Thank you for checking out my newsletter! I’m planing on doing about one a month with updates on my work and some original writing. First up, an essay about Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy Beetlejuice based on the notes for the most recent episode of PROLETKULT with Jon the LitCrit Guy.
Happy Halloween!!!
-Andy
Bio-Exorcism and Class War
The 1988 comedy-horror film Beetlejuice was one of my favorites as a kid. My sister and I would quote Michael Keaton’s cartoonish imp endlessly, even though many of his lewd jokes, and the film’s more subversive themes, were beyond our comprehension. On a recent watching during a two-week bike trip upstate I picked up a lot of what I was missing.
For starters, Beetlejuice is not a movie about the titular demon Betelgeuse, but about a class struggle over the identity and future of the Connecticut village of Winter River. Particularly relevant to the Hudson Valley today, the film begins with a situation I’d heard from several people on my trip—an annoying realtor stalking Adam and Barbara Maitland’s (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) early 19th-century house, begging them to reconsider selling it to rich New Yorkers willing to buy based only on a picture.
Such agents are likely just as ravenous today, with a recent study by a real estate appraisal firm finding a pandemic-driven 44% annual increase in home sales in the New York suburbs by July, accompanied by a 56% decrease in the city. One agent in Rhinebeck told the real estate blog 6 Square Feet the market was “booming” and “more active than any other time I can remember.” Another agent in Kingston reports: “Every single deal I have is someone from Brooklyn or Manhattan. You have bidding wars, cash offers and people rushing to put in an offer the day something comes on the market.”
No matter the valuation, the Maitland made it clear the home was not for sale. It’s implied the couple has deep roots in the village. Early in the movie they drive into town to visit “Maitland Hardware,” where they buy paint for their elaborately-detailed scale model of the village. They even eschew a trip to Jamaica to spend their vacation at home, working on the model, and perhaps conceiving a child.
On their way back from the store, they careen off a covered bridge into a river. Moments later they arrive soaking wet and frozen in their home. They find a “Handbook for the Recently Deceased” that guides them into a bureaucratic underworld understaffed by overworked receptionists and their caseworker, who inform them they must haunt their house for 125 years until the next stage of their death. When they try to leave, they enter a bizarre planet infested by massive threatening sandworms.
Perhaps an afterlife together secluded in the home they love wouldn’t be so bad. But when they exit their caseworker’s office, they find themselves in an atrium overdecorated with grotesque sculpture and tacky expressionistic décor. They quickly realize this modernist hell is their own home.
Shortly after their death, the house was sold to Manhattan businessman Charles Deetz, who had recently suffered a major mental breakdown on the job. He decided the cure was moving to the country for rest and relaxation, to the displeasure of his wife Delia, the avant-garde sculptor, and her live-in interior designer and mystic, Otho. Delia and Otho quickly rip the place apart and rebuild it, while Charles secludes himself to in the study, unable to figure out how to truly relax. He attempts birdwatching, but prefers spying on the town itself, and begins fantasizing about buying and rebuilding it. Delia has similar designs, suggesting the village could become the “summer arts center of New York.” They begin calling their wealthy friends to invest in the town “because the locals don’t know the value of their property.“
Better off Dead
The plot is thus set up to be a haunted house movie with an ‘80s twist—our adorably unhip heroes must save the town from being bulldozed by the rich metropolitan snobs. Another twist particularly of the era is the bureaucratic apparatus that should help them effectively scare the Deetzes away is poorly functioning, perhaps ravaged by the austerity of some afterlife Reagan. The Maitlands are left to either rely on either their own ingenuity, or summon the help of a former underworld bureaucrat who struck-out on his own as a “freelance bio-exorcist”—the perverted grifter Betelgeuse.
Their first attempt of wearing sheets like comic-strip ghosts is too wholesome to be scary. It does, however, win the sympathies of Charles and Delia’s teenage goth daughter Lydia, who can see them because “Live people ignore the strange an unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.”
They work together to concoct a plan to scare out her parents during their initial business meeting dinner. As Lydia tries to warn the investors of the ghosts, each member of the family begins to involuntarily sing Harry Belafonte’s version of the Day-O. The Calypso standard tells the story of Jamaican port workers greeting the daylight by begging their overseers to count their work of loading and unload bananas so they can finally go home. The use of the proletarian tune is perhaps meant to invoke the threat of class war, but the effect is, once again, more charming than scary. Instead of repelling the guests, they agree the ghosts could be the perfect hook to lure visitors to the village. They begin to draw up plans to convert the town into “the worlds’ leading supernatural research center.” Like the Skinwalker Ranch, however, this will effectively be less a scientific endeavor than a “haunted amusement park.”
Realizing their best efforts had backfired, the Maitlands give up on ghosting and confine themselves to the attic. Determined to make the business deal work, Otho summons them to their next investors’ meeting via a seance. The ritual starts to “kill” the couple “again” by withering them into old age. Lydia sees no choice but to call on Betelgeuse to save them. He says he will in exchange for Lydia’s hand in marriage, and she reluctantly agrees.
