Beetlejuice

Growing up as a child in our obsessively self-referential late 20th century culture, I was generally exposed to the ironical mimesis of things long before I knew about the things themselves. And because the things we know first will always be more true for us, my sense of reality while navigating much of pop culture was inverted. I knew about Jellystone National Park, where many a pic-a-nic basket has been filched, long before I knew that a real entity in our world had so nearly stolen the name. I knew about the singer Madonna long before I realized that there was a more famous person referred to by this title. And I knew about the cartoon Beetlejuice, long before I knew that it had been based on a popular 1988 Hollywood movie directed by Tim Burton, longer still before I knew that there was a star in the night's sky called "Betelgeuse."

And always after, in my head, that star will be named after Beetlejuice, rather than the other way around. Plainly, I was a born adherent of those Decadent aesthetic theories, such as those formulated fictionally by Des Esseintes (and maybe less really by his real-world creator Huysmans), that insist that the artificial is more real than nature.

Now, I wouldn't say that my sister and I exactly "liked" the Beetlejuice cartoon. A lot of times, in childhood, liking doesn't really come into it. We watched it because it was on, and I think we found it -- like certain indelible moments of the Ghostbusters cartoon and many other things one recalls most vividly from childhood -- to be vaguely creepy and upsetting yet entrancing. 

I do remember, though, that it stirred certain inchoate and primal moral feelings in me. For obvious reasons, I liked the idea of the weak and small being able to summon up supernatural powers at their command, to mete out a certain kind of rough justice. One episode I remembered distinctly all these years later involved Lydia chaining herself to a tree in order to save it from a bulldozer, and Beetlejuice having to work some ingenious mischief in order to save the tree and take their revenge upon a callous world. 

Thanks to (of course) the internet, I was able recently to track down this episode and see it again. As with many things from childhood, it loses some of its power on the rewatch. I remember it as a kind of epic, moving deep passions within me -- enough so that it was still in my head twenty years later. In reality, this tree-chaining business is over in about three seconds. The specific reason why she is engaged in this protest, the nature of the threat against the tree, the way in which Beetlejuice saves the day -- all of these things that plainly made perfect narrative sense to my child mind -- are now completely impossible to follow as an adult, and the episode ends up being boring for grown-ups for the same reason it is captivating for kids: it does not stay with any one thought for longer than an instant. 

Still, though, this was the closest thing to a political statement that I can recall any cartoon making during my childhood (the noble Captain Planet excepted), and leave it to my young brain to latch on to such material for dear life. This was the sort of thin gruel we had to subsist on in those days -- those of us who thirsted without knowing it yet for a sense of social righteousness. 

If you only knew the world from the pop culture of the '80s and '90s, you would think the Left was made up entirely of good-looking young white people chaining themselves to things with no legal consequences, in order to save the rainforest or small mammals. Audrey chains herself to the bank vault in Twin Peaks. Her father's way of proving in the series that he has become a better human being is to embark on a campaign to save the endangered "pine weasel." Elaine's go-to example of moral sublimity in Seinfeld is Greenpeace. They have to save the whales in the fourth Star Trek movie (which I am not at all knocking, don't get me wrong). I could go on. 

I think this was an image that fit very well with the general belief of mainstream society at the time (shared by those of us eating cereal in the suburbs and watching mind-numbing cartoons) that the Left was a bunch of well-meaning hipsters who were obsessed with environmental causes (stripped of all social context) that could only ultimately be irrelevant, silly, and endearingly superficial, because everyone knew that the really important social problems had already been solved.

It was and is a strange self-conception to have for an era that gave us HIV, "broken windows" policing, mass incarceration, a revamped death penalty, U.S.-sponsored atrocities in Central America,  neoliberalism, "welfare reform" and the IIRIRA -- the whirlwind of all of which we are now reaping as surely as the vengeance of Beetlejuice -- but obviously one that was convenient for a certain group of people to entertain at the time. 

