels quite random. And as you pointed out, he doesn't have that much to do in the film. He's not a huge presence in the film. Although when he's there, he's really there. So, yeah, what is the point of having this demonic creature? What purpose does he serve? 1:16 Erin: This is what I've been trying to figure out. I mean, he's basically the closest parallel that we could say is he's kind of like a bad nightclub act. He's like a Vegas, like a stand up. That's kind of his whole thing. He's very Vegasy in his taste and in his references. Definitely some active parallel going on there. There's so much we could say about him. The strangeness of the name, the fact that it invites mispronunciation, and yet it has to be said properly to invoke him. The look of him, the separation between him. I mean, let's say on the most basic level, if we're gonna follow this biblical thread, just this idea that he was Juno's assistant and then broke out on his own obviously has extremely biblical implications there. 2:05 Wes: Satan? 2:07 Erin: Could it be Satan? 2:09 Wes: Could it be? Yeah. Right. So in contrast to the rest of the afterlife. Well, maybe it's not such a contrast, but he plays this kind of demonic role, whereas much of the afterlife is simply this very mundane bureaucracy, which I think we'll talk about. And it's very interesting. But the demonic, I guess the demonic role he serves, I think it's perverse, Right? So Barbara, or someone even calls him a pervert at one point. So a lot of what he's doing, he's trying to kiss Barbara, feel her up, marry Lydia, I guess, because that will also get him out of there. So to the Extent that he represents something perverse, he represents one of the dangers for any human being in the process of maturation, which is that you get stuck or regressed. There's something infantile about perversity, and there's also something deathlike and aggressive about perversity. At a fundamental level, perversity brings aggression and death into the erotic, into love. It kind of mixes it in. Right. So sadomasochism is paradigmatically perverse. And you might say some of the aesthetic in the movie is suggestive of that. Right. So, yeah. So where love and sex get contaminated by aggression, that's where it gets perverse, and that's where he is. And there's also an element of cynicism. And so this is the way one might respond to the predicament that Lydia is in, that an adolescent is in. There are various suboptimal adult solutions that people end up in as a way of dealing with the disappointments of growing up. And one of them is cynicism, for instance. Another is perversity. Oh, there's also that. Right. I think at one point, Betelgeuse is like a flasher. He's trying to convince them that he can be scary enough to drive the Deetzes away. And they're like, show us. And we don't see it on camera, except we see maybe what look like insect legs, Right. So we see him from behind as he opens his coat, and then they're being shown something, and it seems like it's his guts coming out or insect legs coming out or something like that. But of course, it is very evocative of him being a flasher and flashing genitalia. 4:26 Erin: I was too innocent to get that. That's really good. 4:30 Wes: So it's a very good depiction of his perversity, you know, But I. It's pretty clear just with him, what he's trying to do with Barbara. Right. And the house and all that stuff. The danger, at a surface level, the danger in the film, is that Lydia will end up with him, like, literally as a husband, but that the deeper level, the psychological danger, is that she will end up with him in the sense of end up in that psychological position, let's say, or maybe in that social position in real life. 5:00 Erin: That was another thing I really didn't remember about the film is how much of the latter part of the film is driven by Barbara and how much of Barbara's motivation is protecting Lydia from Beetlejuice. That moment when he flashes them. It's sort of parallel to when Barbara and Adam are wearing the sheets. And Lydia's like, what do you got under there? Is it like Night of the Living Dead under there? Are you all like pussy and full of blood or whatever? She says. And what I love about them is they're so innocent that they've never even seen Night of the Living Dead, which is itself kind of indicative of the fact that they're people from the 50s or something. They're from an earlier era, a more innocent era. But, you know, what's underneath is normies. Like, maybe that's the scariest thing of all, is to just be normal. 5:42 Wes: Yeah. There's the great scene where Otho is going into the closet. Him and Delia are going to the closet, and Barbara's hanging there to try to scare them. And then they react to that with a fright that turns out to be. What they're frightened of is the bad style and the lack of closet space. 5:58 Erin: That's right. That's right. 6:01 Wes: Otho says, we just have to pray the other closets are bigger than. Delia says, my God, we just have to pray the other closets are bigger than this one. Yes, look. And then he pushes Barbara aside, Right. As if she's not. As if it's just a piece of clothing, and then gets out a tuxedo. Undress and says, ozzie and Harriet. What happened to these people? 6:21 Erin: Right, right. Yeah. The Ozzie and Harriet is great for that. Later, they're wearing bedsheets to be indicative of their wit and thinks that they're more like Tracy and Hepburn. But Ozzie and Harriet is right on the money. 6:34 Wes: They're ironic ghosts. 