Betelgeuse suddenly appears in the atrium as a carnival barker, beaconing the “bored businessmen” into his own supernatural amusement park, a carnival game that ends with them shot through the roof with a tremendous mallet, presumably killing them. After freeing the Maitlands from Otho’s spell, he summons Delia’s art to come alive as his foot soldiers and imprison the Deetz family to prevent them from interfering with his marriage ceremony. Eventually the two families, now united in repulsion to the perverted designs on Lydia, are able to work together to distract Betelgeuse long enough for Barbara to (somehow) commandeer a sandworm to devour him.
The Winter River Commune
After this climactic scene the film abruptly resolves with a flash-forward to several months later. A smiling Lydia leaves her nearby Catholic girls’ school on bike. The Maitlands, now her surrogate parents, await her at home to reward her good grades by levitating her to dance to a less gloomy Belafonte tune, Jump in the Line (Shake Senora). Upstairs Charles is reading a magazine called “Living and the Dead: Harmonious lifestyles and peaceful xo-existence,” and Delia works on her latest sculpture—a depiction of Betelgeuse, who we see banished to the end of the line in an underworld bureaucracy waiting room.
The happy resolution came not only through Betelgeuse’s expulsion, but also that of the big-city financiers and bohemian homosexual Otho. Likewise, Lydia no longer dresses like a widow or suicidally broods, and Delia’s art has taken a turn for direct representation. The full horror of Betelgeuse, a stand-in for the most destructively corrupt forces of capital: scammers, ambulance chasers, pornographers, pimps, payday loaners, parasitic drug dealers, subprime mortgagers, etc., has set everyone straight.
The material conflict of ownership is resolved through an understanding that the house and Winter River are not simply property, even if their owners and makers and owners had died, because a spectral character of those who came before still remains. Such a recognition is so crucial to understanding and criticizing capitalism that Marx begins the first chapter of Capital with an examination of the hidden nature of commodities. Charles and Delia had likewise perceived the house and village as simply commodities, an illusion aided by Burton’s portrayal of the town as virtually empty. Lydia’s perception is deeper, sensing a spookier character behind the raw material of the old-fashioned cobwobbed house. This is initially her own type of “fetish” for the house, one differing from Charles’ fetish as a place for healing relaxation, and Delia’s as raw material to sculpt into art. But they soon discover the truth behind the fetish character—that generations of living labor, represented by the Maitlands, gave the house its value. Although the haunting is meant to provide the owning class some anxiety, much like Day-O begs listeners to perceive exploitation and the threat of class war in every banana, this becomes grounds for a new fetish, turning Day-O into a pop hit and increasing the home’s valuation.
Just as the film’s climax begins with a séance, so does chapter 1 of Capital. Marx notes that the bourgeois fascination with “table-turning” rituals that invoke the dead are nowhere near as “grotesque” and “wonderful” as the way commodity fetishism imbues objects with a life of its own. When a house or a town can be bought with stock or sculptures, these commodities becomes equalized, relating to one another as if independent beings that transcend their basic use and monetary price and take on a life of their own. Only when Delia’s art comes alive and attacks the family do they realize they have mystified the personal struggle between the families to an absurd extent, and the conflict is really just between buyer and seller.
“All the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities,” Marx says, “vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.” In this case, the new order is peace between the living and dead, a type of commune in which familial duties are shared, Lydia gifts the Maitlands paints for the model, and the Deetz parents can relax and make art.
May 31 George Floyd riots in Albany, New York. From Times Union
A Peoples’ Betelgeuse?
The problem with this fairytale ending is that it merely resolves a question of conflicting aesthetics. The reality of rural gentrification is not merely one of different cultural tastes taking root in places like Kingston or Hudson, one that can be easily resolved by “sharing” the town between locals and newcomers, but the displacement of working-class residents through the rising cost of living.
A previous version of the script acknowledged these real stakes. Instead of merely summoning the Maitlands to display to the investors, in that version the Deetzes asserted their rights as deed-holders by attempting to evict the Maitlands with an exorcism. At this point, Betelgeuse became necessary in a way that looked less a carnival game turned slightly too dark, and more like class war.
Despite their reservations later in the film, the Maitlands were no pacifists—they had ended the Day-O possession by turning their shrimp cocktails into disembodied arms that pulled the diners into the table, slamming their heads into the table. It was not Betelgeuse’s capacity for violence that repelled them, but his unrestrained sexual predation towards Barbara and Lydia—through whom the Maitlands had developed an affinity for their new housemates.
This reversal of sympathies can serve as an important point in our era of riots, which, no matter how justified, exhibit terrifying proletarian violence. That such conflagrations in France, Chile, Ecuador, and even in Newburgh and Albany in the Hudson Valley, were popular enough to spread, but at another juncture receded, indicates limits to how far the class is willing to go, even when its own liberation is in reach. It’s important to remember the ethical and political character of the revolt can set that limit, especially for those who tend to fetishize the aspects of the riots that were the most destructive, nihilistic, or monstrous.