It worked well to appease the Hollywood "social conscience" -- always such an unstable and untrustworthy thing -- to gently tease, yet signal patronizing approval of, the world's defenders of the humble "pine weasel." It helped to show they too were on the side of social progress in ways that didn't touch anything fundamental about the nature of the society they inhabited, and that also suggested that from here on progress would just be a matter of plugging a few remaining moral gaps in our basically worthy ship of state. (The Alicia Silverstone character in Clueless learns a valuable moral lesson one day, e.g., when she discovers that it is rude to refer to one's grotesquely stereotyped housekeeper as "Mexican," when she is in fact from El Salvador. She does not, however, learn anything about why there were so many Salvadorans in the United States circa 1995, what they fled and what was the United States' role, nor what they would be deported to the following year, when the '96 immigration reform passed.)

If I'm reading too much into a cartoon for children, however, gird yourself -- I'm about to read even more into a movie for grown-ups. I swear to you that what follows makes sense in my brain if in no one else's. I tell you: if the portrayal of Lydia's near-literal "tree-hugging" reveals something important about the complacency of the era that created it, then the movie Beetlejuice (1988) tells us even more about the unease and moral discontent that lay just beneath it. 

Seeing the movie as an adult, one realizes quickly enough that there are several elements to the Beetlejuice mythos that didn't survive into the cartoon. For one thing, the affectionate if mischievous and revenge-happy sprite that one recalls from TV turns out to be -- in his original, Michael Keaton incarnation-- rather a leering Bukowski-esque sexual predator. But this is the sort of discovery one makes upon rewatching anything made more than six months ago, it would seem, so let's leave that for what it is.

The more interesting revelation is that Beetlejuice the movie turns out to be, of all things, a supernatural riff on gentrification and the rising housing costs of the late '80s -- something that didn't translate through to the TV show. 

The film plainly dates from very much the same era and cultural milieu as Tama Janowitz' Slaves of New York (1986) -- that is to say, back when gentrification was still sort of an in-joke among Manhattanites, and something that was mostly just seen as concerning bohemians and artist-types (rather than being the quintessential blight of every modern urban reality). "Hey man, this affects us," as one of the artist-type characters says to one of the investment banker-type characters in the movie American Psycho, upon being asked whether "SoHo is getting too commercial" and hearing the reply "Who gives a rat's ass?" There's a reason why when La Bohème was updated for 1990s Broadway, it would be rechristened Rent. 

These are the kinds of communities whose displacement Hollywood notices. Salvadoran workers, not so much.

The idea in Beetlejuice specifically is that a normal, down-to-earth, vaguely blue collar and un-hip couple (they are played, of course, by Hollywood people, so they are actually a little too glamorous-looking to be quite plausible in this role, but I think we are supposed to gather from what they are wearing and how they decorate the house that this is the sort of couple they are) have an old house in New England. Among other things, they want to have kids and feel vaguely demeaned by their relatives for having so far failed to reproduce. 

One day, they die in a car accident and are forced to haunt their former home, while the new owners move in. These turn out to be smug, would-be-trendy New Yorkers who have just made a bundle off the gentrification of Manhattan ("You're lucky all the apartments are going condo, otherwise you never could have afforded this place," says Otho, the sinister interior decorator-type, by way of helpful exposition). They proceed to remodel the place in line with their avant grade pretensions -- the mother is a would-be sculptor who can't sell a piece, etc. These sculptures and the new decorating are supposed to be ghastly, but I actually kind of like them. There's a great visual gag where what appears at first to be a rooftop turns out to be a bizarre extrusion of the building constructed at ground-level, and to be honest I would totally love to have that on my house. These changes, however, provoke our sympathetic down-to-earth couple to summon the forces of darkness to haunt the new owners until they leave. 

Kind of a brilliant premise, you gotta admit-- and one that tugged at some not very obscure corners of my psyche (I've noticed that my consumption of media and literature as I get older tends to become a less and less subtle representation of whatever reality I am currently living through). Residing myself in an old building in a rapidly gentrifying Boston suburb that recently "went condo" -- and was in fact completely refurbished -- I had every reason to see the film as a dig at people like me; but being like most people more ready subconsciously to cast myself in the role of the virtuous and put-upon and long-suffering, the movie spoke within me more directly to the fact that -- after having the place to myself for several months -- the condo unit above me had finally been sold, and my new neighbors were just moving in. I think my subconscious decided that they were the bad Manhattanites, and I the virtuous down-to-earth types, and that therefore I needed to watch Beetlejuice.