6:36 Erin: Yeah, they have to be. Nobody can be that boring. But that contrast of, you know, what's underneath, I think highlights something that you said, which is this idea that perversity is infantile or even that it's. That it's maybe regressed somehow. Betelgeuse and Adam and Barbara are kind of laminated to each other. The couple, by virtue of them not having. They're not regressed, but they haven't quite progressed. You know, they're like children. And Betelgeuse is having regressed into something quite childlike and infantile. 7:08 Wes: Yeah, they represent the innocent side of the infantile, and he represents the sexual and aggressive side. 7:14 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And something about. Something about battling him and getting to the other side of that direction. You know, it's as though, as you're pointing out, they're worried about that possibility for Lydia, but they are also people in a precarious state because of their position. But Also kind of mentally, as being childlike, are perhaps also threatened by, or maybe even more profoundly threatened by Beetlejuice than Lydia is. 7:40 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. So there's a kind of danger inherent in sublimation. Tragically enough, sublimation should be part and parcel of maturation and a way of channeling sex and aggression in constructive ways. But the danger in it. So we talked about this a bit. Or no, I guess we didn't do the Tempest. Did we do the Tempest together? 8:03 Erin: No, I don't think so. 8:04 Wes: That was a prequel to subtext. But in the Tempest, the Danger for Prospero. Right. So in a way, Prospero is like the playwright. He kind of has control over the characters in the play and the dangers that he'll take revenge on them, which would be part and parcel of a tragedy, but it turns out not to be a tragedy. It's kind of a trap, or it's a tragedy and a comedy. It's a romance. He spares them. He spares all of his enemies. Likewise, the temptation for the artist, or at least the playwright, is to over control the characters to the point that they're actually lifeless, that they don't have any vitality, and they don't rise to the level of the aesthetic or a good effective representation. Right? So, for instance, if you had a political opinion of one sort or another, and you had to make your readers or your watchers know that you disapproved of Richard iii, you couldn't really do justice to him as a villain. So in a way, one has to kind of become a bit amoral or agnostic in that mode. And so I bring this up because it's very similar to the Danger for Adam with a Model, right? When you're a kid, you're playing with dolls and action figures and maybe building things out of blocks and playing with dollhouses, and you're fantasizing and you're creating these narratives. You're very much doing the type of thing that, as an adult, may become more organized, right, into poetry and novels and writing and other forms of creative expression, but they can be contaminated if the fantasy isn't mournful enough. And what I mean by that is that Prospero has to mourn the wrongs that have been done to him by his enemies and get over it. And that way he can get his daughter married. And likewise, one, to get your play done and to make it something good, you kind of have to mourn and let go of some of the control of your characters. Let them come to life and be themselves. So what I'm trying to say here is there's something inherently positive about Adam having that model and having an aesthetic outlet, having an outlet in play. But there's also a danger in that. And the danger is that it could become an outlet for the perverse or an outlet for. Right. In Delia's case, the danger which has come to pass is that it's all about winning praise and acclaim and attention and recognition from other people. In other words, it gets submerged by the impulse for status and recognition. And so I think that's another, as you're pointing out. Right. Beetlejuice doesn't just represent a danger to, like a psychological danger to Lydia, to an adolescent growing up in the sense of the possibility of going down a more perverse path. But he represents it for the Maitlands in their attempt to remain innocent and loving and childlike in their relation to play, for which there are many, many positive things to said. But apparently something else has to happen there. And again, Betelgeuse represents that danger and he's in the model. So it's coming from within the aesthetic itself. The danger is inherent to it, even though the aesthetic arguably is a way out. A way out that has its own pitfalls. 11:28 Erin: Yeah, that really helps me understand his role. I think there's an interesting moment where Beetlejuice takes on Adam's clothing. He dresses in Adam's clothes. I can't remember in what context that was or why he had done that, but he mirrors Adam. 11:42 Wes: Yeah, it's like a black checkered button down shirt and khakis or something like that. Except that Beetlejuice has the belly coming out. 11:54 Erin: Right, right. 11:55 Wes: Alec Baldwin, of course, does not. Yeah, I forget that context too, that 11:59 Erin: Alec Baldwin doesn't have the belly. 