In the face of death, pointless laughter at everything
The ads for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice boast, “From the mind of Tim Burton.” But what that tagline doesn’t say is that it’s always Halloween in Tim Burton’s head. Burton’s embrace by Hollywood shows us the film industry’s acceptance of the spooky, distorted, dark, and occult.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice being the sequel to a film made 36 years ago, its only significance is showing that Hollywood’s routine practice shamelessly observes Halloween more than it celebrates Christmas, Easter, or Yom Kippur.
The real point is to celebrate Burton’s warped sensibility by reviving the clown-demon from the afterlife, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), and the three generations of kooks — Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), her artiste stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), and estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) — who summon his anarchic presence in the midst of the film’s convoluted farce by uttering his name three times. (The two-time title simply anticipates the next sequel.)
That double title repeats a phonetic pronunciation of Betelgeuse, a star in the Orion constellation, consistent with the juvenile mischief inherent to Burton’s animated-cartoon sensibility — a childishly naughty perspective that has become all too common, especially in the comic-book-movie era.
Burton’s sense of humor first got attention with his ’80s Disney-financed shorts Vincent (a lonely kid’s tribute to horror-film icon Vincent Price), Frankenweenie, then his debut feature Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Since then, Burton’s vision has been misunderstood even as he developed it (the misconceived 1989 blockbuster Batman was partially corrected toward satire when Burton found his comic footing in Batman Returns). But the fairy tales of Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Big Fish twisted his point of view. He came to confuse idiosyncratic whimsy with wildly misguided cultural ironies. Similar erroneous invention eventually overwhelms Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Lydia’s dealings in supernatural media (her parody Ghost House TV show), Delia’s outré art projects, and Astrid’s foolish paranormal exploits allow Burton to pile on hellzapoppin skits, but the narrative inconsistency and carnivalesque monster-movie special effects shift from amusing (sandworms that simultaneously devour villains and best Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and social-media influencers being sucked into their cellphones) to tiresome (repeating many of the same ghoulish creatures from the original Beetlejuice).
Mid-career Burton justified Hollywood’s trust in his eccentricity: the startlingly tender Ed Wood, the brilliant social observation of his Planet of the Apes remake, maybe half of Sleepy Hollow’s Americana spoof, and, best of all, the superb Mars Attacks! The latter is the only Burton film that combines his Boomer skepticism and anti-sentimentality with all-out death-defying daring — very close to a masterpiece. But Burton’s recent career has been disastrous, from his unbearable Sweeney Todd to his ungodly Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo remakes, the work of a Hollywood wunderkind turned hack. (Consider Burton’s 2010 presidency of the Cannes Film Festival jury, which awarded Thailand’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a precursor to the reincarnation jokes in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.)
The frantic desperation in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t herald a career comeback; it’s too obviously the brazen exploitation of the market’s nastiest predisposition. Burton never finds humanism in Halloween, as Adam Sandler did in Hubie Halloween. The return of Michael Keaton’s burlesque stunt is nothing more than a continuation of his overzealous hamminess, assiduously avoiding any joke that might be considered unwoke. If Keaton unleashed cannot reliably offend the elite, then this Hollywood gothic is not sufficient to relieve the nightmare we’re living through.
As a decades-late sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trains several succeeding generations to laugh at everything — pointlessly. Like Astrid and Lydia before her, Gen Z is being reeducated via horror-movie camp humor. Burton’s failure is turning the dread of mortality into hysteria and ignorance.