I have met these new neighbors a total of one time. You would think that, living in the same building, we might happen to pass one another every once in a while going in and out. This happens all the time with my other neighbors. But instead, for whatever odd reason, this just never seems to take place. I suppose this has conferred upon us both a somewhat ghostly reality in each other's eyes. I have some notion that they are younger and better looking and more successful than me, and I think the longer I go without seeing or speaking to them, the younger and better looking and more successful they become. Living in this context, I very much liked the idea of a film about summoning a poltergeist to restore one's blissful solitude and exorcise one's insecurities about keeping up with the Joneses. I didn't do that -- I just got out this strange prompting vicariously through Beetlejuice and then left a welcoming gift and nice card on their doorstep instead. But again, they weren't at home at the time, so I had to deposit it there without being seen, and this continues to leave me feeling very wraith-like and spectral.

The movie didn't disappoint. It is the kind of film that you realize upon viewing was far more embedded in your collective unconscious than you ever expected. From the very beginning, there's that theme music by Danny Elfman that is instantly recognizable even though you hadn't thought about it in years -- here, in skeletal form, is the outline of that even more recognizable theme they played at the beginning of the cartoon every week. (Elfman is indeed at his cleverest throughout the score -- we have a sting of the violin when Beetlejuice is clambering in through the window that is a direct musical quotation from Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre -- one that left un-musical me feeling clever in turn for having caught it, and therefore inclined to think even more fondly of the film.)

More importantly, I found that the movie performed well at the quintessential fantasy task of distilling one's inner psychic and life-stage conflicts into a story without ever getting too literal. The characters tell you who they are and what archetypes they are meant to fulfill within the fairy tale plot at first glance -- in part because the actors are mostly people you recognize, but not so well that you don't have to look them up on IMDB in order to know what from. 

For some reason, you are immediately willing to accept the father of the new owner family that moves into the house as a likable but vaguely ineffectual doofus who is not likely to be much help in a tight spot -- he plays the shrugging and grinning role of Hansel and Gretel's schlemiel dad, say. Why does he look like this is the sort of character he will prove to be, right away? Ah, because a quick check on IMDB reveals that he also plays the nice emperor dude in Amadeus.

As for the mother, well -- we know exactly who she is in the fairytale archetypes. ("Step-mother," as Lydia clarifies to our two sympathetic ghosts). And why are we so prepared to see her as the flighty, fretful, neglectful, hot-mess bougie mom type? Oh right, because she will go on to play exactly this character as well in Home Alone!

As for Alec Baldwin -- he's the only one who leaves you scratching your head. Not because he does a bad job -- but because you are surprised to realize he was once that good looking.

As for Beetlejuice, he checks some fine archetypal boxes as well, being only summoned according to a "rule of three" (rather like Bloody Mary) and teaching a valuable moral about unleashing forces too great and dark to handle. (Indeed, the character is so convincingly folkloric, that I'm not sure I'd realized until after seeing the movie that this was an entirely original screenplay).

Then there is Lydia, played by the ever-endearing Winona Ryder, trapped between the evil step-mother and the absent-minded father. It's a perfect match, then, when it turns out that she alone can see the ghosts living upstairs. They need a surrogate daughter, having never been able to conceive a child in life. She needs surrogate parents. And so, once they all reach a compromise position on the interior decorating, they are able to live together happily as one big family. 

Like the best fantasies, then, this film is really not about its purportedly supernatural material. Beetlejuice himself ends up being a mere obstacle and nemesis to be overcome -- not at all the agent of karmic justice that he will become in the cartoon. The movie is not about him, but about the vague angst of entering adulthood as an East Coast-type in the mid- to late-'80s and discovering oneself on one side or the other of a widening economic divide -- visible most directly in the spirally housing costs. One suddenly finds oneself either living in, or unable to afford -- or both, for that matter -- a home that has gotten preposterously expensive. 