12:00 Wes: Yeah, I'll give him a break. He's in the 60s. 12:02 Erin: Oh, I know, I'm just teasing. I, right off the jump, flirting with Barbara, he puts himself in the position of, you know, a prospective mate to Barbara, you know, asking. Asking Adam if, you know, a replacement for Adam. In other words, asking Adam if, you know, if he has a chance, if they were going to break up or something. So he's kind of putting himself in Adam's shoes. And if we're to go with this idea of the whole death plot, basically everything after minute eight in the movie or whatever, of being a kind of an extended dream sequence, Beetlejuice is kind of like Adam's shadow self in that this might be some sort of expression of like every inner impediment to maturation and being a father or whatever. Like, almost like he's too young for this, but almost like Beetlejuice is like an expression of Adam's shadow self that's having a midlife crisis or something, right? With the girls and the being disgusting and being kind of. Kind of sleazy and gross, and even the car and the, you know, it's all kind of there. I think it's. Insofar as we've identified maybe a link between Betelgeuse and Delia, I think this helps to kind of just further extend that, because you've already identified a link between Adam and Delia, and so that would make sense that there's alignment there. And Barbara is the one who's more interested in stopping Betelgeuse or more active in stopping him up to a certain point, and more interested in the projection of Lydia, you know, beyond normal, kind of like maternal instincts that she seems to already be displaying. 13:26 Wes: So she's the one who says, home, home, home. The thing that she failed to say right before they went off the bridge. But to get them out of the model, when Betelgeuse is basically harassing them, she'll say, you know, I'm not staying here another minute. Even though I think Adam is. Well, no, he's ready to go too, actually, at that point. But in general, he seems more keen on Betelgeuse's help, if I remember correctly. But, yeah, she says, hum, hum, home, and gets them. Teleports them back out of the model. 13:52 Erin: Obviously, Betelgeuse is also aligned with their state and that he's trapped in the model until they release him. Or he's trapped. Is it in the model? I mean, it's very. The physics of this don't make a lot of sense. I mean, he's also in the tv. He's somehow sending them flyers in the handbook, Right? 14:11 Wes: And then the door to the afterlife, or the netherworld, whatever you want to call it. Right? It's something they can draw on chalk on the wall. And it seems as if that's where Betelgeuse is. Or is he. I mean, is he out of there? You know, so it's unclear. But is he somehow stuck in the model? Or is the model just a portal into some area of that world? It's unclear to me. 14:35 Erin: I just have to say that when I was little, it seemed like Beetlejuice just lived in everybody's consciousness for so long. I mean, I remember in the 90s, like mid-90s, people going as Beetlejuice for Halloween all the time. And it, like being around and. But I wasn't allowed to watch it for the longest time because I guess my mom thought it was too scary or too disgusting or something. 14:54 Wes: Well, as Barbara said, I'm not exposing that little girl to that pervert down there. 14:58 Erin: There you go. There you go. 15:00 Wes: Yeah. 15:01 Erin: And so I was at a friend's house at a party in their garage that had, like, cement walls. And they tried to draw this door on the wall. And, like, they were all making. It was a Beetlejuice thing that they were trying to go into the afterlife by doing the chalk drawing of the door. And I had no idea what they were talking about. And that revealed that I hadn't even seen Beetlejuice and I was such a loser. 15:25 Wes: No, that sounds very traumatic. 15:30 Erin: No, it was. It was fine. I was just a little embarrassed. 15:34 Wes: Did that make you. Yeah, did that make you cool or a loser? 15:37 Erin: No, it was because it was around and it was. And, like, you know, there was a animated series and everything. So, like, I. I knew a lot about the movie without ever having seen the movie, as in that way that you do when you're a kid where, you know, you've just. You pick up everything through some kind of weird context clue or ask people, like, tell me about that so I can pretend that I know more about this, to seem cooler than I am, since it's forbidden, so it's obviously cool. But that was when it was revealed that I hadn't seen it and I hadn't known what they were talking about anyway, so kids were drawing. I just have to say I can testify to the fact that this was an attractive mode of entry for kids. 16:20 Wes: But, no, you've got me asking this question of where is he exactly? I guess he is in the model. I mean, his grave as down in the model. I don't know. 16:28 Erin: Yeah. And they literally. They have to dig to get to him. He's buried in there. Yeah. 16:33 Wes: Yeah. 16:33 Erin: Deep in the subconscious. 16:34 Wes: Yeah. What happens after he leaves? Right. To get out into the real world, he has to marry Lydia. I don't know. Yeah. It's a bit confusing, but. 16:44 Erin: And why does he have so many rules applied to him when he seems to be a guy without rules, who. 16:49 Wes: Yeah, it's a weird. Is this a punishment of some sort? But, yeah, he stands in some contrary contrast to the afterlife itself, to that netherworld itself that Barbara and Adam go into, which is portrayed as being this bureaucracy, which is a very interesting kind of irony. Right. So Juno is Their caseworker. I mean, it kind of feels more like maybe a DMV in the beginning. Right. And there's this huge line and these cranky tellers, I want to call them, but that's not the right word. People at the windows, you know, who are supposed to help you. 17:26 Erin: Yeah. 17:27 Wes: And you know, you take a number and the number is ridiculously large and the wait time is going to be ridiculously large. But I guess more apt is a comparison to a welfare or social services office because they need help and they need a caseworker. To do what? Figure out one of the things of course they have to do is figure out how to get the deetses out. And Juno gives them advice on that. But if it weren't for that problem, what is it exactly that they need help doing? And why are they stuck in the house for 125 years? As I suppose there's lots of questions, but I find it interesting that. So in a way, right. It's not heaven and it's not hell. And that's something that Barbara, I think, says, or maybe it's Adam. But when they're reading this book, the 18:15 Erin: Handbook for the Recently Deceased. 