The sudden inaccessibility of housing then becomes a symbol for the loss of "youthful idealism" -- that Hollywood currency that everyone supposedly once had --  ("think back to our past when you used to have an open mind," as a character says in 1982's Poltergeist -- another spook-fest from this era), the fact that adulthood ended up being very different from what one expected, the fact that one doesn't actually seem to be making the transition into having a "house and kids" that one's parents did, and that one thought would be so easy as to be almost inevitable. Or maybe one has all those things, and yet still feels like an imposter. (And you may find yourself in a beautiful house/ With a beautiful wife/ And you may ask yourself, well/ How did I get here? as David Byrne sang at the start of the decade.) The ghosts in Beetlejuice wanted to have kids, but couldn't. They wanted a house, but it was bought out from under them by yuppies. Story of a generation.

Here, the comparison to Janowitz's Slaves of New York, published two years earlier, becomes particularly relevant. The premise of this collection of interconnected short stories also revolves around the New York gentrification problem -- the slaves in question being women (and men) who are forced to remain in demeaning and semi-abusive relationships with narcissistic male artist-types --doing all the housework, cooking all the meals, and walking to dog -- because they cannot afford any other place to live (the collection ends -- after far more sober accounts of this predicament -- with an outrageous S&M fantasy on this theme). 

Housing costs are almost a character in themselves. "Well, it's his apartment, and if we have a fight or something I sometimes get this panicky feeling: Where the hell am I going to go?" says Eleanor --the closest thing to a protagonist running through the non-narrative of the stories. She also advises a girlfriend to stay in Boston: "If you live with Bruce, you'll be his slave. It's not the same in other cities, the rents aren't so high. Roger doesn't have the same power over you, because you could always threaten to move out and get your own place in Boston."

A narrator of another one of the stories could basically be meeting the Manhattanite new owners from Beetlejuice, when she arrives at a boyfriend's house to be introduced to his rich Upper East Side parents. Here again, the mother doesn't have a job, per se, but is vaguely artistic, and both parents have a sideline in real estate. When the narrator meets the guy again months later, to discover that his rich family has just bought the apartment she was most desperately coveting, he announces he is working now on "a project" for his parents: "They bought a house upstate and hired me to renovate." Perhaps it's the house in Beetlejuice. 

The housing issue, though, is a stand-in. And a stand-in-the-way. It means that one cannot afford one's own place to live, and therefore is blocked from gaining the autonomy and independence of adulthood. (Eleanor, like the ghost-couple in Beetlejuice, wants to have a child -- but the narcissistic artist boyfriend nixes this idea right away.) At the same time, however, one has almost too much freedom. Because one isn't able to glide through the transitions of the adult life stages -- from student to householder -- from single to married to parent -- one feels that one has been handed a new role for which one doesn't know the lines, and for which one has no examples at hand. 

Janowitz's characters stumble blankly through a series of endless surreal conversations that go nowhere (rather like the people -- in milieu and location too -- in a Jim Jarmusch movie, except Jarmusch, in truth, does it better). A character says of another: "How many times had he fallen for this before, patiently listening to a tale that added up to nothing? [...] there [wasn't] going to be any connection, there wasn't even going to be a punchline." A reader looking for a plot in this book might feel that the critique applies to everyone in Slaves of New York. Its stream-of-consiousness anecdotes and non-sequiturs remind one of George Orwell's description of another great chronicle of the vie de Bohème -- Henry Miller's novels. The following passage from Orwell's "Inside the Whale," trying to describe what actually happens in a Henry Miller novel, could very well be said of the antics in Slaves of New York:

Not that they are anything very startling in the way of adventures. [...] There are interminable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries to decide which is worse, being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In great detail he describes his visits to the widow, how he went to the hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to urinate, so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment etc., etc. And after all, none of it is true, the widow doesn't even exist — Karl has simply invented her in order to make himself seem important. The whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why is it that these monstrous trivialities are so engrossing?