18:17 Wes: Handbook for the Recently Deceased. Yeah. One of them says, I don't see anything at all, anything about heaven or hell. And this netherworld comes across as a kind of possibly a purgatory. Right. And there's an element of punishment in it. And the element of punishment is just this kind of ordinary punishment to which we are regularly subjected in life, which is to have to deal with bureaucratic red tape and inefficiency. So what is that about? 18:45 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And the workers are all suicides, right? 18:48 Wes: Right. 18:49 Erin: They're civil servants in the afterlife, as Otho talks about. And I thought about that, that connection to this idea of bureaucracy. And the only word that I could think of to kind of bridge that gap is self defeating. There's something self defeating about the process of dealing with a bureaucracy and that. That somehow linked up with this idea of suicide and of defeating oneself. The bureaucracy is strange one, as a filmic space, as a set piece, it's so highly colored and so imaginative. I mean the people literally are highly colored in the waiting room and stuff. And they're also highly representational. I mean, they're literally representing the, the manner of their death in their bodies. Evidently nobody just dies of old age in this, in this waiting room. And so it's supposed to be boring, but then like the very expression and representation of this boring place is so not Boring that, you know, one has to remind oneself that this is a bureaucracy because it's so funny and because it's so, you know, so many interesting things happen there. So that is something, like, kind of strange about this. It made me think about again, just about, like, elements of film and why certain things work on film and other things don't. Like creative process. Watching someone. You know, we've talked about this before. Watching someone create or write or sit in a room and read and study and go through the work of building oneself as a person in an interior way that doesn't ever come across on film well. But for some reason, like, bureaucracy is super great thing to represent on film. It's visually very interesting, whether it's the apartment, you know, like the desks arranged to the vanishing point in the big room, or whether it's boring and highly symmetrical or it's wild. 20:29 Wes: I was thinking of Brazil, too. Dystopian representation of bureaucracy. 20:34 Erin: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Because there's sort of different modes of it. It reminds me of Alien vs 2001, where you have the dichotomy between clean space and dirty space or something. You know, like lived in space versus the clean, pristine. You know, I guess one would be utopian and one would be dystopian to a certain extent, at least visually. So there's the clean bureaucracy, where everything is perfectly ordered and vis. It looks very satisfying because everything is usually extremely symmetrical. And sometimes that can be indicative, of course. Right. Of a dark underbelly. But then there's the paper stacked everywhere. Super messy bureaucracy in which, like, you get lost in the shuffle easily and everything is. Everybody's incompetent and nobody knows what's going on. Both of those looks, I think, work really well on screen for different reasons. 21:20 Wes: Yeah. 21:20 Erin: I'm sort of getting away from your question, but I think I'm trying to see if I can answer it aesthetically as a way to answer it symbolically in the film. I think you're right to point out that this is something that we have to deal with in life. This is just another way of talking about life. Like this idea of the purgation that they have to go through. It's sort of implied what happens after that. There's that room of lost souls which they then become during the exorcism at the end of the movie. So maybe that's like death. Death. That's. I think the janitor calls it death after death. Yeah. 21:52 Wes: Or the death for the dead. 21:54 Erin: Death for the dead. That seems really far out there. And Weird, but something about the process of having to live in the house is definitely designed to teach the Maitland some kind of lesson. What does bureaucracy teach? Well, if it's not totally self defeating, then it might teach you, at best case scenario, it might teach you patience. 22:11 Wes: Yeah, I was giving some thought to what it is that bureaucracies generally do in real life. And I think my conclusion was that they are often about minting is the word that came to mind. They're legitimating. So whether it's actions or people. Right. So you have to get a driver's license, just thinking of the DMV in order to drive, or a license to make an addition to your home. Or if school itself, which involves going to school, involves a lot of bureaucratic elements, including getting grades and transcripts and just the application process, who gets in, who doesn't, getting licenses to do things, professional licenses, paying taxes, which is about ensuring that people are contributing towards the public good. There are lots of ways in which bureaucracy is about determining where people stand in society and who it is, who's allowed to do what, and including who it is, you know, who's eligible for certain services, including this kind of welfare service that Juno is providing. And then I like your distinction between clean versus dirty bureaucracy, because you mentioned there being kind of a dark, possible dark side to clean bureaucracy. And the dark side, I think is the element of control. Right. So you could have a very efficient, I don't want to say German, I guess I did want to say German. You could have a very efficient totalitarian in bureaucracy that is a very effective means of controlling people. So that's one danger. And then one of the other dangers is that the bureaucracy is inefficient and papers are stacked up, so you have to wait forever. And maybe you have to go back to the DMV three times because you forgot something or however all that works. So it's very frustrating. Or just in governmental bureaucracies, nothing gets done and change is so difficult and slow. I think there's some system related to traffic, air traffic control, for instance, which is like a program written in the 70s or something. And they can't update that software because that's just the way the government works. It doesn't move that quickly. So we are punished by this. Right. So what does purgatory do? We were thinking in terms of Christianity and Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. Purgatory, it's punishment, but also it's like a licensing process where you earn the right to go to heaven. Right. You have to change, you have to acquire the skills. It's like going to med school or something. But in this case, instead of learning how to do surgery, your character has to change before you are eligible to move on to the next phase of life. So I guess that's the connection I'm trying to make between purgatorial minting, let's say, between. Or you could even call it therapeutic. What happens in purgatory if punishment is supposed to change you? Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but that minting process is the connection I'm making to bureaucracy and why it might be a good way to represent purgatory. 25:20 Erin: The leader, the head of the division, or whatever it is. Juno. There's an interesting kind of contrast, I think, between. Well, I suppose if you make an appointment, you don't have to wait in that long queue. So maybe there's a workaround. 25:35 Wes: Right. If they had read the book. 25:36 Erin: If they'd read the. Yeah, exactly. You probably didn't even read the whole book yet. But certain messy qualities of the bureaucracy do kind of butt up against Juno's authority and her kind of. I mean, I'm a huge Sylvia Sidney fan, so the, you know, the fact that she. The fact that this great old Hollywood actress is at the core of this bureaucracy, it's like, it can't be all that. You know, she's. She's very good at what she does. She seems very competent. If the clean bureaucracy has the rotten thing underneath, this is like the dirty bureaucracy that actually has, like, the person who's actually trying to help, you know, just dealing with a bunch of incompetence all around her and ghosts that won't read their damn handbooks or what she represents. Maybe she doesn't have to represent anything but what she is. I mean, she's Juno, so she's not. So the film is kind of sidestepping the idea of a biblical form of higher power with the Roman name. But thinking about the authority that she brings. 26:31 Wes: Well, she's God's wife, right? 26:33 Erin: Yeah. 26:33 Wes: Juno is Hera, right? 26:35 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the authority that she brings is in. Old Hollywood actress who. I mean, I wonder what her reaction was to seeing this script and if she had to be convinced to do this. I didn't look this up. 26:46 Wes: Apparently, a lot of people had a. Yeah, like, what the hell is this reaction? 26:49 Erin: Right, right. I can't imagine her. On the one hand, extreme competence, it seems, and on the other hand, her inability to control Beetlejuice, her. All of. All of these things that Maybe represent the kind of dichotomy inherent in the biblical God too. 27:05 Wes: Right. 27:06 Erin: Like, everything's going well, but then you have this one real pain in the ass underling who upends everything. You know, maybe there's some of that in the Bible as well, but. Yeah. And like, she doesn't seem to impress upon them as strongly as she should the danger of inviting Betelgeuse in. 27:26 Wes: And in fact, she's the only reason why they know how to pronounce his name. 27:29 Erin: Oh, that's right. Yeah. We've talked about this before. The Felix culpa, the fortunate fall, the idea that perhaps this whole thing is part of the divine plan. Anyway, obviously Beetlejuice ends up having a positive effect on the whole affair. I just really like Juno, but I love her scenes. 27:45 Wes: Yeah, she's great. She really is. If it's necessary to have a caseworker, that would be the one. Curmudgeonly feisty and like five feet tall. 27:55 Erin: Yeah. 27:56 Wes: Old and presumably wise, but not so wise as to not be feisty and curmudgeonly. 28:03 Erin: Right. 28:03 Wes: I was thinking too, in a way that something about bureaucracy is evocative of the mindlessness of the adult world. And I think to which the adolescent is somehow responding with their protest. And by mindlessness, I mean it starts out with good intentions and a system of values. Right? And that's something, as we mature, we incorporate. But they tend to take on a life of their own and to be bigger than any one person and to be difficult to change even when they become detrimental. And it's a source of political conflict all the time. Right. So business regulations are there to protect the public good, but if they get to the point where. Or zoning regulations, let's say, if they get to the point where you can no longer start a new business without some incredible amount of red tape and jumping through certain hoops, or the point where you can't build houses anymore, there's a housing shortage in this country, then one wants to point to the regulations and say, well, this has gone too far. So the bureaucracy, it's kind