Why indeed?

Nobody can really define or challenge the rules and conventions of the bizarre human interactions people go through in Janowitz's book, because no one is sure what the rules are, or if rules exist anymore. Eleanor attempts in one scene to ask someone at a nightclub where she is from, and the woman is outraged. "Is my question in terrible taste, or is she crazy?" wonders Eleanor. "It's hard for me to figure out how to be a social being[.]" Later on, after she is dumped by a man who mysteriously and elaborately heaped praise on her for no reason when they first met, she reflects: "it didn't seem right that animals  met each other, performed some little courting dance, and mated for life. They knew exactly what to do; they relied on instinctive behavior that had not given their parents and grandparents any problems either. Maybe my mother had taken something during my prenatal months that interfered with my evolutionary, collective knowledge. [...] It was like I was stuck on a soap opera inside a tiny TV, and the plot wasn't going the way I thought it should."

Too much freedom, and yet a total lack of autonomy and self-direction. It's the quintessential bohemian's problem. "I remember how much I looked forward to being a grown-up," says Eleanor again. "[N]o school, no one telling you what to do. It didn't turn out to be so much fun; I find it traumatic even to make a decision on what to order from a restaurant menu."

Except that this is no longer just a Manhattanite's problem. It is everyone I know's problem.  We are all living in Bohemia now. 

While most people like to blame the young for this predicament, Beetlejuice and Slaves of New York come closer to the money (so to speak). It's the economy, stupid! That neoliberal capitalism that the '80s gave birth to, while everyone in Hollywood was busy cracking jokes about pine weasels and hippy activists, has put modernity on hyperdrive. Gentrification is the story in every city, and displacement the story in every traditional industry, seemingly, in the country. It's not that people don't at all want to live the old-fashioned way -- it's that nobody knows how they are supposed to do it, when the rent is -- as Jimmy McMillan presciently put it -- so damn high! 

How is anyone supposed to find a job or a house or an apartment when the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out of every city and town, and the gentrifiers (myself among the guilty) have moved in to ensure that everything is now "going condo." At one go, communities have been deprived of both housing prices they could afford and the income to pay them with.

There is a reason why people living through the early stages of this accelerating process would turn their minds to ghosts, why people would be making films like Poltergeist and Beetlejuice. (And I swear to you -- not making this up -- while I was writing this post my bedroom door swung shut on its own accord. But in fairness, it was propped weirdly, and my AC had just clicked on.) 

There is a reason why Rachel Whiteread's artworks of this era treated of the theme of displacement in a way that is positively spectral. 1993's House was a solid mold of the whole interior of a working class housing building in East London that had been slated for demolition by the local government. In appearance and evocation, it might as well have been made of ectoplasm. All that is solid has melted into air. And indeed, one of Whiteread's earlier pieces that formed a prototype for it -- the solid interior she had molded of a room -- was fittingly titled Ghost. Whiteread's photographic series Demolished -- about the detonation of council housing flats in the 1990s -- is eery in a similar way. 

The reason why gentrification and displacement should make us think of ghosts is obvious enough. We are living in someone else's place, and we are haunted by it; or, if we are on the other side of the process, we still belong to a place spiritually in which we can no longer physically reside. 

Beetlejuice tells this story in a subtle way, but  -- being a product of Hollywood -- gives it a happy ending. It ends on a note of reconciliation. Old and new occupants learn to live together. The ghosts and Lydia make friends. 

One can hold out hope for such an ending in real life. But the processes of hyper-capitalism that give rise to displacement around the world don't seem to be slowing down, and our current political overlords are intent upon removing the last few impediments to its ravening progress. You may have missed that the White House Council of Economic Advisors recently declared that the War on Poverty is "over," because we won, and thus concluding that we need to cut back even further on social programs. This in the same year that the UN Human Rights Council found 40 million people living in dire poverty in the United States.

Speaking of which -- you know who else was big in the Manhattan scene, in the era when this whole catastrophe was being acted out there in dress rehearsal? Someone -- you may have heard of him -- named Donald Trump.