of representative at an individual level of inhibition. We want to make sure we're not just acting impulsively and destroying the environment or doing other bad things. But we don't want to be so inhibited that we don't act altogether. We want to be in control of our values and the way we're executing them. The way it might look to an adolescent. Right. Is I have parents preaching to me about don't do drugs and have Sex or blah, blah, whatever parent. Who knows? Is that even going on anymore? I don't know that parents are preaching like that anymore. But whatever values that parents are trying to instill in children that they don't themselves follow or maybe that in some ways are ill considered, it looks like a form of mindlessness. It looks like some sort of system is running roughshod over people and overriding their critical faculties and making them inflexible. So I think in a way that's apt because I think you mentioned if the Maitlands are sort of stuck in an Edenic and childish world, it's very apt that they would have to confront. Right. The problem with leaving home is that you have to confront all this bs, all this adult stuff and the netherworld, the afterlife is very much a caricature of that of adult pain in the ass stuff. I don't know. Does that make sense? 30:33 Erin: That's great. Yeah, it does. And I think if we were to triangulate this and say there's home and then there's like the dmv, maybe another point on the triangle would be like the carnival. You know, I'm thinking of the carnival aspect that Betelgeuse brings. The explicitly carnival aspect he brings at the end where he has the carousel on his head. Hat. I don't know what's going on there. And the strength game that he uses to eject the. 30:58 Wes: Exactly. 30:59 Erin: And also the idea that maybe those two things are kind of twinned together as well. Because he's, of course, very associative. Right. So I think the reason why he ends up looking like a carnival is because of Charles's scheme as a developer to turn the whole town into an amusement park. And I think there was already. I think, as I said, maybe in the last episode, that there's already something kind of amusement park y about the Maitlands last name, as though the family home is like their own private amusement park where they just have each other. And how maybe slightly sick and perverse that is, but I'm just kidding. Sort of. It's so normie. It's so sick. I took what, Beetlejuice's expressions of carnival carniness or Carnival. Carnival, whatever. Carnivalesque. I took all of that to be riffing off of the father's amusement park pitch, since it happens in the middle of the pitch. 31:53 Wes: Right. 31:54 Erin: And I think that the father, by being a condo developer. So someone who's like, trying to make the world look more like the. I've been watching Severance. Have you seen Severance? 32:06 Wes: Yeah. I really like that. Is the new season out yet? It's just one season. 32:10 Erin: Not yet, but I've been just watching the. I finally got Apple tv. Plus I had watched the first two episodes with someone who had a subscription ages ago. And now I'm like, okay, I have to get serious about this. I'm finally. 32:22 Wes: I really like it. 32:23 Erin: Yeah. But you know what I'm talking about with the look of like the condo development as being very similar and very kind of dystopian to. Don't say anything past the first episode. Cause that's all I remember. But you know what I mean? Like that kind of dystopian look to the condo complex. And any kind of aerial view. And maybe this is related to the model, right. Like any kind of aerial view of the world. The way that things have been developed by these developers, by the sort of bureaucratic unseen mind that determines how people live. And zoning and various other things. Right. Can look quite dystopian from above. So we get these aerial shots in severance of the condo complex looking very dystopian. And of course, the building where he works, Lumon, I think, looking very dystopian. So the fact that Charles is a condo developer is suggestive to me of like, you know, fitting as many people in as possible, but in like, agreeable ways of trying to make it so that you could zone for his. Right. That's heavily bureaucratic dwelling places. It's sort of the opposite of the Victorian that he wants to live in to escape everything. Like, he's happy to put everybody in their little skinner boxes while he goes to this huge house in the middle of nowhere and gets to escape people. Meanwhile, he's shoveling them in and trying to make everything probably with little ets like kitchenette and all these. Right. Like in order to fit as many people in as possible to make as most as much profit as possible. And the fact that he then wants to turn the town into an amusement park is almost like the marriage, I'm trying to say, of the sort of carnival with the bureaucratic. 33:53 Wes: Well, it's when he can't sell what's his face Gulag. What's the character's name? 33:57 Erin: Oh, Maxie. 33:58 Wes: Yeah. He can't sell Maxi on the condos, but after they find out the ghosts are in the house, he can sell them on this new idea, the amusement park. Yeah, go ahead. 34:07 Erin: Yeah. No, and maybe I'm just. Maybe that's kind of connecting me back to this idea of the waiting room and of the fact that this bureaucratic place is so great because everybody is representing their manner of death. It's so almost like they're avant garde art pieces, you know? So that waiting room itself is kind of blending the carnival and the bureaucratic. 34:26 Wes: Yeah. From the audience's perspective, it's more like a carnival. 34:29 Erin: Right. 34:30 Wes: Yeah. 34:30 Erin: Carnival of death. 34:32 Wes: Yeah. Internal to the story. It's bureaucracy, but yeah. All right. Should we talk about the Day O scene? 34:40 Erin: Yes. I've had that in my head musical for Deos and Dayos now. Especially because I saw Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice in theaters. 34:49 Wes: I love it. What'd you think of that? 34:50 Erin: I loved it. I thought it was so great. 34:53 Wes: It's great. 34:54 Erin: Yeah. And it was right up to the line of what I could take in terms of disgustingness. Actually crossed it a couple times. But it's. But it was perfect. It was like a. It was. It was just enough to really upset me in a. In a fun way. 35:10 Wes: Right. So I guess the premise of this is that Adam and Barbara have been trying and failing to scare off the Deetzes. And at a certain point, they had been ready to give up and maybe use Betelgeuse. Well, after their first visit to the netherworld and meeting Juno, I think they meet Lydia and ask for her help. And then Lydia is trying to convince Delia of that there are ghosts in the attic, but Delia is preparing for this dinner party. Then there's the scene where they're pulled into the model with Betelgeuse and they're disturbed by them. They come out, and so they're not going to use Betelgeuse. And then Barbara has an idea of how they can scare. So a new idea for scaring the Deetzes themselves, which incorporates Adam's interest in calypso music. And it's fun and playful and kind of still captures some of their innocence, but it does possess the guests at the. Takes control of their bodies. Right. I mean, it starts with Delia involuntarily starting to sing, and then everyone's dancing. Right. And they're being possessed. And it may be the scariest thing that happens is the hands come out of the shrimp, become hands. Is that what happens? The shrimp cocktail becomes hands that grab everyone's faces, but they're still in the realm of something that's. You would think it would be effective, actually, but it turns out to be yet another ineffective attempt at being scary for the Maitlands. 36:49 Erin: They're too sophisticated, or maybe they're too miserly or something. They immediately see it as something that can be taken advantage of for entertainment purposes. Yeah. They immediately take it to be something they can capitalize on and are delighted by. Or it's like a performance art piece that they can use these ghosts to force them to sing. Yeah. There's something about the fact that this is the calypso song. So it was the song that Adam was listening to at the beginning of the movie, one of them. It's kind of a novelty song. And so there's something like performatively kitschy about it, probably for the Dietzes, where, like, the song works really well because of the absurdity of the song. You know, like, if they were. If they were designing this as a performance art. Art piece, it pretty much checks all the boxes of things that might appeal to them, I think. Yeah. I mean, do you know anything about why they chose this particular song? Or. Because I don't know anything about the making of the film or anything like that that. Was there a reason behind it? 37:46 Wes: I don't know anything about that. But I did give some thought to it and looked up calypso music. And I don't know if it's a bridge too far. I mean, I think it's very likely the writers weren't thinking all that carefully about this, but. Right. So the song in question is the Banana Boat song sung by Harry Belafonte, which I think is a Jamaican song. The calypso music originated in the Caribbean and has slave origins in slave work songs. I think at a certain point it became a vehicle of protest and free speech concealed underneath kind of bright and happy sounding songs. So, for instance, rum and Coca Cola, which the Andrews Sisters appropriated. 38:28 Erin: Okay. Hey, now. I used to love singing that song. It was very problematic of me as a 5 year old. 38:36 Wes: I'm all for appropriation. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it. But I mean, it's originally a song that's a commentary on. On the explosion of prostitution near American military bases in Trinidad. So you get the idea. There's an element of protest. Right. And often it's protest against authoritarian colonial rule. So it's less obvious in the Banana Boat song, which is just about counting up the number of bananas at the end of the day to get wages. But it's a long, grueling. 39:06 Erin: Yeah, I work all night and I work all day. Daylight. Yeah. There are elements of it in there, I think. 39:12 Wes: Yeah. If we wanted to be very speculative, we could associate adolescent protest with that type of protest. Except that there's a very happy shiny veneer to this It's. The protest is concealed underneath it, which I think is part of why someone like Adam would be attracted to it. You also might associate it with travel, which is, you know, again, I'm thinking of Adam as the one having the travel bug and wanting to go to Jamaica, literally to go down there. So he obviously has a thing for. For Jamaica. But there's an element of travel that one can read in a sinister way. Right. So the ugly American or someone being in the legacy of colonialism and someone being in that mode going around getting served by people. And the colonialist, of course, is a lot like the obtuse adult and unjust adult against which the adolescent is also protesting. So in other words, calypso is like Adam's version of goth, let's say, except that it. Right. Aesthetically, it's as far from it as could possibly be. 40:17 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about the mere fact that this was a 50s fad. And I think the fact that it was probably predominantly listened to by white audiences too, I think kind of fits into what you were saying. But also just okay with it being the Banana Boat song with the Edenic climate of the Caribbean. You know, maybe there's something too that calls out to that kind of. 40:36 Wes: Good point. Really good point. We can't do justice to what a wonderful scene that is by describing it. That scene really makes the whole movie with them dancing around and then Lydia kind of standing in a corner looking very delighted by it. And you can imagine those are very. Just Winona Ryder's very natural reactions to what's going on. Apparently it was somewhat improvised. I don't know how that's possible, but that's what I heard. 41:00 Erin: Wow. I love the looks on their faces of. You know, they really give the effect of not being in control of their bodies, which is great. And I love at the end, when they do jump in the line and the football players appear behind her and it's all like a bunch of chorus boys or something. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's great to get the reappearance of the ghostly. And that doesn't make any sense either. The fact that they're shown as being insubstantial types of ghosts that you could put your hand through or whatever, versus the substantial ghosts that Adam and Barbara are. But it's best not to think too hard about that. Anyway, it's a cute ending. And the levitation and using the possession as an after school reward for the goth girl is pretty funny. 41:50 Wes: Yeah. And the way it Ends, you know, Lydia comes back from school looking very happy and she's got friends and says goodbye to her friends and bikes home. And she's obviously a different person to some extent. Her mournful. I want to use the word lugubrious. Use that sat word. It's got to be able to use it at some point in your life. That mournful quality that she has has 42:15 Erin: transformed a bit now that she lives in a polycule. Everything's turned around for her. Polyamorous relationship really works out. 42:24 Wes: She's being parented by. I don't know if death is the word, but by these representatives of death. And I guess that frees her from the morbid preoccupation with it. I don't know what else to say about it. But if calypso is for Adam, it's his version of goth. Right. The shiny, happy version you could see. And if it's a version of protest in line with adolescent protest, you could see her as moving forward to some maybe more mature form that doesn't completely give up the protest element, but is a little bit more joyful. 42:58 Erin: Yeah. And the thing that she was trying to escape the house with is now the thing that she lives with. So she can't, you know, it's become, like, integrated into normal part of her life. So she can't very well desire refuge as a form of rebellion from something that now is like telling her to do her homework. I think before, there was a lot of ammunition in torturing Delia and Charles with the Goth. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just. Maybe they completely ignored her. But there's usually an impulse in the goth look to try and deliberately goad your parents into, like, torturing them. 43:30 Wes: Yeah. Delia accuses Lydia of being miserable everywhere. You're miserable whether you're in the city or in the country. 43:36 Erin: Right, Right. 43:37 Wes: Charles is miserable in the city and Delia is miserable in the country, but Lydia is miserable in both places. 43:43 Erin: Right. 43:43 Wes: So we are queued in to the fact, the idea that she's really unhappy. 43:47 Erin: Right. Not just that, but that you goad your parents by dressing in this way, almost like to embarrass them. Yeah. And this way. It's impossible to embarrass your parents by being a Goth when your parents are dead and they're like the ultimate Goths, in a way. Yeah. So that kind of solves itself by being integrated into her own family. It's as though the whole family decided to become Goths. 44:07 Wes: Yeah. I think this concept of the integration of death is really Important because I was making the earlier association between denial of death and denial of sexuality and denial of instinctuality more generally and aggression. And that denial is strongly, I think, associated with the narcissism of someone like Delia and the status orientedness of someone like Delia, which is one of the other dates. Dangerous perversity is one danger, but narcissism of the Delia sort is another sort of danger. And the integration of death is a way of avoiding that. And it's mourning and it's part of the maturation process. 44:43 Erin: Is Delia okay in the end? Like, do we think she's gotten. She's become a better person now that she's successful or what's the deal with Delia? 44:51 Wes: Yeah, I think. Well, everyone's. Yeah. Given a bit of a happy ending, I think. Are we only get a hint? Right. 44:58 Erin: Because I like her in the sequel. I like the fact that she is just. Yes, she's now just become a nice person and it's fine. I mean, a dramatic person. 45:05 Wes: But yeah, she's still kind of problematic in the sequel, but yeah, but she's like, loving. She's not as horrible. 45:12 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard for me to tell at this point. I mean, it's. It's Catherine. 45:17 Wes: You can't tone her down too much because she's like her hilariousness and yeah, she's a big part of what makes the movie great. So you would not want to see that toned down too much. 45:27 Erin: I would want to see her just the way she is. Don't go change. And Delia and Catherine o'. 45:32 Wes: Hara. I mean, it just makes me want to see every movie that Catherine o' Hara is in. 45:35 Erin: Oh, yeah, she's fantastic. 45:37 Wes: Yeah, Just love her. Okay, I enjoyed that. Thank you. 45:41 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. 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